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This paper examines how well the concept of "strategic culture" explains the tendency for India's foreign policy to lag behind its rapidly expanding economic interests. Realist analyses of Indian foreign policy and security strategy tend to find that the country is not living up to its potential. This leads to a consideration of strategic culture as an explanatory variable for India's suboptimal performance. The strategic culture aspects of political military culture (civil-military relations) and military culture (martial traditions of the armed forces) tend to point towards a strategic culture that has been shaped by civilian politicians and bureaucrats. The dominance of civilians and general exclusion of the military from decision-making has hindered India from becoming a power that regularly uses the military as an instrument of policy. The factor of domestic strategic culture (including attitudes towards the use of violence and the domestic political order) explains the short-term focus of Indian leaders and the lack of strategic vision. Structural factors, such as the entrenched foreign affairs and defense bureaucracy, produce a narrow and procedural focus and prevent the development of strategic analyses and planning. In conclusion, the strategic culture concept appears to play a significant role in explaining India's suboptimal foreign policy and security strategy. On the basis of those findings, one must expect the India-US relationship to move forward slowly on a number of issues and on future interactions. The possibility of an eventual alliance between the two powers is unlikely given India's strategic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I would like to conclude this analysis of "Making US Foreign Policy for a Nuclear South Asia: Off-shore Balancing in Historical Perspective" by considering the question, "What does it mean to be a "great power"? in the context of the Bush administration's efforts to transform US - India relations. I start with the thought that the US is labeled a superpower. It is said to be the only one, the sole superpower. Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China are, by a consensus of sorts, the five great powers. India aspires to be a great power. The US has told India that an important aspect of the nuclear deal it is offering to India is US willingness to recognize India as a great power.The choice before great powers in today's uni-polar world seems to be whether to bandwagon with the sole superpower, the US, or to balance against it. In the face of the Bush administration's doctrines of unilaterialism and pre-emptive war, it is not likely that balancing against the super-power can prevent it from going to war when it is not over-committed. But when it is over-committed, as is the case in mid-August 2006, balancing against the super-power as Russia and China seem to be doing with respect to the possibility of a US attack on a Iran, can be effective. The five great powers have are thought to be great because they have robust economies, ranking second [Japan], third [Germany], fourth [Britain], fifth [France] and sixth [China] behind the US, that enable them to be relatively economic independent and because they have nuclear weapons or have the protection of nuclear weapons. The question before is, how credible is the US claim that the nuclear agreement it is offering India will make it a great power? A lot turns on the question of nuclear sovereignty. For India nuclear sovereignty operationally means the capability and the right to determine and maintain a credible nuclear deterrent.Under the NPT there are five and only five states who, by treaty, possess nuclear sovereignty: The US, Britain, France, Russia and China, the five country which, by 1968 when the treaty became operational, had developed and tested nuclear weapons. India was not among them, It first tested in 1974 and, as a result, was classified as non-nuclear weapons state, a state that lacked nuclear sovereignty. Japan and Germany, two of the great powers, rely for nuclear protection on a US nuclear umbrella; it gives them freedom from what K. Subrahmanyam, a leading Indian security intellectual, calls "the power of intimidation." Lacking nuclear sovereignty, Japan and Germany, Japan more clearly than Germany, are prone to bandwagon with the US.Russia and China, states that are nuclear sovereign, can and do balance against the US.Britain historically and more intensively during the nine plus years that Tony Blair has been Prime Minister, has bandwagonned with the US, more so during George Bush's than during Bill Clinton's presidency. The costs, it seems to me have outweighed the benefits. Blair's Britain has had to share the enmity that the US has generated in the Muslim world and the marginal but increasing alienation of its Muslim citizens and that alienation's potential for generating terrorist violence. Can India be a "great power" given the need for a great power to have a robust and relatively independent economy and to possess nuclear sovereignty? The simple answer to the economy question is yes. The answer to the nuclear sovereignty question is maybe. Much depends on the outcome of the negotiations between the US and India on the question. At this stage, those negotiations depend in both cases on how the deliberative process in the two countries' respective legislatures [and parties and public opinion] turn out... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]