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With every new speech in English, Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, becomes more comfortable with the language. Yet his audience at a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday would have been grateful for their printed copies of his address—not merely because the text would have been helpful when Mr. Modi did trip up, but also as a keepsake: The speech offered the clearest Indian promise to date of a 21st-century alliance with the U.S.

India and the U.S. have been performing a mating dance since the early days of George W. Bush’s second term. Bruised by Iraq, he found a salve of sorts in India. By the end of his presidency, Mr. Bush had concluded a nuclear deal with India that was the historic turning point in a relationship between the two countries that had hitherto been cordial at its best and bristling at its worst. (The nadir came in 1971, when Bangladesh, aided by India, broke away from Pakistan, to President Nixon’s great consternation.) The vastly improved relations with India counted as one of the few Bush foreign-policy successes beyond dispute.

President Obama had things other than India on his mind in his first term. But in his second term, Mr. Obama made up for his neglect of the land Bush had won over, courting New Delhi so ardently that U.S.-India relations will also count as that rarity in the Obama presidency, an indisputable foreign-policy achievement.

The nationalist Mr. Modi and the cosmopolitan Mr. Obama aren’t natural soul mates. Neither were the folksy Mr. Bush and the mousy Manmohan Singh, Mr. Modi’s predecessor. So the coming together of India and the U.S. isn’t the product of passing brotherly love, or chemistry that might dissipate once new leaders come along. There have been tectonic changes in the world that have caused India to rethink its foreign, defense and economic policies. Foremost among them is the irruption onto the world’s stage of China—mercantilist, bellicose, sea-grabbing and covetous of ever-greater portions of global heft. India cannot cope with China without America. CONTINUE AT SITE

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi paid his second visit to the White House in two years on June 8. President Barak Obama was greatly pleased by Modi’s stated willingness to proceed with ratification of the Paris agreement to limit greenhouse gases, and this was the theme duly emphasized in the Western media coverage of their meeting.

To Modi, however, global warming was a peripheral issue. He is a foreign-policy realist who looks upon Obama’s climate-change obsession with quiet bemusement, while pretending to share his concern in order to obtain concessions on other issues. He is far more interested in the long-term geopolitical challenges facing India from the Islamic world to her west and from the Chinese colossus to her north. Pakistan is perceived—quite rightly—as a threat and a source of chronic regional instability, and its deep state (as embodied in the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI) as irredeemably jihad-friendly. China’s explosive economic growth over the past quarter-century, followed less spectacularly by India’s since the mid-1990’s, has not prompted the two Asian giants to resolve their border disputes and other feuds of long standing.

In order to meet various actual or potential threats, Modi wants to further develop and assert India’s status as a regional power; but to that end he needs closer relations with Washington on a number of fronts. His strategy vis-à-vis the United States is threefold. First of all, Modi wants to turn India into a major global manufacturing workshop—that is the theme of his Make in India campaign—and he sees the involvement of U.S.-based corporations as essential to its success. His second goal is to encourage the United States to terminate its policy of tolerating Pakistan’s duplicity in the fight against Islamic terrorism—as manifested in its schizophrenic attitude to the Taliban in Afghanistan—and to encourage the U.S. to look upon India as the only reliable and rational partner in the Subcontinent. Finally, Modi wants to diversify India’s arms supplies—most of which still come from Russia—but does not want to become (or to be seen as becoming) too close to the United States in the grand-strategic scheme of things.

All of Modi’s strategic themes and objectives broadly correspond to America’s interests in Asia. India occupies pivotal position in the Indian Ocean, the second most critical maritime highway in the world. Under Modi the Hindu nationalist, the government in Delhi may be more inclined to base its long-term strategy on the development of a community of geopolitical interests with the leading thalassocratic power in the world—the United States—than any of its predecessors since independence. America wants to contain China’s ambition to break through the bars of the First Island Chain in the Far East and Southeast Asia, while India would be loath to see Burma (“Myanmar”) provide China with direct access to the Indian Ocean by road, rail and pipeline.