IF HE HAD ANY POLITICAL SENSE HE'D TAKE W WITH HIM:

A Tattered Special Relationship: As the president hits India this weekend, he will find it is still George W. Bush country. Tunku Varadarajan on an alliance that Obama has allowed to wither on the vine. (Tunku Varadarajan, 11/05/10, Daily Beast)

Two years after Bush’s departure from the White House, India is still Bush Country—a giant (if foreign) Red State, to use the American political taxonomy. By that I mean that the political establishment and much of the non-leftist intelligentsia still looks back with dewy-eyed fondness to the time when India’s relations with the United States flowered extravagantly under Bush. It wasn’t just a matter of securing a mold-breaking nuclear deal with Washington; it was a case of India dealing, for the first time in the uneven history of its relations with the United States, with an American president who saw India as a partner-in-civilization.

Bogged down in health care and bailouts at home, and in “Afpak” abroad, Obama has let the alliance with India wither on the vine. This has frustrated India deeply, especially as a perception came to grip New Delhi that some of Obama’s neglect was payback to India for its closeness to his predecessor. India pushed back hard and furiously at Obama’s early, tone-deaf attempt to foist Richard Holbrooke on the Indian subcontinent as some sort of “Kashmir czar,” and New Delhi has returned, to a noticeable extent, to the pre-Bush method of dealing with America: watch first, and closely; trust later, and sparingly. It is remarkable how an alliance that had seemed so electrifying—indeed, one that had all the hallmarks of a “paradigm shift” in international relations—has been so quickly squandered.

America’s interest in India is two-fold: “material” interest, both military and economic; and “ideal” interest, consisting of politics, ideology, and political culture. There are many countries with which we share only the former, and many fewer—the U.K. is the perfect example—with which we share both. India should, and does, fall into this latter category, and we should--as the sage political scientist Ken Jowitt, of Berkeley and the Hoover Institution, argues—have a higher threshold when it comes to engaging in conflicts with such dual-interest countries. We should be more tolerant of differences with countries like this and not stop drinking French wine or eating Indian curry when we have disagreements. As a rule—and by contrast—disputes with countries like Russia or China (with whom we have a single-interest equation) should be qualitatively different. The question is: Does Obama see international relations in this way? India thinks not.