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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often imagine that countries with nuclear energy programs are nuclear weapons states waiting to happen. Yet there are multiple ways that states can enhance their nuclear security, even when they possess the requisite technology for a weapons program. They may undertake diplomatic efforts to reduce the level of threat, they may seek shelter under an ally's nuclear umbrella, and they may adopt unilateral military measures, up to and including the development of a nuclear arsenal. Over the past five decades, India has engaged in all three of these approaches. Since India's pursuit of nuclear weapons is already well-documented, this article focuses on its efforts to elicit nuclear restraint from other states through diplomacy and to seek the protection of nuclear-armed allies. Drawing on archival documents and interviews in New Delhi and Mumbai, it documents how Indian leaders eventually became disillusioned with these two alternatives to nuclear armament. In doing so, it depicts India's emergence as a nuclear power not simply as a response to regional threats, but also as the result of dissatisfaction with alternative paths to nuclear security. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this finding for possible U.S.-Indian cooperation in nuclear energy in the future. ..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]

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]

One of the most significant developments in the nonproliferation regime in recent years has been the Indo-US nuclear cooperation agreement, which was first announced in July 2005. It seeks to allow nuclear cooperation between India and the U.S. New Delhi is not a member of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and because it does not maintain full-scope safeguards on its nuclear installations, full nuclear cooperation has been denied to it ever since it conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. Under the agreement, U.S. companies will be allowed to supply India with nuclear technology; in return, India will submit 14 of its 22 existing reactors under safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), putting them on a 'civilian' list. The remaining eight reactors will be put under a 'military' list for use in India's strategic nuclear program. While this is the basic structure of the agreement, several steps have to have be taken before its implementation. They include amending the rules of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and concluding a safeguards framework with the IAEA. But the first, and arguably most crucial step, has been concluding a bilateral nuclear agreement between India and the U.S., under Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act. It specifies the benefits that India will receive as well as the concessions it will have to make with regard to its nuclear program. The '123' agreement also requires approval from the U.S. Congress.However, despite some expectations that the bilateral agreement would be concluded speedily, several hurdles cropped up between India and the U.S., reflecting long-standing differences between the two sides on the future of nuclear energy and fissile material production. These differences include - whether India would legalize its unilateral moratorium on nuclear tests; whether India would be allowed to reprocess spent fuel; and whether India would be granted assurances of permanent supply of fuel for nuclear reactors. This paper examines the '123' agreement negotiations between New Delhi and Washington, in context of their broader bilateral relations as well as their positions on nuclear proliferation-related issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Indian-American citizens' groups in the United States, and the efforts of an increasingly professionalized and well-funded "India lobby" on Capitol Hill, were critical in rallying congressional support around a significant and controversial bilateral nuclear trade and cooperation agreement between India and the United States in 2006. This episode may represent the consolidation of the "India lobby" and portend its emergence as of the most important ethnic communities seeking influence over US foreign policy in the 21st Century. Existing scholarly literature on ethnic lobbies and American foreign policy typically focuses on communities such as Jewish and Cuban Americans (the "Israel lobby," in particular has been the subject of recent contentious academic and policy debates ), and argues that wealth, geographic concentration, and group cohesion are important factors explaining ethnic lobby influence in the US foreign policy process. Indian-Americans as a community broadly fit the first two criteria, but until very recently were highly segmented into particular professional and Indian language/regional associations, and received scant attention in the ethnic lobby literature. Recently, though, the community has become more unified and politically mobilized, with potentially important implications for US policy in South Asia, the broader Asian region, and the world. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [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]