Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
routed.
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This military debacle led to a fundamental shift in India's security
policies as the country lurched forward with a major program of military
modernization.
Although Nehru's successors continued to invoke the precepts of
nonalignment, Indian defense policy increasingly came to embrace a Realist
outlook. In the absence of reliable, powerful patrons, India, its decision-makers
came to realize, would have to resort to strategy of self-help to protect its
security interests. Even though the United States was keen on protecting India
from Chinese military pressures, its support was not forthcoming. The American
military dependence on Pakistan for bases, coupled with India's neuralgic
insistence on nonalignment, foreclosed the prospects of an Indo-US security
relationship.
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The considerations of nonalignment also inhibited the emergence of
an Indo-Soviet security nexus.
India's costly commitment to the principles of nonalignment became more
diluted as it perceived a growing threat from China in the wake of the Sino-
American rapprochement. Accordingly, India forged an alliance of convenience
with the Soviet Union in 1971. This relationship held India in good stead for
nearly three decades. Soviet intransigence toward China dovetailed with India's
misgivings about a renewed Chinese threat.
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The Indo-Soviet relationship was
not without cost, however. India's ties to the Soviet Union, coupled with its
feckless anti-American rhetoric, stunted the any meaningful improvement in
Indo-American relations.
The Cold War's end, however, also brought an end to the Indo-Soviet
relationship, forcing India's decision-makers to find new means to assure their
country's security. To this end, India assigned greater significance to its nuclear
weapons program as a hedge against strategic uncertainty and the possibilities of
future Chinese nuclear blackmail. The inexorable progress of its nuclear
weapons program was demonstrated to the world by the controversial tests of
May 1998. Ashley Tellis' article in this special issue sketches the likely
evolution of the Indian nuclear weapons program in the foreseeable future. Tellis
persuasively argues that the program will evolve in an incremental, cautious, and
circumscribed fashion.
India's decision to forthrightly challenge the existing global nuclear order
initially led to a significant setback in its relations with the United States. This
relationship had seen some limited improvements in the 1990s as a consequence
of India's hesitant embrace of the free market, the abandonment of its reflexive
anti-American rhetoric and the end of its close ties to the Soviet Union. Adroit
diplomacy enabled India's leadership over the course of the next year to repair
much of the rift that the nuclear tests had generated.
As Robert Hathaway's article argues, the relationship has gathered greater
strength under the George W.Bush administration. The administration's
