Changing US Foreign Policy toward India

US-India Relations since the Cold War

Carina van de Wetering

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137548627
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book uncovers how US-India relations have changed and intensified during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George Bush Jr., and Barack Obama. Throughout the Cold War, US-India relations were often distant and volatile as India mostly received attention at times of grave international crises, but from the late 1990s onwards, the US showed a more sustained interest in India. How was this shift possible? While previous scholarship has focused on the civilian nuclear deal as a turning point, this book presents an alternative account for this change by analyzing how India's identity has been constructed in different terms after the Cold War. It examines the underlying discourse and explains how this enables or constrains US foreign policymakers when they establish security policies with India and improve US-India relations.

© The Author(s) 2016

Carina van de WeteringChanging US Foreign Policy toward India10.1057/978-1-137-54862-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Carina van de Wetering¹

(1)

International Studies, Leiden University, The Hague, The Netherlands

End Abstract

The USA and India have enjoyed closer relations during the last few US administrations than during the Cold War. ¹ As President George W. Bush said in 2005, “India and the United States are separated by half a globe. Yet, today our two nations are closer than ever before” (Bush 2005a). During the Cold War, relations were often distant and strained. India only gained Washington’s full attention during moments of serious international tension in South Asia as the USA sought to “contain” the Soviet Union. For example, in the late 1950s, the USA was interested in the Soviet Union’s influence in the region and hence monitored the 1962 war between China and India (Hagerty 2005, 1–2). ²

After the Cold War, US-India relations changed dramatically: the USA displayed a continuous interest in India since the Clinton administration. When both India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998, the Clinton administration’s first response was to sanction both countries, but as India appeared to be becoming a significant power, the US administration re-evaluated its foreign policy toward India (Cohen 2002, 292). During the Kargil crisis in 1999, when Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate sent troops over the Line of Control into Kashmir near Kargil, this was the first time, according to Stephen Cohen, that the USA came out in full support of India against Pakistan (2010, 13). The US support grew even stronger under the Bush Jr. administration: in 2005, the USA took the unusual step to set up a civilian nuclear agreement with India, a non-signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as India promised that nuclear material and technology would be used for civilian purposes and kept under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) observation. During the Obama administration, the President even moved his own annual State of the Union address to the American people to another day in order to be present at India’s Republic Day celebrations on January 26, 2015.

This book explores how US security policies toward India have changed during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. It investigates what discursive changes made it possible for US security policies toward India to take a different course since the Clinton administration in 1993. The argument is that these changing security policies were made possible by changes in the underlying policy discourses after the Cold War. Policy discourses help to construct how objects and subjects, including security problems, security policies, but also the identities of the USA and India, should be understood. The book thus makes use of a critical constructivist approach in which phenomena are seen as socially constructed. If India is presented as “dangerous” or “poor”, this is followed by different US security policies. These policy discourses enable and constrain policy options available to foreign policy-makers. What the book does not aim to do is to explain the causal question “why” relations changed. Also, it does not provide a comprehensive overview of all US security policies toward India. Instead, the book asks the “how-possible” question in order to analyze the underlying discourse, as discussed below. ³

“How-Possible” Question

In analyzing how meanings are produced and attached to security issues and the identities of the USA and India within policy discourses, the researcher asks “how-possible” questions. The conventional approach of foreign policy analysis is to pose “why-questions”, which are often concerned with “explaining why particular decisions resulting in specific courses of action were made” (Doty 1993, 298). The problem is that foreign policy researchers treat the social background and material capabilities of countries as facts. For example, when one asks why the USA wanted closer relations with India, one could answer this question by referring to the positive effect of India’s 1998 nuclear tests. However, this explanation is incomplete in that “[c]ertain background meanings, kinds of social actors and relationships, must already be in place” for the agent to imagine closer US-India relations and to make subsequent policies possible (Doty 1993, 298). The US foreign policy-makers would not have imagined the effects of the nuclear tests to be positive if India was constructed as a threat. In this book, therefore, I focus on a “how-possible” question which asks how subjects, objects, and events are socially constructed to make certain practices possible. With regard to US security policy toward India, the question is then how it was possible, “and indeed common-sensible”, for state officials to understand US security policy toward India in a particular way (Weldes 1996, 283–284).

There has been a considerable interest in the transformation of US security policies toward India, in particular during the second Clinton (1996–2000) and both Bush Jr. administrations (2000–2008) (Kant Jha 1994; Rubinoff 1996; Cohen 2002; Schaffer 2009). However, these authors tend to stress a specific event or an administration as an explanatory variable, instead of analyzing the changing discourses underlying these policy changes. For instance, some researches stress the importance of India’s nuclear tests in 1998 and the subsequent US-India dialogues, which led to a heightened interest in India by the Clinton administration (Hathaway 2003, 7–8; Cohen 2002, 292; Talbott 2004, 4; Rubinoff 2008, 199; Schaffer 2009, 75; Malone 2011, 167–168). According to Robert Hathaway, the nuclear tests of both India and Pakistan in 1998 and the dialogues changed the relations between India and the USA. Even though the USA sanctioned both India and Pakistan through the imposition of military and economic sanctions as required by US legislation, after the tests India was ready to engage in a more “responsible” attitude now that it had shown its power (Hathaway 2003, 7–8). In 1999, a dialog emerged between Indian Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh, and US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, in which both countries tried to manage their differences and to fix a “broken” relationship (Talbott 2004, 4). Accordingly, the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) were discussed in 12 rounds.

There has also been an interest in another explanatory variable: Bush Jr. administration’s willingness to intensify the US-India relationship. In the 2000 campaign, Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser to be, insisted that the USA “should pay closer attention to India’s role in the regional balance” (2000). In April 2001, Jaswant Singh met with Rice and President Bush in Washington, after which the Indians were informed in advance of Bush’s speech on its Missile Defense Treaty in May 2001 (Tellis 2006, 128; Hathaway 2003, 7). The Indian government was one of the few governments supportive of the limited missile defense system based on ground-based interceptor missiles (Tellis 2006). Teresita Schaffer writes that the statement helped to enhance the US-India relationship (2009, 65). President Bush became personally interested in strategic talks that led to the release of a joint statement between Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on July 18, 2005, seeking to achieve full civilian nuclear energy cooperation (Kapur and Ganguly 2007, 651–652).

Instead, this research focuses on the “how-possible question” and how identities of India and the USA are constructed by the underlying discourse. A few critical constructivists make use of this question for US-India relations, for instance, Runa Das’ analysis of nuclear discourses under the Bush administration and Himadeep Muppidi’s reconstruction of India’s self-understanding during the Cold War (Das 2012, 2013; Muppidi 1999, 120, 126–133). Muppidi’s work shows that asking “why-questions” is not sufficient for understanding US-India relations. We should also reveal more about how meanings are produced and attached to subjects and objects. Muppidi finds it puzzling that India’s relationship with the USA was so insecure compared to its relationship with the Soviet Union (1999, 121). Since Muppidi argues that discourses affect the relationships between the countries, he analyzes the reconstruction of the self-understanding of India’s relations with the USA and the Soviet Union. In order to have a systematic inquiry of these self-understandings, Muppidi makes use of the concept of security imaginaries, which he defines as an “organized set of understandings and social identities that are productive of worlds” (1999, 120, 124).

Muppidi discovers that it is not the US alliance with Pakistan that is at the base of this insecurity, as is often argued by other scholars; rather, it is India’s nationalist struggle with the British (1999, 124). After its independence there was a strong assumption in India that India was a great power. For this reason, India conducted a non-aligned foreign policy which was not primarily a policy of neutrality toward the superpowers; it was, rather, a policy of showing these countries that they should recognize India as a major power (Muppidi 1999, 126–133). The USA misunderstood this understanding or “security imaginary” (Muppidi 1999, 124). The USA emphasized that both countries had a shared democratic identity, but the US articulation also sought to engage the Indian security imaginary to gain support for the US anti-communist security imaginary. This generated insecurity as India perceived itself as being colonized again. In contrast, the Soviet Union recognized India as a major power and did not treat it as a colonial subject. For instance, the Soviet Union allowed India joint authorship: the Soviet Union allowed the Indian delegation to draft a joint commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Analyzing Policy Discourse
• 3. Developing US Relations with India: 1945–1993
• 4. India, the Underappreciated: The Clinton Administration
• 5. India as a Strategic Partner: The Bush Administration
• 6. India Has Already Risen: The Obama Administration
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter