18 | http://www.nationalreview.com MARCH 23 , 2020J
UST ten days after Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) chairman
Mao Zedong inaugurated the
People’s Republic of China in
1949, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal
Nehru landed in Washington for a three-
week tour of the United States. Time maga -
zine called it “one of the century’s most
important visits of state”—a statement that
would have been inconceivable a few years
earlier, when India was still a British
colony of limited geopolitical consequence
for the U.S. But after the loss of Beijing to
Communist rule, the newly independent
India suddenly became, as the New York
Times put it, “potentially a great counter-
weight to China.” Though American lead-
ers made overtures to Nehru, India’s policy
of neutrality during the Cold War, as well
as its recognition of Mao’s government,
precluded a full-fledged alliance between
the two countries.
Seventy years later, India has once again
emerged as a possible bulwark against a ris-
ing China. Beijing loomed large as Indian
prime minister Narendra Modi received
President Trump at Sardar Vallabhbhai
Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad
on February 24. Trump neglected to call out
China by name during his stay, but his ref-
erences to countries that “seek to claim
power through coercion, intimidation, and
aggression” left no doubt as to China’s
influence on the U.S.–India relationship.
Though marred by ongoing religious vio-
lence in the streets of Delhi, the visit exhib-
ited the mutual affinity between Trump and
Modi that may finally turn intermittent
alignment into lasting alliance.
After India gained independence, it
often found itself strategically alignedwith the U.S. Despite India’s Cold War
neutrality, Washington provided economic
aid to the country throughout the 1950s,
reasoning that “if the United States helped
India succeed and win the development
race versus China, it could demonstrate to
the ‘uncommitted’ world that democracy
and development could co-exist and
thrive,” according to the Brookings Insti -
tution’s Tanvi Madan.
As Beijing grew more hostile to Delhi
in the late 1950s, the U.S. and India
engaged in military as well as economic
cooperation. In 1959, skirmishes erupted
on the Sino–Indian border, and an upris-
ing in neighboring Tibet alarmed Indian
leaders. These disputes culminated in
the 1962Sino–Indian War, during which
the Kennedy administration provided mili-
tary assistance to Nehru’s government. The
following year, Nehru and Kennedy signed
an air-defense agreement that included
arms provisions and joint training exercises,
as well as a somewhat veiled commitment
to defend India against Chinese attack.
But differences in the two countries’
strategic outlooks stood in the way of a last-
ing bilateral alliance. India’s reluctance to
become dependent on the U.S. led to its
collaborating with Moscow, while dis-
agreements as to the nature of the Chinese
threat impeded more robust cooperation.
Vis-à-vis China, Washington prioritized its
long-term struggle against Communism,
whereas Delhi focused on the urgent threat
of Chinese encroachment on its border.
Soon thereafter, the Nixon administration’s
policy of rapprochement with China nulli-
fied the latter’s role as a mutual adversary
of the two countries. Over the ensuing
decades, India became functionally a client
state of the Soviet Union, and the U.S.’s
support for Pakistan soured relations
between Delhi and Washington.
After the Cold War, India’s economic
liberalization in the 1990s and concerns
about terrorism in the 2000s aligned the
two countries’ interests—up to a point. For
one thing, the U.S. and Pakistan remained
allies; for another, in keeping with its his-
tory of avoiding strong alliances, India
preferred a diversified “portfolio” of part-
ners to call on as needed.
Today, Beijing’s increased belligerence
has the potential to change that. Through its
Belt and Road Initiative, China has expand-
ed its reach into the Indian Ocean with a
naval base in Djibouti, strategically located
on the Gulf of Aden, and investments in Sri
Lanka and the Maldives. Because bothSciences, the only level-four Chinese cen-
ter that conducts biological-weapons
research? The Internet remains fervid with
such theories and rumors. It would take a
gossipy Procopius to hunt them all down.
Was COVID-19 a mutated virus that
jumped to humans from the many known
animal viruses in China? Did profit-minded
technicians and doctors sell sick lab ani-
mals to the open markets? Were Chinese
military researchers on the hunt for a
coronavirus vaccine or an offensive
super-weaponized strain—or both? The
variety of these conspiracy theories seem
no different from Thucydides’ own spec-
ulations in book 2 of his history.
The known unknowns of our pandemic
remain endless. Why were there epidemic
foci in Iran and Italy, of all places? And
why for such a supposedly virulent coro-
navirus were the ratios of dead to infected
still below 2 percent, and like the flu, why
was it mostly lethal to the elderly and
chronically sick?
Globalization may have lifted billions
out of poverty, but open borders and
same-day transoceanic jet travel had
helped to spread the disease. Meanwhile,
the electronic ability to shut down social
media and curtail free use of the Internet,
cell phones, and dish and cable TV
enabled the Chinese government to down -
play the nature of COVID-19 for the first
critical weeks of its outbreak.
Certainly, so far China is the world’s
great loser in the “pandemic” that is not yet
really a pandemic. Beijing’s initial sup-
pression of news of the coronavirus con-
firmed a continually deteriorating global
portrait of Communist China, especially
when collated with its losing trade war
with the U.S., the Hong Kong democracy
protests, the million-person Uighur reedu-
cation camps, and the Orwellian point-
system surveillance of Chinese citizens.
In the end, we are left with the irony
that the hysterias of a multibillion-person
postmodern world in reaction to a rather
puny virus are about the same as those of
premodern societies that sometimes lost
nearly half their populations from horrific
plagues. But moderns—unlike ancients,
who were without effective medicines
and vaccinations—apparently believe
that the good life means that pandemics
of any sort belong to another era and have
no business daring to pop up in their own.
In terms of hysterias, the more the world
changes, the more its people certainly
remain the same.Mr. Tenreiro is an editorial assistant at NATIONAL
REVIEW.The
Counterweight
To China in
Asia
The importance of the American
relationship with IndiaBY DANIEL TENREIRO3col_QXP-1127940387.qxp 3/4/2020 1:34 AM Page 18
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