Political scientist Sameer Lalwani joins Milan to discuss the looming threat of U.S. sanctions over India's defense ties to Russia.
Last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his maiden visit to Washington under the new Biden administration. It was all sunlight and good vibes and—for a week—American and Indian policymakers ignored the fact that a darkening cloud is gathering over U.S.-India relations in the form of potential U.S. sanctions.
Milan’s guest on the show this week, political scientist Sameer Lalwani, thinks that this threat of sanctions is very much real. Sameer is a senior fellow in Asia strategy at the Stimson Center in Washington and an expert on issues ranging from nuclear deterrence to national security decision and counterinsurgency.
Sameer and Milan discuss how India might run afoul of the U.S. Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), what the Biden administration might do to avoid a crisis in bilateral relations, and how India might help its own case. Plus, the two discuss how the fallout in Afghanistan will affect India-Pakistan relations and the prospect of future violence between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.
SPEAKERS
Outro, Sameer Lalwani, Intro Reel, Milan Vaishnav
Intro Reel 00:00
Unabashedly the most unpredictable becomes a headline the most volatile outrageous behavior and unsubstantiated, a battle of personalities.
Milan Vaishnav 00:12
Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. Last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his maiden visit to Washington under the new Biden administration. Modi met with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, the first person of Indian origin to hold that position, and the leaders of the so-called Quad. It was all sunlight and good vibes, and for a week, American and Indian policymakers ignored the fact that a darkening cloud is gathering over US-India relations in the form of potential US sanctions. According to our guest on the show this week, that threat of sanctions, while not always acknowledged, is very much real. Sameer Lalwani is a Senior Fellow in Asia Strategy at the Stimson Center here in Washington. He researches nuclear deterrence, interstate rivalry, national security decision-making, crisis behavior, and counterinsurgency. He joins me today on Zoom from Washington. Samir, thanks for coming on the show.
Sameer Lalwani 01:02
Thanks for having me, Milan. I'm a big fan of the pod.
Milan Vaishnav 01:04
So let me start by asking you to set the stage. Last week, we saw Prime Minister Modi and President Biden sit down for their first face-to-face summit here in Washington since the latter took office. This meeting also took place alongside a leader summit of the so-called Quad nations. We saw a number of tweets, joint statements, communiques, fact sheets come out last week's summitry. I'm wondering [if you] could help us place these two summits—the bilateral visit as well as the Quad visit—in the broader context of US-India relations. What do you think these meetings actually achieved?
Sameer Lalwani 01:40
Well, I think the significance of the meetings in and of themselves was important. In particular, the Quad, the fact that it's progressing and starting to get to a point where it seems irreversible. There was, I think, a lot of speculation when Quad 2.0 was being put together. And after the first round of this back in 2007 2008, there was always speculation as to whether it would falter or dissipate. And I think as its progressed to the leader level, and there have been now two leader level meetings, one in-person; there have been commitments made. I think there, this is a real entity that will only continue to grow.
Sameer Lalwani 02:17
At the bilateral level, this [has] been a progressing relationship over the last two decades. I think generally everything is positive, but there's a lot that will be set the stage to happen in 2022. When I looked at the readouts, there are multiple readouts and talking points that came out of the bilateral meeting. But 2022 seems to be like a really packed year, for the US-India relationship. They have Indo-Pacific business forum, a trade policy forum, a high-tech cooperation group. They have the strategic clean energy partnerships. These are all things that have been announced, but they really aren't going to really get off the ground until next year, along with delivery of the big vaccine commitments that the Quad is committed to that India is a critical part of. So, I think there's a lot of potential here. But it needs to play out over time, the commitments about technology, cooperation, space cooperation, a huge swath of climate and clean energy commitments. Those things are going to unfold over the next couple years. And so the proof is really in the pudding.
Milan Vaishnav 03:26
I want to ask you about something that wasn't talked about, at least officially, between the two governments in the readouts that we saw, which is this looming threat of sanctions. So on the eve of the visit, you published a piece in the Hindustan Times in which you have this to say: "Even as President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi are set to meet this week for the in-person Quad summit, they could face a devastating setback if the United States sanctions India in the coming months." Now, people who do not track the bilateral relationship on a day-to-day basis, like you and I do, might not be aware of this looming threat. For the uninitiated, could you unpack what the dilemma is that's facing these two countries right now?
Sameer Lalwani 04:07
Certainly. The legislation in question is the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act [CAATSA] that was passed in 2017. This was a piece of legislation with sanctions as the as a tool directed at three countries: North Korea, Iran, and Russia. But basically, the North Korea and Iran sanctions were things that were already on the books. The Russia sanctions were new. Section 231 of the CAATSA legislation specifically deals with their essentially secondary sanctions on any entity that conducts transactions with Russia's intelligence and defense sector [...] let's say the origins of this legislation really come after the 2016 election when there's pretty clear evidence, as detailed by the US intelligence community of Russian interference in US elections and cyber security penetrations into US networks, and manipulation of the campaign. And that constituted a direct attack on the United States, at least on institutions. It's a different form [...] it's a non-kinetic attack, but still one that the US government's intelligence agencies and Congress took very seriously.
Sameer Lalwani 05:25
This legislation was in part to punish Russia, but it was also in part to tie the hands of a president or a new president that had expressed an interest in moving past that and bracketing off or even ignoring these Russian transgressions. India, meanwhile, has been in talks with the Russian government for several years, even prior to this legislation, to purchase an air defense system known as the Triumph Air Defense system, S400. And that would constitute a major transaction that would run afoul of the CAATSA Legislation Section 231. But nevertheless, there's been clear warnings from the US government, including the final speech from the US ambassador in early 2021 in January, essentially saying that this is a real possibility.
Sameer Lalwani 06:16
And I think all across US government [there's been] a consistent set of warnings, including from Congress, that India is quite likely could get sanction[ed] for this purchase, if it actually is delivered. So they've held off on these punitive measures until actual delivery, but the delivery is expected to happen later this year. And the types of sanctions that are involved are spelled out in Section 235 of the legislation. This involves anything from denying US loans or access to financial institutions to export a procurement ban to visa restrictions on corporate or executive officers. So in theory, the sanctions, when applied, could be very narrow and very tailored. If [...] these are not necessarily broad sanctions, it depends on the specific application that's left to the judgment of the administration and the application process. But nevertheless, even if these are "modest sanctions" or "symbolic sanctions" meant to sort of uphold the precedents, there's very real possibility this can generate a lot of blowback in the relationship.
Sameer Lalwani 07:19
Just to recap, again, for people who haven't been following this, this is a piece of legislation that wasn't designed to target India; it was designed to target entities that did business with Russian defense military intelligence services. By virtue of purchasing this new weapon system from the Russians—the S400—the Government of India could be in violation of those sanctions and would be then slapped with secondary sanctions because of the way the legislation is written. Is that right?
Sameer Lalwani 07:54
That's right, you put it much more succinctly than I did.
Milan Vaishnav 07:56
I mean, a skeptic could say, okay, you know it's good to take cognizance of this. But is this much ado about nothing? Because if the president under law has the legal authority to issue a waiver, which would essentially carve out a special exception for India, obviously, they're going to do that, because India is an important linchpin in their broader Indo-Pacific strategy. Is there really reason to kind of sound the alarm bells?
Sameer Lalwani 08:23
Yeah, that's a good point. I have gone through the legislation myself and in conversations with several other folks, I think there is enough room for the President to justify it; they have to have affirmation from the intelligence community that the entities involved or not involved simultaneously in cyber-attacks on the United States. But ultimately, this is a this is a doable proposition. The question then becomes what's the next move from Congress? Because this was a congressional piece of legislation that, as I said, in the origins was intended to tie the hands of the President. And it's quite possible you can get some blowback from Congress.
Sameer Lalwani 08:53
In in the previous two years, again, Turkey stated openly it was purchasing S400. It actually started to receive delivery. And when the administration did not immediately imply sanctions, Congress baked into the National Defense Authorization Act, particular components that essentially compelled the administration to sanction Turkey and also push Turkey out of the F-35. program. So essentially, Congress has a say in this process, if they're not brought into the decision, even if the administration initially decides to issue a waiver. And so because you have signals coming from Congress, including a bipartisan signal, in my view, from the Senate Foreign Relations Chair [Bob] Menendez, who's indicated he's not in favor of a waiver, but also another member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ted Cruz, who is very upset about the effective waiver given to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, you could see [a] bipartisan coalition backing some sort of punitive measures and possibly pushing something that ties the President's hands in future legislation like the National Defense Authorization Act, or frankly, just holding up nominations like they currently are, including the US ambassador to India, they could also have a real setback.
Milan Vaishnav 10:13
In other words, the President could issue a Waiver—Congress could override that waiver, if there was a coalition of the willing, as it were. In the HT [Hindustan Times] piece that I referenced, and we'll link to that in the show notes, you kind of lay out a three-point plan for how India might be able to help its own case here. So I'm curious, short of abandoning the S400 deal altogether, which the government of India hasn't indicated, it's inclined to do, what are the things that government might be able to implement that could help lower, if not completely eliminate, the threat of sanctions?
Sameer Lalwani 10:48
Yeah, that's an important question. I do hope the Indian government has been regularly talking to these members of the Senate and congressional staff, because the things that I have heard—it's been a while since I've had really detailed conversations on this—but baked around for the particulars of the CAATSA legislation, the S400 transaction is a little bit of a frustration about India's silence on a number of things with respect to Russia, right? I think the United States at this point really appreciates the degree of the strategic relationship between Russia and India, and maybe even appreciates the importance of this S400 transaction given that India is facing down really hostile border with China that was contested even last year.
Sameer Lalwani 11:34
I think the signals that would suggest that India is with the United States, in principle on a lot of the concerns about Russia, even without calling out Russia by name, could help a lot. So, condemning cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, militarized territorial incursions, electoral interference. Those are all things that I think India generally believes; they are vulnerable to all those things; they could be perpetrated by a number of India's adversaries. So why not come out and say that, and I think that would be a gesture that would be appreciated by US policymakers, including Members of Congress who have felt that India's silence on Russia's behavior in Ukraine, in Syria, in the chemical weapons attack in Skripal, that silence has been deafening and most deafening of all has been the silence about interference in US elections and the cyber-attack disinformation campaign.
Sameer Lalwani 12:26
So I think that is a sore spot, that could be easily remedied with some rhetoric, and possibly even some frank discussions behind closed doors about how the US and India can work together to counter some of these things. The second, I think, is demonstrating to Members of Congress, but also administration, what the opportunity costs are. If India is excellent in certain areas, and that excellence redounds positively for the United States, then we stand to lose that if we if we jeopardize [the] relationship with sanctions. I think the best way for India to do this is to get back off the mat and start exporting vaccines. I think that's something they have committed to, it seems to be planned for October, but I think as that reflects positively on the Quad, and the relationship more generally, that the US India relationship and the Quad are providing these public goods to a region that's in dire need of more effective vaccines, particularly in Southeast Asia.
Sameer Lalwani 13:21
I think that will then show members of Congress that there's real value generated from this relationship with India. And it hurts our case. And it potentially risks jeopardizing that if we were to sanction India. I think the areas that we've been most effective at have been advanced security cooperation, but something that I've thought about for a while is that we have a lot of exercises with India, but we don't necessarily have shared missions with India. And so, it'd be interesting to see if he was able to propose a shared mission that [we'd] regularly be conducting rather than practicing for future missions. That might be another way to demonstrate the value of the relationship with the United States. And the last point, I get this a lot from, again, conversations with the officials and congressional staff is that India just tends to make really unrealistic demands and expectations of United States government, and particularly in the area of technology transfers and arms sales. And I think that's something that they'd have to approach with a little more realism as to how the US defense industry and defense sector works and then coming up with some creative methods for working within that system, rather than, say, writing op-eds demanding that India should also get access to nuclear propulsion technology without any sort of treaty alliance.
Milan Vaishnav 14:38
You mentioned that there is a greater recognition in Washington that India and Russia have had this long partnership particularly on defense and military affairs. But in effect, what the sanctions are doing or could do, if implemented, is force India to choose between arms ties with the United States or with Russia. You have written elsewhere that while the US might expect this to be an obvious or easy choice, it really runs counter to decades of Indian grand strategy. And again, this the legacy of this partnership with Moscow. I think most of our listeners are familiar with India's long running military relations with Russia. But I think what's less clear to many of them is what is the state of those ties here in the year 2021, where a lot of the rhetorical emphasis seems to be on the US-India partnership, building bridges with European Union, [and] with looking east to Southeast Asia. How would you characterize India Russia ties today?
Sameer Lalwani 15:38
I think that they are narrow, and perhaps, in some ways diminishing, but still strategically very consequential. The areas where people will point out that India's relationship with Russia is quite thin, or in the space of commercial and trade relations, the economic transactions are pretty small, except for the energy defense sectors. There's no diaspora, Indian diaspora in Russia, that maintains strong ties back to India. The science and technology cooperation, there is some robust cooperation, but I think it's concentrated in defense technology and a little bit in space technology.
Sameer Lalwani 16:19
That's [to] make the case as to why it may not be as significant at times. But in the areas of strategic cooperation, there is very serious cooperation between the Indian and Russian defense sectors. The three areas I would point to are in nuclear submarines, which not only were leased to India to get them trained on this starting in the late 80s. and is ongoing, although they've just given one lease submarine back and are expecting a new one in 2025. But also, the capabilities and the wherewithal and the advising to build India's own SSBN. Its own nuclear submarine, that would be [with] ballistic missiles. And in terms of support for missile technology, more generally, there are a lot of I would say speculations, but sort of informed speculations about the types of support that Russia has given to India for its long-range missile program. But very overt is the cruise missile program, the BrahMos missile system that has been a direct collaboration, or a joint venture, between Russia and India. This is perhaps India's best chance of a major defense technology export that it could sell to other countries, including in Southeast Asia. And you know, it's largely built on Russian technology. Although it's advanced over time with Indian collaboration, it has multiple uses. It can start to move not just for land attack cruise missiles, but also hypersonic anti-ship missile, and there sounds to me like another variant that'll be a counter high value aircraft missile.
Sameer Lalwani 18:02
In these areas, India and Russia have a pretty thick relationship. But there are two other components to it that also should be paid attention to. One is sort of the geopolitical motives that drive the relationship together. India needs Russian partnership for its own interests in Central Asia, potentially even magnified now, given what's going on in Afghanistan. But also, it has a theory of how it precludes a deeper Russia-China partnership. This is maybe not shared necessarily with other American analysts as to what drives Russia and China together and what keeps them apart. But India's theory, pretty explicitly, is that if they weren't around to sort of keep Russia on side or tethered in some way, there would be a much deeper defense technology and maybe even an alliance relationship between Russia and China.
Sameer Lalwani 18:59
And then I think the third component that we shouldn't sleep on is there are actually some shared principles between India and Russia. Despite what I said earlier, I think there are a lot of things that India stands for in the global order that Russian behavior runs counter to. There are some broader principles about polycentrism, which I think involves attention to spheres of influence and a desire for greater multipolarity in the international system that India very much embraces that I think they say explicitly, I think that certainly the advocacy for multipolarity is explicit; the advocacy for spheres of influence happens a little bit more quietly. But I think India very much adheres to those principles. And you know, it's reflected again in something like UN voting records or India's voting records are much closer to Russia's, than the United States. And we can be dismissive of that, but I think those are salient facts for, again, people making decisions about the S400 acquisition in the State Department and the US Congress.
Milan Vaishnav 20:03
Sameer, you laid out a number of reasons why the United States can't simply wish away the India-Russia defense relationship. And a recent article in "Survival," which we'll link to on the show page, you've argued that America has to rethink and recalibrate its approach in line with those basic realities of the strong and dense defense ties. Now, as you know better than I, there is very little appetite in Washington right now for taking a softer line on Russia. So what is it […] in the United States' ability and interest to try and kind of circle the square?
Sameer Lalwani 20:40
Yeah, I think that's important. I think that United States has a lot of work to do in its own strategic reappraisal. And I'm glad you mentioned that article because my points when I was writing the HT [Hindustan Times] article was to sort of speak to the Indian side, but I had previously written a piece, not only in Survival, but also War on the Rocks, essentially arguing that the United States just really needs to bite the bullet and rethink how we approach the India Russia relationship and CAATSA. So essentially, I think there are three things the United States needs to do. First is draw out the logical consequence of the strategic prioritization of China over Russia. China is a strategic challenge. Russia is a disruptive—I've heard a colleague refer to them as a disruptive force—it's capable of brigandry in the international system, but not a strategic challenge in the same way that China poses across multiple domains in terms of economics, technology, and military capabilities. So, if that prioritization is true at the apex level, when it comes to national defense strategy and national security strategies, we should be concentrating our efforts on China, and anything that detracts from that, we should seriously rethink. So sanctioning partners, that would be directly beneficial to US coalition in balancing China would be counterproductive to that effort. And if we're pushing them away from the effort, we're undermining our broader grand strategy.
Sameer Lalwani 22:17
The second point, I think that sort of then follows from that is we have to have some realism about India's fore structure. I think I mentioned India has to have some realism in the way it deals with Congress in the United States on defense technology. I think the United States also needs to exhibit some realism about India's fore structure realities. So sometimes I hear US policymakers talk about helping India to phase out its Russian systems out of its arsenal over time. I think there are some ways to help with this process. We can use the Excess Defense Articles program, Foreign Military Financing program to help India more affordably transition to a different arsenal of platforms and systems. But I don't think it's ever going to be completely effective; I think there are going to be advanced Russian systems in the Indian arsenal for decades to come. One piece of evidence that we sort of used to support this is the United States supported Egypt for over 25 years before military financing to the tune of over $30 billion from the late 70s to the early 2000s. I'm not sure if it was real or nominal terms, it might have been higher than that. But even after all that money, the Egyptian Arsenal was still barely 50% American platforms.
Sameer Lalwani 23:42
This is a very costly, expensive venture to overhaul your fighter aircraft and tanks and ships and subsurface vessels, to shift from one national platform to another. I think we just have to be honest about the fact that they're going to be there for decades and decades, a lot of these are going to have sort of advanced systems with command sensors, or Command systems and sensors that are Russian origin that pose counterintelligence challenges. And we have to find ways around that problem. And so that gets us to a third area of how we how we think about this; the US wants to have an interoperable joint force with India, maybe sometimes more than the Indians do. And that’s something that I think we need to rethink. Maybe we can do a lot with the Indians and be great defense partners, even without being fully interoperable across all domains. But in the areas that we do want to have joint conduct of operations, there are technical, political, and sort of geographic work arounds like the technical ones—we detail these in the survival piece. But there are ways to get different systems to talk to each other safely, [it] requires kind of bespoke solutions to these different systems, but they’re doable. They're just costly. So I think we focus and concentrate on the areas where we're most effective. And either bracket off or work through with some workaround solutions some of the other domains,
Sameer Lalwani 25:07
But at the same time, based on what you said before, the United States often tells New Delhi "Look, if you go forward with this S400 purchase, that's going to create an insurmountable problem, because we don't want to have our American systems integrated with Russian systems." Your point is that it is a problem, but it's not insurmountable, that we have done this for other partners. It requires investment it requires technical know-how, it requires going out of your way, to put it gently right. But it is possible, although there could be certain ceiling effects in terms of how far we could go in terms of introducing new high-tech systems.
Sameer Lalwani 25:50
Yeah, I think that's right. I've been told it's possible. And frankly, the other part of this is that a lot of these are unknown risks, right? Even when I talk to experts about what particular risks are introduced, when you link up, let's say, the NASAMS [National/Norwegian Advanced Surface to Air Missile System] US Air Defense system that India's purchasing for New Delhi, if it was linked up with its S400 batteries that maybe are on the border, what kinds of risks are being introduced here? And the truth is it's unknown. But we know there's potential, there's latent potential, for cyber exploits t throughout those links. And so, it's a risk that I think the United States is very hesitant to take. Also, as I said, the workaround solutions are plausible, but I'm not sure we've actually ever dealt with this, where we're dealing with a partner that wants advanced US systems and is also operating advanced Russian systems. This might be a very unique case, one that, as you rightly point out, it might be worth [...] it'll be it will be difficult, but it might be worthwhile to do it. But it's a whole new challenge. And yeah, I think you're right about [...] the point that it poses a ceiling on the types of maybe intelligence sharing and defense cooperation that are possible in the future, so long as these two systems are cooperating in the same environment.
Milan Vaishnav 27:14
So Sameer, before I let you go, I want to ask you a bit, pivoting here from US-India-Russia to developments in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Had Ashley Tellis on the podcast last week to talk about US-India relations. I asked him about what the events in Afghanistan, the Taliban takeover, mean for the US Pakistan relationship. I want to ask you a slightly different question, which is what you think the US exit means in Afghanistan for India-Pakistan relations, right? So does the fall of Kabul to the Taliban make an active, hot conflict between India and Pakistan more likely, in your view?
Sameer Lalwani 27:53
I think at the surface, it looks like that, but I'm actually willing to short that possibility. On the surface, I think the emotions are very raw in New Delhi. It's very stunned about how quickly things turned. There are discussions about you know, who lost Afghanistan, a lot of the blame goes to the United States on this. And they're facing a government that has fundamentally different policy interests than what was previously in power, and maybe even counter to Indian interest. The clear beneficiary is Pakistan. So that creates a lot of antagonism there. There's a fear of an ideological contagion or emboldenment, that could spread to other parts of the region including in the Kashmir Valley. There previously were terrorist plots that were patched in Afghanistan that targeted India in the past, and so rightly, [there's] a fear of this.
Sameer Lalwani 28:56
And then there's always the possibility that this slips back into some gray zone proxy wars, where India maybe gets involved, and then the targeting of each other's proxies, and there could be blowback effects down the road. That's something that seems similar to what happened in the 90s. So, all that I think is true, but I don't think it makes India uniquely worse off. There are a lot of reasons why it's actually safer today. The diffusion contagion concern of embolden terrorists across the across the world that start to target India. I didn't see this happen after the IS [Islamic State] declared a caliphate in 2014. There was no major spike in violence in Kashmir after that, there's no emboldening effect there. So, I'm not sure why the Taliban would precipitate that. I think people are using the analogies of the late 1980s. But that was a situation where the Kashmir valley [...] it was pretty thin defenses and intelligence and monitoring.
Sameer Lalwani 29:57
Today, there's much more intelligence presence, border fencing. India's got far greater military and political control. And, I think, effectively a lot of backing from the international community. So, I don't think that either the material diffusion or the ideological diffusion is going to pose a real challenge to India's control of Kashmir. I think the second challenge here is really going to be for Pakistan. I think it will have its hands full on its western border; they're already starting to see attacks spilling over from Afghanistan into Pakistan's territory, I think the period of the greatest decline in India-Pakistan tensions was during the composite dialogue from 2003 to 2007, but then continued on for several years in terms of the number of cross border firing activity. And I think part of that had to do with the fact that Pakistan was consumed with was happening on its western border. And despite the fact that their proxy is now in power, I suspect Pakistan will have its hands full. Again, you're going to start to see some more activity on the Durand Line, more TTP [Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan] attacks, greater difficulty just managing the Taliban, which has proved fairly unruly and unwilling to submit to Pakistan's direction.
Sameer Lalwani 31:17
I think that's going to be a real challenge [...] by Pakistan. It might actually keep things quiet on the eastern front with India. And then I think the last reason why India may be in a better position is if there are direct material threats that are formed by Jaysh-e-Muhammad or Lashkar-e-Taiba, and they are conducting those or forming those plans out of camps in Afghanistan, then, effectively, those are much easier to target than if they were doing this out of Pakistan. There are nuclear escalation risks that come into any calculation of retaliatory strikes, if these groups are operating out of Pakistan, but if they're operating in Afghanistan, India has a lot more freedom of action, I would say with fewer escalation risks. There are some maybe some more technical challenges there. But I think the political challenge is lighter for India. So I think they're actually in a better position. I expect to see some, you know, tensions on the surface. But ultimately, I think this is to India’s strategic benefit.
Milan Vaishnav 32:19
So let me ask you a last question, Sameer, just about the role of the United States and all of this because a few years ago India and Pakistan did briefly engage in an act of conflict after the Pulwama attacks on Valentine's Day 2019. We saw the bombing of a terrorist installation in Balakot in Pakistan by the Indian Air Force; we saw a brief kind of 72-hour skirmish. In the piece on the War on the Rocks you characterize the Trump administration's responses as it's relatively slow, sort of flat footed. You know, there are some people who go even further and say, the Trump administration wanted to see India teach Pakistan a lesson. But I want to kind of divine what this means for the future, right? Because in that piece you warn that the Biden administration needs to be actively planning for a potential crisis between India and Pakistan, even if the risks are low. And you write that it should expunge hesitations and prepare its crisis management playbook. In concrete terms, you know, what does that look like?
Sameer Lalwani 33:26
I think the administration can prepare for this in a number of ways. Probably the most important thing, th[ese are] sort of the lessons that are drawn from years of Stimson analysis, looking at previous crises and what the United States is done, but the first and most important thing is to acclimate senior officials to this prospect at the tier level, because they will be the ones who will have to be doing the diplomacy, the possible political interventions, efforts to counsel restraint, and so they need to be prepared for this. That starts with intelligence briefings on the environments and some of the risks, maybe even debriefing with the Trump administration officials and the lessons learned from that 2019 crisis, but then conducting very soon an interagency simulation exercise or tabletop exercise so everyone refreshes the muscles that are needed for this. The intelligence community is aware of this risk. I think a lot of the civilian national security practitioners in all these agencies are familiar with it, but it's really about the political officials at the apex level will be thrust into the center of these challenges that need to get caught up.
Sameer Lalwani 34:34
And then I think you're we're talking about preparing a menu of options, of things that the United States could do to try to apply the brakes in a crisis if it was deeply concerned about escalation risks. That menu usually kind of breaks down to a few things; [it] requires communication channels and information sharing. It possibly requires some ways to change incentive structures, both potential punishments as well as incentives for restraints. And it also means thinking about alternatives or ofference. What are the non-kinetic ways or non-escalatory, retaliatory measures the United States can propose and put on the table that allow de-escalation of a military crisis, even if there's going to be escalated political tensions? And each administration and each sort of crisis has found a new creative way to do this. Think during the 2008 crisis, there was a creative way to apply pressure on [the] Pakistani government because of the intelligence that was publicized about the direct recordings of the handlers in this operation. In 2002, there's a very creative brake applied in the form of travel ban and travel warning on Americans that really started [...] to affect their business environment and expectations of this environment. So, I think there are probably some other creative tricks in the tool bag that the administration [...] needs to start planning now, and thinking about how to execute it. Probably it doesn't want to reveal them publicly because these may not be evergreen tools. But I think that, as I said, sort of exercising those muscles early on and preparing for it, because this is bound to repeat itself, is probably putting the United States in the best position to be a crisis manager.
Milan Vaishnav 36:27
My guest on the show this week is Sameer Lawani. He's a senior fellow in Asia Strategy at the Stimson Center in Washington. He and his co-authors have written extensively about the threat of CAATSA sanctions on India, but in addition, the relationship between India, the United States, Russia, and what those things mean for both US and Indian foreign policy. Sameer, thanks so much for sharing your insights with us, and good to chat with you.
Sameer Lalwani 36:50
Great chatting with you, Milan.
Milan Vaishnav 36:53
Grand Tamasha is a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. This podcast is in HT Smartcast original is available on htsmartcast.com, India's fastest growing podcasting platform. You can also find us on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to rate and review, helps others find the show more easily. For more information about the show and to find the writing reference on this week's episode, visit our website grandtamasha.com. Production assistance comes from Caroline Duckworth. Tim Martin is our audio engineer and Cliff Djajapranata is our executive producer. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
Outro 37:34
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