The common jest about presidents who have taken a whipping in mid-term elections is that they take up foreign policy issues because they offer a welcome retreat from tough domestic battles and revitalized partisan opposition. It would be wrong to say that about President Obama’s 10-day foray to Asia, his longest and most intensive trip abroad this year. His visits to India, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan were planned some time ago, and they are clearly about two important and often misplaced issues: trade relations and the jobs that flow from more intensive trade, and national security.
His first stop, a three-day visit in India that ended Monday for talks with India’s political leaders and Indian and American businessmen there, is illustrative. The world’s largest democracy, India possesses one of the world’s fastest growing economies. That makes it an inviting target for both American exports and Indian companies that want to build plants in the United States.
Indeed, some economists believe that India, though its economy is now just a fourth of the size of China’s, will outperform China in coming decades due to its more rapidly rising population and educational levels, and more robust and unrestrained free market system.
India’s strategic position, influence and nuclear-weapon capacity are equally crucial to America’s national security interests. India’s north juts like a spear point into the heart of central Asia, with Pakistan to its west and China on its northeast flank. Its war-weary relationship with nuclear-armed Pakistan, and long conflict with Kashmiri Muslims who long to split away from India and join Pakistan, put India in the vortex of terrorist extremists and Pakistani angst.
One reason Pakistan harbors and nurtures the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, is because it fears India might gain influence with a more peaceful Afghanistan and develop a pincer force to attack Pakistan on both its eastern and western borders. Thus Pakistan keeps Muslim extremists in the border state of Kashmir stoked, along with the Taliban who prolong the war in Afghanistan and find safe harbor in Pakistan’s northern frontier district.