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India’s Strategic Relationship with Israel and U.S.

A boon to all three, a threat to Islamist terrorism

by
Hadara Graubart
April 23, 2010
Waving the Indian flag.(Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images)
Waving the Indian flag.(Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images)

Writing in The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead calls attention to a much overlooked alliance that is dramatically affecting the political landscape. “Americans often talk about Israel as if we were the Jewish state’s only real friend,” writes Mead. In actuality, a 2009 survey demonstrated that in India—which has the “third-largest number of Muslims in the world”—58 percent of the population supports Israel, compared to 56 percent of Americans. “The deepening relations between the United States, India, and Israel are changing the geopolitical geometry of the modern world in ways that will make the lives of fanatical terrorists even more dismal and depressing (not to mention shorter) than they already are.”

Mead’s optimism is at its wildest in his vision of Iran as “a natural long-term ally for both India and Israel once it moves beyond the delusional and dead-end geopolitical agenda of its current government,” but it’s also founded on hard facts: “Israel is India’s largest supplier of arms,” Mead points out. “As two of the leading IT countries in the world, India and Israel also collaborate on a variety of high tech projects, some with military implications.” In addition, in the face of extremism in the Middle East and China’s growing influence, “the United States increasingly favors the emergence of India as a world and regional power,” and therefore supports its unity with Israel.

While Mead dismisses the idea found in terrorist documents from Pakistan that a “‘Zionist Hindu Crusader‘ alliance” between Israel, India, and the United States seeks to wage “war on Islam,” he makes the case that the friendly relations between the three powerful nations does have dire implications for Islamist radicals: “The radicals have imagined a world in which the west and especially America is in decline, Israel faces a deep crisis, and a resurgent Islamic world is emerging as a new world-historical power,” Mead writes. “Suppose none of that is happening. Suppose instead that both the United States and Israel are going to prosper and grow, based in part on their economic relationship with India.”

The “Zionist Hindu Crusader” Alliance Marches On [American Interest]

Hadara Graubart was formerly a writer and editor for Tablet Magazine.