Abstract
Understanding Past Failures to Launch in the U.S.-India Defense Relationship
Christopher Clary, University at Albany, State University of New YorkIf the United States and India are “natural allies,” as Indian prime ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi have asserted, then why did it take so long for New Delhi and Washington to build a stable partnership? The conventional explanation focusing on Indian nonalignment in the Cold War is substantially incomplete. This project looks at prior periods of serious U.S.-India defense cooperation in the Cold War and asks why those earlier efforts to build an enduring partnership failed in order to better understand how to prevent such failure to launch in the current era.
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