THE MONROE DOCTRINE is alive and well — in India. Like their American predecessors, successive Indian prime ministers have declared the Indian Ocean off limits to interference by external great powers. They have invoked President James Monroe by name to justify Indian primacy in regional waters and coastal areas. And, emboldened by a surging economy, they have set out to construct a “blue-water” navy able to keep outsiders at bay and police the sea lanes.

To glimpse India’s oceanic future, and to understand how to conduct relations with a more confident, more assertive New Delhi, U.S. leaders need to examine their own history. This is especially true now, when the U.S. Navy has embarked on a new maritime strategy premised on the cooperation of up-and-coming regional powers such as India.

With fewer and fewer ships of its own, the Navy can’t be everywhere. So the United States needs help from fellow sea powers now more than ever — putting a premium on navy-to-navy diplomacy. Understanding the perspectives of America’s Indian interlocutors is critical to negotiating any durable partnership in South Asia.

U.S. leaders typically assume that India represents a “natural strategic partner” for the United States in the Indian Ocean. By their logic, the two nations’ common English language and the political affinities between the world’s largest democracy and its oldest democracy will bind together a U.S.-Indian nautical consortium. But Indians also take a hands-off view of the United States, the world’s dominant naval power. A maritime partnership is not a foregone conclusion.

This may come as a surprise.

That the sea figures prominently in Indian foreign and military policy is clear. Why? First, economics counts. Like other nations — China, for one — India increasingly depends on foreign energy supplies, the stuff of a vibrant industrial economy. Because of their bulk, these resources are transported overwhelmingly by ship. Economic development thus has riveted Indian leaders’ attention on the sea lanes that pass through the Indian Ocean, along Indian shores.

Second, geopolitics remains influential. K. M. Panikkar, the “father” of Indian maritime history, observed that Indians are acutely conscious of threats emanating from the sea. Over the centuries, India’s imposing natural defenses — rugged mountain ranges with few passes — slowed down conquering armies. As a result, overland threats were manageable.

By contrast, European seafarers — from Portugal’s Vasco da Gama, in the 15th Century, to Britain and its Royal Navy in the 19th — imperiled the nation’s very survival. Because Indian history supplies little guidance on how to counter seaborne threats, strategists have turned to 19th-Century America, which faced roughly similar dilemmas, for help.

In 1823, Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, famously placed the Americas off-limits to new European colonization, forbidding the imperial powers to extend their “political system” to the United States’ southern neighbors. The Monroe Doctrine was an object of ridicule among Europeans, for the simple reason that the United States lacked a battle fleet to enforce it.

But Americans could shelter behind the wooden walls of the Royal Navy.

Britain had reasons of its own for keeping its rivals from colonizing Latin America. In effect, the Royal Navy upheld Monroe’s principles for much of the century while Americans tended to internal development. In the meantime, the U.S. and Royal navies worked together on matters of common interest, such as suppressing the Caribbean slave trade.

Fast forward to the 1890s, when the United States finally put to sea a powerful navy and surveyed its maritime surroundings. In 1895 the Grover Cleveland administration inserted itself into a border dispute between Venezuela and Britain. Secretary of State Richard Olney proclaimed Washington “practically sovereign” in the New World, declaring that its “fiat is law” in any affair in which U.S. leaders saw fit to intervene.

Thankfully, this was the high-water mark for the Monroe Doctrine.

Despite his reputation for bombast, President Theodore Roosevelt muted Olney’s claim to regional dominance. Roosevelt’s 1904 “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine asserted a more modest “international police power” aimed at maintaining order in the Caribbean basin. Roosevelt wanted to deny the imperial powers any pretext for seizing naval bases in the Caribbean — debt collection being their usual excuse — from which to threaten shipping bound for the Panama Canal, then under construction. International police duty was a low-key affair, amounting to little more than stationing a U.S. administrator in the Dominican Republic to help the government repay its European creditors.

As they fashion their diplomacy toward India, U.S. naval officials should ask themselves: Monroe, Cleveland or Roosevelt? Does India see itself as Monroe’s America, with grand geopolitical ambitions but without the naval means to fulfill these ambitions? Is it Cleveland’s America, with the capacity and an occasional propensity for bullying? Or is it Roosevelt’s America, possessing dominant means held in check by the nation’s political leadership?

The future of U.S.-Indian maritime relations could depend on how well Washington gauges — and, if possible, shapes — Indian capabilities and intentions. While history can’t provide firm answers, it can help the U.S. Navy think through these matters.

James Holmes is an associate professor of strategy at the Naval War College and a senior research fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.