Good morning.  It’s great to be back in New Delhi, and to be able to take part in this U.S.-India dialogue. 

As a professor and the director of Missouri State University’s Washington DC-based School of Defense and Strategic Studies, I am no longer in government and can speak only for myself.  With the caveat that I can thus provide no more than my own personal opinions, however, I’m pleased to offer some thoughts to fuel our discussion on this panel on arms control and nuclear risk reduction.

The other speakers have done a fine job of laying out the current state of play in the arms control world – which is to say, arms  control’s notably moribund status – and how this terrain is seen from India, so I don’t have much to add there.  I fear there’s very little chance of new arms control of any kind for some time among the “Big Three” nuclear powers of the United States, Russia, and China, at least until we Americans augment our own nuclear capabilities enough finally to convince Moscow and Beijing that it’s more in their interest to talk with us than to compete with us.  (At the moment, they seem to think an environment of unbridled arms competition favors them, so why negotiate with us?)

What I thought I’d do today, however, is to offer some thoughts on the possibility of future arms control that involves South Asia. 

I have myself so far only nibbled around the edges of that issue on previous trips to India.  I spent a good deal of time when in government, for instance, trying to convince Pakistani counterparts that it would be unhelpful to them (and indeed destabilizing) were they to continue to develop and deploy very small, forward-based nuclear weapons – and that it might elicit notable U.S. inferences of hostility were Islamabad to develop intercontinental-class systems that it certainly didn’t need to range India.  And while those discussions may have been unavailing, I have gotten the impression that both India and Pakistan have made improvements in the nuclear security measures they apply against terrorist and insider threats, even if this degree of improvement has been made only unilaterally by each, and without apparent coordination or transparency. 

As for nuclear risk reduction through Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures (TCBMs), there have certainly been some moves here in the region.  There was, for instance, the agreement India and Pakistan reached in 1988 on refraining from attacking each other’s nuclear facilities, and a mutual agreement in 1992 to forswear chemical weapons.  The two countries have so far also stuck to the individual moratoria on further nuclear explosive testing each announced at the United Nations in September 1998.  After nuclear TCBM talks in 2004, moreover, they agreed to set up a crisis communications “hotline” and to exchange missile launch notifications.  All this is well and good, though I am unaware of there being any more movement since then. 

But note that I was being careful with my phrasing a moment ago: I referred to arms control that involves South Asia, not necessarily to arms control just between India and Pakistan.  Indeed, my intention is not to be just another American lecturing you here in India about the need to “do more arms control” with Pakistan, though it’s true that I’d like to see that. 

Rather, taking as my jumping off point the turbulence we are currently experiencing in the U.S.-Indian relationship, I thought I’d offer you some food for thought about what our two governments can do together in this arena as a way to help build our relationship toward its full potential. 

The U.S.-India Relationship

Before I get to broader questions of arms control and risk reduction, however, let me frame the issue with some broader observations about the U.S.-India relationship.  I offer them as someone who has long had great hopes for the U.S.-India relationship, and for all the good things that strong ties between us could entail for our two peoples, and for the world as a whole, if these two large, modern, prosperous, and dynamic democracies really learned to cooperate as they should.  And indeed it been good to see that our two countries have generally proven able to move forward in cooperative ways. 

That said, as much as we have therefore made some progress, we also each seem repeatedly to have irritated or disappointed the other by not living up to expectations. 

I was working on arms control and nonproliferation issues at the U.S. State Department at the time of the pathbreaking U.S.-India civil-nuclear deal in 2005, in which we broke a great deal of diplomatic crockery with unhappy third parties in order to pave a way for much closer cooperation between Washington and New Delhi.  American officials have also long cherished the idea that our two countries can do a very great deal more together in furthering our blindingly obvious shared interest in meeting the threats presented by China’s growing regional and global power, and Beijing’s ambitions for hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.  In my own experience, in fact – going back to a visit I took with Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Senator Richard Shelby in 2002 during which we met with Prime Minister Vajpayee and, among other things, discussed China with him – I’ve generally found Indian officials to say sensible and serious things about these shared interests.

Yet while Indian leaders often talk persuasively with us about the importance of the U.S.-India relationship, it sometimes seems they are slower to do things consistent with such positions.  I spent most of one of my trips here in government, for instance, trying to find ways to help India wean itself of its appetite for Russian military systems and increase its interest in ours, a topic on which I’m afraid we then made little progress.  I’ve also had surprisingly unproductive engagements with Indian officials even on the topic of civil-nuclear cooperation for which we in Washington burned diplomatic bridges with some parts of the nonproliferation community back in 2005, for there too, progress has generally languished. 

Most recently – despite the theme of shared interests vis-à-vis China that has been perhaps the single most consistent “through line” for U.S.-Indian diplomacy during the last two decades – India has also gone out of its way to host meetings of the rather openly anti-American BRICS group, and seems now to be working hard to strengthen its relationship with Xi Jinping’s totalitarian dictatorship. 

In all these respects, I’m afraid Washington has frequently found itself disappointed in its relationship with India.  My experience of dealing with India as a U.S. diplomat has been full of warmth and optimism for the relationship, and informed by an acute appreciation for shared strategic interests.  But it has also been an experience of frustration and disappointment.  For too many people in Washington, India is a partner that seems repeatedly to fall short of its potential and to get in its own way, to be constantly hamstrung by bureaucracy and institutional and intellectual inertia, to carry on its diplomatic shoulder an industrial-strength chip of sterile and antiquated ideological grievances, and to talk a much better game than it is usually able or willing deliver on.  (New Delhi, it has been joked more than once in DC, is just one more major American concession away from becoming the regional partner we Americans want, and it always will be.) 

So while our two countries have proven able to move forward in some cooperative ways, it seems to me that for many years the pace of this progress together has consistently been less than the notably fast rate at which our collective “China problem” has been evolving.  As much as we have made some progress, therefore, it feels as if we are nonetheless falling behind the challenge.

But don’t get me wrong.  I also fully appreciate the harm Washington has itself recently done to the U.S.-India relationship with our capricious tariff policies and the remarkable way we have polluted our international relationships by acting as if we care not a whit for any friend, partner, or even formal military ally except insofar as we can wheedle or browbeat some further short-term, zero-sum, transactional windfall out of them.  And I fully understand the damage being done to the U.S.-India relationship by blinkered American immigration policies apparently unable to draw a distinction between migrants swarming illegally across our southern border with the help of human trafficking gangs and highly-educated and -motivated foreign entrepreneurs who seek U.S. visas so that America can be the site of yet another amazing new technology startup.  Don’t think I cannot see how harmful these U.S. policies have been for our bilateral relationship.

So there’s a great deal of blame to go around.

Oddly Fraternal

Nevertheless – if you squint a little – it’s actually quite remarkable how much alike our two countries are despite such policy differences.  I don’t just mean that we are the two largest democracies in the world, though that’s true enough. 

Both of us, each in our own way, are also both new and old nations at the same time.  India, of course, is the modern representative of an extraordinarily old civilization and culture, but as a political entity stretching over its current geography it’s really quite a recent creation that still seems to be fishing around a bit to find a clear national “self” for itself.  At the same time, the United States is still, in historical and civilizational terms, a mere babe in arms, yet at 250 years we are by far the oldest democracy. 

Furthermore, we each adopted a somewhat rigid and ideological approach to geopolitics during the Cold War and developed a sense of our own specialness in the world many aspects of which irritated the other endlessly, and facets of which linger to some extent in our consciousnesses and institutional habits today.  Moreover, in the present moment, at least, both of us seem to like to drink the invigorating coffee of our domestic politics with a dash of ethno-nationalist, authoritarian, and Islamophobic populism on top.

Most importantly from the perspective of arms control and nuclear risk reduction, our two countries both have a “China problem” in the contemporary world, a problem which some of our other political and geopolitical instincts seem repeatedly to get in the way of acting together effectively to address.  What’s more, we also both have a contemporary “three-body problem” when it comes to nuclear deterrence and escalation management. 

We in Washington talk a lot about three-body problem in the context of having to deter two nuclear near-peers simultaneously, while having only one force posture with which to do it.  We refer, in this context, to China and Russia, but it’s obviously also the case that India has its own “three-body problem” too: with China and Pakistan.  In both “three-body” cases, moreover, the other two nuclear players are dangerously enmeshed in a partnership against us: China and Pakistan against you in India, and Russia and China against us. 

To be sure, we each face unique problems within that context of two-peer deterrence.  We Americans face the complexities of providing “extended” nuclear deterrence to our allies, but at least our theater deterrence challenges are many miles away from us.  India, by contrast, faces theater-level deterrence dilemmas – on top of its “core deterrence” strategic ones, of course – not far away but rather right on its very borders. 

So my point is threefold: (1) we are in certain ways remarkably alike and share some fundamental interests, especially in addressing the mutual threat of China’s growing power and ambition; (2) that growing Chinese power and ambition has turned our more traditional geopolitical deterrence challenge with one adversary into a “three-body” problem with two; and (3) neither the United States nor India has yet figured out exactly how to meet this three-body challenge.  Neither of us, in other words, knows how to deter two peers at the same time, nor how to handle adversary strategies of nuclear-fueled coercive bargaining and escalation manipulation in ways that stably deter escalation to a general nuclear exchange yet do not leave our opponents dangerous space for lower-level opportunistic violence. 

To my eye, Washington and New Delhi thus both need to refocus hard on rebuilding our countries’ ties so we can deepen them to where they really need to be and work together to find viable answers to the challenges we together confront.

A Risk Reduction Agenda?

In this light, our two countries probably share an interest in working to involve China more in developing multilateral approaches to risk reduction., such as by exploring the possibility together of an Indo-Pacific regional TCBM regime that would involve the United States, China, India, and Pakistan, and could perhaps involve some combination of things such as launch notification agreements, data-sharing provisions, verification and site-visit protocols, mechanisms for handling operational incidents and encounters between military assets that might otherwise escalate uncontrollably, and crisis communications links such as state-to-state “hotline” agreements or more multilateral institutions such as the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) system.

In principle, such an arrangement could provide direct benefits to all concerned, adding at least somewhat to strategic stability and mutual understanding in this tense area of the world, and reducing the risk of unintentional, mistaken, or uncontrolled escalation across the multiple nuclear relational axes that exist between these powers.  Having such an agreement structured in an open-ended “modular” way might also allow progress to be made – and diplomatic pressure increased upon hold-outs – in useful ways even if it did not (or not initially) include all of those states.  (Who knows? Maybe Britons, Frenchmen, and Russians could eventually also be enlisted.)

Even the mere fact of working together in an effort to develop such an approach could still send useful signals of good faith and good intentions, improving our countries’ diplomatic posture vis-à-vis third parties, increasing pressure on the countries we know to be the real problem, helping us understand our “three-body problem” adversaries better, and helping improve arms control negotiating experience and comfort levels among parties hitherto unaccustomed to such interactions, not least in Beijing.  (I cannot imagine, moreover, that even at this point in 2026 decades after your open weaponization and the problems between us that it entailed, India would entirely mind the degree of nuclear “normalization” that would be represented by working cooperatively with us in pursuit of a new multilateral arms control regime.)

So my point here is less about arms control between India and Pakistan than about how our two governments might be able to approach the China problem through an arms control prism, together.

Even beyond the more specific and speculative possibility of a multilateral TCBM regime, moreover, the United States and India need to do much more work together to build an intellectual and doctrinal framework for dealing with the novel challenges of “three-body” deterrence and strategic stability.  This is a conceptual agenda that goes far beyond arms control and risk reduction.  If anything, in fact, we may need to do more to articulate a clear theory of how to meet these challenges until we even know exactly what to pursue by way of arms control in the first place. 

Working on this intellectual project together is essential.  The term “three-body problem” is evocative in part because of its meaning in Newtonian orbital mechanics, for there isn’t actually a general closed-form analytic solution for the problem there.  And perhaps indeed our two countries’ geopolitical three-body problems will prove similarly insoluble and unstable.  Nevertheless, even if that’s true, we won’t know this until we try – and perhaps there actually are reasonable solutions.  Either way, both of our governments have an interest in trying to crack that figurative math.  So why not work on it together?

I think we thus have a shared intellectual agenda of world-historical importance: one in which all of us – not just this event’s sponsors at the Center for Nuclear Security Policy and the Observer Research Foundation, but lots of others too, including my own team at Missouri State University’s School of Defense and Strategic Studies – have important roles to play. 

What might that look like?

• Well, for one thing, there should thus be more conferences like this at both the “Track 2” and the “Track 1” levels. 

• More broadly, there should also be more joint research efforts and wargaming work between our two governments focused upon issues related to multiplayer deterrence, escalation management, challenges of handling nuclear-facilitated adversary coercive bargaining, stability-instability paradox problems, limited nuclear weapons use, and both two-party adversary collusion and opportunistic aggression in time of crisis by the third player in a three-body problem. 

• And there should be a concerted effort to improve and expand our respective and collaborative national ecosystems of think tanks, academic faculties, and higher education human capital development pipelines, cultivating avenues of intellectual inquiry and schools of thought that can enrich our leaders’ decision-making by their mutual interaction. 

We in the United States and the NATO-centric West did a half-decent job of all these sorts of thing during the Cold War vis-à-vis the two-body problem of Soviet power, but how it’s time for the two big democracies of the Indo-Pacific to work together to do likewise for the novelty of the three-body problem we share today. 

All of which makes me especially glad we are here today for this discussion.  Thank you for inviting me. 

—Christopher Ford