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The shift in U.S.-Indian relations around the turn of the twenty-first century provides an ideal opportunity to test competing explanations of global power relations. Through examination of primary and secondary source materials, this paper investigates the timing of and justifications for the rapid changes in the relationship between the United States and India. This evidence is used to test the utility of explanations based on political regime type, extent of economic liberalization, global and local balance of power considerations, and nuclear proliferation concerns in light of changes in U.S.-Indian relations. Although the United States currently has friendly relations with China, this paper finds that the U.S. government is engaging India as a balancer against Chinese power. This suggests that the United States' role as a regional hegemon encourages it to promote a balance of power in Asia, even if the immediate threat of China is arguably minimal, implying that U.S. foreign policy decision-makers feel compelled to intervene in order to remain the sole regional hegemon. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

A dramatic transformation has occurred in India-US relations in the last decade. The interactions between the two democracies have expanded enormously and their impact is beginning to be felt beyond the bilateral realm. This evolving partnership holds the potential to shape not only the regional politics of South Asia but the international relations of the wider Asia-Pacific region. Some analysts project an even grander vision, claiming that this relationship may play a decisive role in determining the future global order. Taking these projections as a point of departure, and recognizing the impressive strides that have been made in Indo-US ties, this research focuses on the strategies, outputs and consequences of this foreign policy engagement. Its impact on Asian stability in the context of a rising China is also analysed. The research also studies the dynamics between the three major Asian powers, India, China and Japan, whose bilateral equations with the US are divergent and therefore of concern to the smaller powers of the region. How these major powers relate to one another and whether their mutual interactions can be autonomous are some of the questions that this research explores while charting the course of Indo-US relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]