JOIN USThe United States and Maldives have signed a defence framework agreement aimed at deepening cooperation towards maintaining peace and security in the Indian Ocean and ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific. The pact will see the two countries engage in military-to-military dialogue at senior levels and in joint activity relating to maritime domain awareness, response to natural disasters and humanitarian relief operations among other things.
But more important than its bilateral component are the pact’s implications for regional geopolitics. In the context of growing overlap of Indian and American strategic interests in the Indian Ocean and Indo-Pacific regions, the US-Maldives pact puts Maldives more firmly on India’s side in the India-China contest for strategic influence in the Maldives. Under former president Abdulla Yameen, Maldives’s economic ties with China had soared, triggering concern in New Delhi that the resulting economic indebtedness would culminate in Male ceding strategic ground to the Chinese. The US-Maldives defence pact is likely to ease such apprehensions.
The pact signals the dramatic change not only in India’s relations with the US but also in how India is looking to enhance its own security and other interests. A few decades ago, India was strongly opposed to the presence of extra-regional powers in the Indian Ocean.
They were perceived as a threat to its security and its position in the neighbourhood. As recently as 2013, India stood in the way of Maldives’ signing the Status of Forces Agreement with the US. China’s clout in the archipelago, which surged between 2015 and 2019, seems to have changed India’s thinking on that. India has welcomed the US-Maldives defence pact now.
It is unlikely that the US and Maldives would have signed the agreement without India’s concurrence. There is a possibility of New Delhi having encouraged Maldives to pursue such a deal. It raises several questions. In the past, India was confident about its capacity to be the net security provider for its neighbours. That appears to have changed now. It is looking to the US to play the role of a security provider in the region in order to beef up its own security. India has been the dominant power in South Asia.
To keep out China, India is allowing the US to play a larger role. Its laying out of a welcome mat for the US may seem a welcome development in the context of India’s current spat with China in the Himalayas, but its downgrading of its own security role in the Indian Ocean is neither in India’s long-term security interests nor will it further New Delhi’s global ambitions.