US Republicans raise China issue

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Asserting that certain Chinese actions surrounding India are concerning, top Republican Senator John McCain late on Friday (November 5) advocated a robust Indo-US strategic partnership to ensure a peaceful rise of the communist state.

"Some recent Chinese actions are concerning," Senator John McCain said in his speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Therefore, while India and the US each continue to encourage a peaceful rise for China, we must recognise that one of the greatest factors for shaping this outcome, and making it more likely, is a robust US-India strategic partnership as well as our ability to multiply our power together with like-minded states," McCain said.

McCain said some of the largest recipients of Chinese arms are states bordering India and China continues to build deep water ports suitable for military purposes in multiple nations encircling India.

"...China has settled all of its land border disputes except those with India, where Chinese incursions continue into Indian-claimed territory," he said.

From undermining the multilateral effort to pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their illicit nuclear weapons programs, to resisting entreaties to revalue its currency, to provocatively contesting territorial disputes with several Asian nations, there appears to be, to quote Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a 'new assertiveness' on the part of China, and that is very troubling, he said.

The Senator said it is not difficult to understand why many Indian strategists and leaders, including PM Singh, see in these actions a Chinese effort to surround India and weigh down its rise to global power with persistent local problems.

The Republican leader said expectations from the US-India partnership are extremely high but cautioned that success is not a foregone conclusion.

"If India and the US are to build a strategic partnership, we must each want it, and commit to it, and defend it in equal measure. Though our democratic values are our greatest source of strength, it is the domestic pressures of our democratic politics that pose perhaps the single greatest danger to our emerging partnership," McCain said.

He said these issues must be navigated with care as though India and US will make their own decisions, these decisions will be significantly shaped by the actions of the other.

"On the US side, then, we cannot allow our anxieties about globalisation to cause us to demonise India for crass political gain. Outsourcing is an inescapable feature of today's global economy, not an Indian plot to steal American jobs, and we should not condone any unfair punishments of Indian workers," McCain said.

"On the Indian side, relations with the US cannot remain a political club, which the party out of power uses to beat up the party in power for doing exactly what it would have done were it governing."

He urged the need for more leaders from both sides to speak up for this partnership and build the public support needed to sustain our strategic priorities and cautioned that if it is not done, then the relationship "will fall far short of its potential as it has before."

"For most of the last century, the logic of a US-India partnership was strong, but its achievement eluded us. If we are to steer a different course today," McCain said.

"We must remain focused on the central animating purpose of our partnership the idea that the oldest democracy and the largest democracy in the world can align our great power together to shape geopolitical conditions that ensure the success of freedom," he added.