What 'Team Biden' means for India's energy and strategic relations with US

As US expectedly pivots away from fossil fuels and India redoubles its commitment to the Paris Accord, Jennifer Mulhern's role becomes far more significant

Energy Secretary
 

Jennifer Mulhern Granholm, the former two-term governor of Michigan state, was expected to be in Barack Obama’s first team; then in his second team; and was again almost a certainty as a judge in the Supreme Court. So, even though she has not held a post within the Beltway zone in the US capital, she is extremely familiar with the turf. As US expectedly pivots away from fossil fuels and India redoubles its commitment to the Paris Accord, her role becomes far more significant than Dan Brouillette enjoyed.
 

Within the US, the administrator of the Environment Protection Agency, Michael S Regan will wield the whip but as a cabinet member, Granholm will be calling the shots. Yet, unlike trade, the energy partnership of USA and India has strong pillars.

Jennifer Mulhern Granholm, US energy secretary

Though of the four pillars of the India-US strategic energy partnership, the second one — oil and gas — could see less cooperation and more inspection. But this is not bad news — not yet. Biden will have problems shutting off domestic coal and shale industries without a clear visibility of alternative employment in middle America. So, cooperation in areas of research on transformational power generation based on supercritical CO2 (sCO2) power cycles and advanced coal technologies for power generation will continue. Republican support will be crucial to change policies in the US Congress, which means Granholm will have to depend on US energy companies as outside support for her plans to pivot to 80 per cent clean energy by 2030, as she said in a Ted Talk. Like India, she has ambitions to bring renewable energy manufacturing to USA, and that could mean current India-US disputes on import of solar panels may be harder to reconcile.

Secretary of State
 

Antony Blinken is seen as pragmatic and prudent, with good consensus-building skills, notes a commentator. These qualities will be necessary to even get the Senate to ratify his appointment. But India will be reading him intensely for what he brings to the US-China-India triangle, the most difficult geopolitical question globally that has easily eclipsed the West Asian stakes. He has already called out decoupling from China as “counterproductive”, yet his key task will be to hold out China even as domestically the president seeks to rebuild the US economy.
 

As a career diplomat, a cadre whom Trump virtually disowned, Blinken is a return to the centre. Which means while the strident anti-China position that India has set itself on will not get an immediate endorsement from the Biden administration, yet he is unlikely to reverse the classifying of India under the Strategic Trade Authorisation-1 category by Trump (only the third Asian country to get the status) and the finalising of the Industrial Security Annex (a crucial precursor to the actualisation of US-India Defence Technology and Trade Initiative, or DTTI). There is enough space to build on the India tilt espoused even by the Obama administration.
 

Also, he is no stranger to Biden’s foundational role in the modern-day development of America’s ties with India, but New Delhi has to be ready to face more examination of its internal affairs from the State Department. If that sounds complicated, it is made even more so because he has already indicated that the new US-China ties will instead be less bound down on ideological lines.