Did Delhi just yield the Indian Ocean to the US?

The guided-missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones sailing past the Lakshadweep Islands off the coast of Kerala last Wednesday has thrown India’s Sinophobes into confusion.

One leading daily noted it as a “rare falling out between the two partners in the Quad grouping.” An anti-China analyst tweeted that it was just a “botched PR exercise” on the part of the Americans. The Indian Ministry of External Affairs took a legalistic perspective as if it were answering a writ petition in the Delhi High Court.

But reflect seriously. Yes, this is a rare fracas within the cozy Quad family. Yet the Quad is a toddler. What can happen when US President Joe Biden grooms it into a boisterous adolescent?

Make no mistake, what happened is the military equivalent of the great American diplomat-scholar George Kennan’s written comment about the oil reserves in the Persian Gulf. They were “our resources,” he wrote, integral to America’s prosperity, and therefore the US should take control of them. (Which it did, of course.) 

The seabeds of the South China Sea and Indian Ocean are sitting on an unimaginable wealth of mineral resources – potentially, the last frontier. The John Paul Jones acted like a dog marking a lamppost. The specter of an acute future big-power scramble – not only with China or Russia but also involving European rivals – haunts Washington. With all their tragic colonial history, Indians tend to forget.