Narendra Modi is preparing to make his eighth visit to the United States as India’s prime minister. Although previous U.S. administrations have received Modi warmly, the fanfare surrounding this trip—the Indian prime minister’s first official state visit to Washington—will be unparalleled. He is scheduled to address a joint session of Congress. And as a parting gift, Modi will likely leave the United States having secured a long-coveted deal for General Electric to share technology and jointly produce military jet engines with India.

Such an enthusiastic reception is undoubtedly intended to reset relations with India. Although both countries are ostensibly committed to a partnership, the U.S.-Indian relationship has not lived up to its potential in recent years. The United States must shoulder some of the blame for this failure. Successive U.S. administrations ignored India’s warnings about negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Biden administration has continued to pursue a relationship with India’s rival Pakistan even after U.S. priorities in Asia have shifted toward dealing with China. Washington has also flubbed more routine diplomatic issues such as visa processing, with record backlogs in U.S. consulates in India that only recently ebbed. And it took more than two years for the U.S. Senate to confirm former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as ambassador to India, hampering Washington’s ability to advance its interests in New Delhi.

For their part, U.S. officials seem to be waking up to the promises—and the limits—of a strong relationship with India. It is unclear whether the same can be said for Indian leaders. New Delhi continues to harbor a variety of misgivings about forging a genuine partnership with the United States. Despite ongoing clashes at the disputed border with China, India has resisted embracing its security partnership with Australia, Japan, and the United States—known as the Quad, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—designed to protect the Indo-Pacific from Chinese aggression. At the same time, both Modi and his foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, have been praised at home for their staunch refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This stance of neutrality, they have argued, best serves India’s interests. Since the invasion in February 2022, India has undoubtedly benefited from a steady supply of cheap Russian oil as the Kremlin has scrambled to secure alternative buyers for its energy commodities. But New Delhi’s relations with Moscow occupy a shrinking portion of Indian foreign policy. In the long run, Russia’s growing dependence on China will make it an unreliable partner.

India rightly wants to guarantee itself strategic autonomy as it continues to rise in the world. But such a vision will not be fully realized if India continues to imagine that it can indefinitely play to all sides. Nonalignment may work in specific instances, but it will not serve India well in the long term. Instead, India should forge a strong partnership with the United States. With U.S. support, India can reassert its control over South Asia and emerge as a strong pole of regional order in the Indo-Pacific.

TIME WARP Most of India’s concerns about the United States hark back to another era in global politics. New Delhi, it seems, is caught in a time warp. Key members of India’s foreign policy elite remain fixated on the United States’ relationship with Pakistan during the Cold War and fear its renewal. This belief, although perhaps understandable given the record of U.S. policy toward South Asia, is nevertheless flawed: the United States and Pakistan have never been and are not now as close as Indian policymakers tend to imagine them to be. It is to the credit of the Trump administration that the United States finally called Pakistan’s bluff and terminated all military aid. Since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, some in the Biden administration have proposed a limited strategic relationship with Pakistan focused on counterterrorism. But Washington’s efforts to secure this new partnership with Islamabad have been halting at best. Although some U.S. foreign policy thinkers still support Pakistan over India, the Beltway establishment is finally recognizing India’s primacy in South Asia. There is little reason to believe that the United States, whether under this administration or a future one, would want to resurrect its old alliance with Pakistan, especially if it comes at the expense of a partnership with India.

India’s supremacy in its neighborhood is not challenged by Pakistan or the United States but instead by China. In Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and even within India’s own borders, China represents an existential threat to New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. Indian and Chinese soldiers have massed along the disputed mountainous border between the two countries, with bloody skirmishes breaking out sporadically. India currently possesses neither the domestic military capabilities (what scholars of international security refer to as “internal balancing”) nor the foreign partnerships (“external balancing”) to guarantee its security interests and protect its northern borders from the Chinese incursions that have been accelerating since 2019.

Some within India’s security establishment continue to believe that Russia may yet serve as a possible bulwark against China. These expectations stem from the Soviet Union’s role during the Cold War and India’s continuing dependence on Russia for defense equipment and spare parts. Recent developments, however, suggest that this hope is rather fanciful. Russia, preoccupied with its disastrous invasion of Ukraine, has already failed to deliver some military supplies that it had contracted to provide India. And New Delhi’s assiduously cultivated neutral position on the invasion has not prevented Moscow from turning to Beijing, India’s long-term competitor and adversary. Russia has grown only closer to and more dependent on China since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. It simply cannot play the role India wants it to in checking China.

This is a known bug that will be fixed in the next Lemmy update. In the meantime, you can fix it by changing the page number in the url to “0”.

Actually stunning how bad this is doing. With a >70% drop incoming this week, where do you think the final gross is going to land?

Thanks for the response. To be honest, that seems a bit misguided. Seems like it adds a fair bit of complexity and performance issues in exchange for a relatively marginal benefit(hiding an IP that’s probably dynamic from a server the user chose to visit anyways).

For an example !dnd@lemmy.world has a different set of stickied posts when visiting through lemmy.world versus this instance. It’s clearly a day or so out of date.

BeeHaw defederated all the major lemmy instances, pointing someone towards a website where they can’t interact with 80% of other users for reasons they likely don’t care about seems silly. If people want to make BeeHaw accounts once they learn about it, more power to them. But the average user is going to want as seamless of a transition as possible, and getting a crash course on defederation is the exact opposite of that.

Whatever the ideal decentralized setup may be, the truth of the matter is that the current setup makes it significantly harder to surface content from instances outside of one’s own. I’d prefer to point people towards lemmy.world than to send them to a smaller server and have to field questions about why the servers they’re trying to join are out of date or possibly not available at all. As people get more comfortable with the setup, they can branch further out into the federation as they please.

Hi! I’m the mod of !credibledefense@sh.itjust.works. I’m the only contributor at the moment, but I’ve been trying to do so pretty regularly. If you’re interested in r/cd style discussion in a federated environment, we’d love to have you.

!noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works is the biggest NCD community that I know of, might want to sub to that too if you’re interested in the memes.

Hi! I’m the mod of !credibledefense@sh.itjust.works. I’m the only contributor at the moment, but I’ve been trying to do so pretty regularly. If you’re interested in r/cd style discussion in a federated environment, we’d love to have you.

!noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works is the biggest NCD community that I know of, might want to sub to that too if you’re interested in the memes.

Kofman just posted this Twitter thread as well: https://twitter.com/KofmanMichael/status/1672999622032195584. Mostly rehashing the statements I summarized above but with a few additions. I’ve quoted the new stuff( by my reckoning) below:

After Bakhmut, the military was far less dependent on Wagner. Folks often conflated Bakhmut for the entire Russian winter offensive, and Wagner’s role as though it was omnipresent on the front. It was quite narrow, and Wagner was not used for defense in the south. 15/

This is in part how Wagner found itself so close to Rostov, reconstituting in training camps and deployed to the rear. Their units were not pulled off the line, hence Russian defense (especially in the south) is unlikely to suffer immediately from their absence. 16/

Wagner might be disbanded in its entirety, or absorbed. The Russian state had been trying to set up competing organizations and this process is likely to accelerate now. This in part depends on what happens to Wagner’s backers in Moscow - what was Prigozhin’s cover there. 17/

There’s also the nagging question of whether anyone has seen Shoigu and Gerasimov, and what’s going to happen with them. As Prigozhin’s discussion with Alekseev in the SMD HQ illustrated, they are near universally detested in the Russian military. 18/

My conclusion is that Prigozhin ultimately lost. Wagner will also lose out. But Putin lost as well, and the regime was wounded. What the long term repercussions are remains to be seen.

I have seen at least one user claim they got a result from lemmy when searching a question on google. YMMV though. Lemmy is a fraction of the size of reddit, it will take time for posts to reach the level that google starts indexing them specifically.