AP Photo

In advance of US President Barack Obama’s three-day visit to India this month, a panoply of Republican, conservative and neoconservative strategists in Washington urged him to use his trip to persuade New Delhi to join the United States in a political-military alliance. India, they argued, could serve as the lynchpin of efforts to cement the United States’ role as a superpower in Asia and the Indian Ocean—an anchor in an American scheme to surround and contain a China.