At least since the end of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers and analysts have devoted considerable thought to the dissonance between existing international institutions and the shifting global order. It is now widely recognized that the emerging powers of the 21st century—such as China and India—have yet to be accommodated within the aging multilateral organizations that were forged in the aftermath of the Second World War.
China has been especially eager to bridge the gap between its newfound power and relatively limited say in multilateral institutions. Beijing has lobbied for the reform of existing institutions and worked to launch significant new groupings, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and, more recently, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. By building and dominating new multilateral forums, retaining its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and forcing procedural changes in institutions like the International Monetary Fund, Beijing is making strides toward global leadership.
Yet Asia’s other emerging colossus, India, has made far less progress on this front. India’s material capabilities clearly lag China’s, but its population and potential make it a suitable UNSC member, as President Obama recognized during his first visit to New Delhi in 2010. Realistically, however, the prospects for achieving India’s UNSC membership are slim in the near term. Moreover, New Delhi has thus far demonstrated little of Beijing’s initiative when it comes to building new institutions. India played an active role in the non-alignment movement of the Cold War but now tends to punch below its weight in regional groupings, in part because South Asia’s own forum—the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation—appears permanently deadlocked by Indo-Pakistani disputes.
More troubling than India’s slow path to leadership in the world’s most significant multilateral groupings, is the lack of an institutionalized trilateral setting, where the United States, China, and India can all gather to discuss their shared interests and address outstanding concerns. Bilateral interactions and large multilateral settings are insufficient to address this noteworthy gap in international architecture, which has both short and long-term consequences.
In the short-term, it deprives the three states a useful venue for crisis management. As I observe in a new Contingency Planning Memorandum for the Council on Foreign Relations, although the China-India relationship is remarkably stable, it is still vulnerable to territorial, political, and maritime crises. A combination of disputes—perhaps related to Tibet, Pakistan, the Line of Actual Control, and the South China Sea—could snowball into a serious armed confrontation.
A militarized conflict between India and China would be a costly and unwelcome development for the United States. It would disrupt international markets, distract Beijing and New Delhi from their efforts to create economic opportunities at home for their combined populations of over 2.5 billion, threaten to pull other regional players (especially Pakistan) into the vortex, and raise the possibility of a long and bitter military competition between Asian neighbors that have avoided serious violence for decades.
Outright conflict between China and India would also tie the United States in new strategic knots. At present, the strong bipartisan consensus in Washington supporting an enhanced strategic partnership with India would predispose U.S. policymakers to take New Delhi’s side in a conflict with China. That said, no one in Washington is eager to seek new points of conflict with China, one of America’s largest trading partners and foreign holders of U.S. debt.
The only way for the United States to escape this bind is to help prevent a Sino-Indian conflict in the first place. That effort will require a comprehensive strategy, and building any new diplomatic forum should not be mistaken for a panacea. But a trilateral institution with a permanent secretariat would at least offer an improved means for secure communication, intelligence sharing, and sensitive diplomatic interaction in the midst of an escalating Sino-Indian contingency. That alone would mark an improvement over the status quo, and would supplement the bilateral hotlines and crisis management mechanisms that Chinese and Indian leaders have promised to implement in the past.
Over time, a trilateral forum would also have the potential to help address existing weaknesses in the global institutional order, especially the problem of India’s lagging participation and leadership, while making sure that both China and the United States retain a seat at the table. Of course, a forum of this sort would have its limitations. Sensitivities in New Delhi and Beijing will preclude any frank trilateral discussion of their core disputes in the near term. And Washington would need to explain to its European and Asian allies that the new forum will be intended to complement, but never to replace, other multilateral institutions.
Even so, the idea of building a new U.S.-China-India forum, with short-term crisis management potential and long-term value for global diplomacy, has merit. It would be a worthy legacy project for the Obama administration or a smart new initiative for its successor.
