The Missing Piece in America's China Strategy Is India
SS: The article’s core argument: Washington has already accepted the strategic necessity of India as the indispensable counterweight to China. However, the US has not yet built the machinery required to make the partnership real. Washington's export-control rules, procurement habits, financing tools, and technology-transfer often conflict with the spirit of its declarations, frameworks, and bipartisan gestures. Additionally, the US' security architecture remains trapped in a Cold War model built for the Soviet Union, not for China as the central manufacturing power of the world.
The authors’ strongest point: India is not waiting to be discovered. India's southern industrial base is already producing cheap, agile, militarily useful technology, namely: drones, components and exportable systems. The Barak-8 precedent with Israel, for example, shows that India can handle serious co-development with sensitive technology when the framework is disciplined. Thus: the missing piece is not Indian willingness or strategic logic. The bottle-neck is on the American end - in its India policy execution. If Washington wants India to function as a real industrial and military counterweight to China, it must stop treating defense cooperation as mere paperwork. Washington must start treating India as wartime architecture.