India and the Balance of Power

Author(s): C. Raja Mohan

Source: Foreign Affairs , Jul. - Aug., 2006, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 2006), pp. 17-32
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations

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 India and the
Balance of Power
C. Raja Mohan

WILL THE WEST ENGAGE?

AFTER DISAPPOINTING itself for decades, India is now on the
verge of becoming a great power. The world started to take notice of
India's rise when New Delhi signed a nuclear pact with President
George W. Bush in July 2005, but that breakthrough is only one
dimension of the dramatic transformation of Indian foreign policy
that has taken place since the end of the Cold War. After more than
a half century of false starts and unrealized potential, India is now
emerging as the swing state in the global balance of power. In the
coming years, it will have an opportunity to shape outcomes on
the most critical issues of the twenty-first century: the construction
of Asian stability, the political modernization of the greater Middle
East, and the management of globalization.
Although India's economic growth has been widely discussed, its
new foreign policy has been less noted. Unlike their U. S. counterparts,
Indian leaders do not announce new foreign policy doctrines. Nonethe
less, in recent years, they have worked relentlessly to elevate India's
regional and international standing and to increase its power. New
Delhi has made concerted efforts to reshape its immediate neighbor
hood, find a modus vivendi with China and Pakistan (its two regional
rivals), and reclaim its standing in the "near abroad": parts of Africa,
the Persian Gulf, Central and Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean

C. RAJA MOHAN is Strategic Affairs Editor at The Indian Express and

a member of India's National Security Advisory Board. His most recent
book is ImpossibleAllies: NuclearIndia, United States, and the Global Order.

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 C. Raja Mohan
region. At the same time, it has expanded relations with the existing
great powers-especially the United States.
India is arriving on the world stage as the first large, economically
powerful, culturally vibrant, multiethnic, multireligious democracy
outside of the geographic West. As it rises, India has the potential
to become a leading member of the "political West" and to play a key
role in the great political struggles of the next decades. Whether it
will, and how soon, depends above all on the readiness of the Western
powers to engage India on its own terms.

THREE STRATEGIC CIRCLES

INDIA'S GRAND STRATEGY divides the world into three concentric
circles. In the first, which encompasses the immediate neighbor
hood, India has sought primacy and a veto over the actions of outside
powers. In the second, which encompasses the so-called extended
neighborhood stretching across Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral,
India has sought to balance the influence of other powers and prevent
them from undercutting its interests. In the third, which includes
the entire global stage, India has tried to take its place as one of the
great powers, a key player in international peace and security.
Three things have historically prevented India from realizing
these grand strategic goals. First, the partition of the South Asian
subcontinent along religious lines (first into India and Pakistan, in
1947, then into India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, in 1971) left India
with a persistent conflict with Pakistan and an internal Hindu
Muslim divide. It also physically separated India from historically
linked states such as Afghanistan, Iran, and the nations of Southeast
Asia. The creation of an avowedly Islamic state in Pakistan caused
especially profound problems for India's engagement with the Middle
East. Such tensions intertwined with regional and global great-power
rivalries to severely constrict India's room for maneuver in all three
concentric circles.
The second obstacle was the Indian socialist system, which
caused a steady relative economic decline and a consequent loss of
influence in the years after independence. The state-socialist model
led India to shun commercial engagement with the outside world.

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 India and the Balance ofPower

As a result, India was disconnected from its natural markets and

culturally akin areas in the extended neighborhood.
Finally, the Cold War, the onset of which quickly followed India's
independence, pushed India into the arms of the Soviet Union in
response to Washington's support for Pakistan and China-and thus
put the country on the losing side of the great political contest of the
second half of the twentieth century. Despite being the largest
democracy in the world, India ended up siding with the opposite
camp on most global issues.
The last decade of the twentieth century liberated India from
at least two of these constraints; state socialism gave way to eco
nomic liberalization and openness to globalization, and the Cold
War ended. Suddenly, New Delhi was free to reinvent its foreign
policy-positioning itself to face the rise of China, shifting its strategic
approach to its other neighbors, and beginning to work closely with
the world's existing great powers.

VARIETIES OF INFLUENCE
INDIA'S RECENT embrace of openness and globalization has had an
especially dramatic effect on the country's role in the region. As the
nations of the subcontinent jettison their old socialist agendas, India
is well positioned to promote economic integration. Although the
pace has been relatively slow, the process has begun to gain traction.
The planned implementation ofthe South Asian Free Trade Agreement
this summer signals the coming reintegration of the subcontinent's
markets, which constituted a single economic space until 1947.
At the same time, optimism on the economic front must be tem
pered by an awareness of the problematic political developments in
India's smaller neighbors. The struggle for democracy and social justice
in Nepal, interminable political violence and the rise of Islamic extrem
ism in Bangladesh, and the simmering civil war in Sri Lanka underscore
the potential dangers of failing states on the subcontinent. There are
also the uncertain futures of Pakistan and Afghanistan: defeating
religious extremism and creating modern and moderate states in both
countries is of paramount importance to India. A successful Indian
strategy for promoting peace and prosperity within the region would

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 C. Raja Mohan
require preventing internal conflicts from undermining regional security,
as well as resolving India's own conflicts with its neighbors.
In the past, great-power rivalries, as well as India's own tensions
with Pakistan and China, have complicated New Delhi's effort to
maintain order in the region. Today, all of the great powers, including
the United States and China, support the Indian objective of promoting
regional economic integration. The Bush administration has also started
to defer to Indian leadership on regional security issues. Given the
new convergence of U.S. and Indian interests in promoting democracy
and countering extremism and terrorism, New Delhi no longer suspects
Washington oftrying to undercut its influence in the region. As a result,
it is more prepared than ever to work with the United States and other
Western powers to pursue regional goals.
Meanwhile, the external environment has never been as conducive
as it is today to the resolution of the Indo-Pakistani conflict over
Kashmir. The conflict has become less and less relevant to India's
relations with the great powers, which has meant a corresponding
willingness on New Delhi's part to work toward a solution. Of
particular importance has been the steady evolution of the U.S. position
on Kashmir since the late l99os. The support extended by President
Bill Clinton to India in its limited war with Pakistan in 1999 removed
the perception that Washington would inevitably align with Islamabad
in regional conflicts. But India remained distrustful of the Clinton
administration's hyperactive, prescriptive approach to Kashmir. It
has been more comfortable with the low-key methods of the Bush
administration, which has avoided injecting itself directly into the
conflict. The Bush administration has also publicly held Pakistan
responsible for cross-border terrorism and has extracted the first-ever
assurances from Pakistan to put an end to the attacks. New Delhi
does not entirely believe these promises, but it has nonetheless come
to trust Washington as a source of positive of influence on Islamabad.
These developments have opened the way for a peace process between
the two governments. With the growing awareness that the normal
ization of relations with Pakistan would end a debilitating conflict
and help India's regional and global standing, New Delhi has begun
to negotiate seriously for the first time in decades. Although the pace
of talks has not satisfied Pakistan, the two sides have agreed on a range

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 AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS

Engagement on the high seas: the US.S. Higgins, docked in Goa

forajoint US.-Indian naval exercise, September28, 2005

of confidence-building measures. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan

Singh has rejected the idea of giving up territory, but he has often
called for innovative solutions that would improve living conditions
and for common institutions that would connect Kashmiris across the
Line of Control. Singh has made dear that the Indian leadership is ready
to risk political capital on finding a diplomatic solution to Kashmir.
India's recent effort to resolve its long-standing border dispute
with China has been just as bold. New Delhi decided in 2003 to seek
a settlement with Beijing on a political basis, rather than on the basis
of legal or historical claims. As a result, during Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao's visit to New Delhi in April 2005, India and China agreed on a set

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 C. Raja Mohan
of principles to guide the final settlement. The two governments are now
exploring the contours of mutually satisfactory territorial compromises.
India's search for practical solutions to the disputes over Kashmir
and its border with China suggests that the country has finally begun to
overcome the obsession with territoriality that has consumed it since
its formation. Ironically, the nuclearization of India and Pakistan in
1998 may have helped in this regard: although nuclearization initially
sharpened New Delhi's conflicts with both Islamabad and Beijing, it
also allowed India to approach its territorial problems with greater
self-assurance and pragmatism.

INDIA UNBOUND
PROGRESS ON the resolution of either of these conflicts, especially
the one over Kashmir, would liberate India's political and diplomatic
energies so that the country could play a larger role in the world. It would
also finally release India's armed forces from the constraining mission of
territorial defense, allowing them to get more involved in peace and
stability operations around the Indian Ocean. Even with all the tensions
on the subcontinent, the armies of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have
been among the biggest contributors to UN peacekeeping operations.
The normalization of Indo-Pakistani relations would further free up
some of the best armed forces in the world for the promotion of the
collective good in the greater Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
Even as the Kashmir and China questions have remained unsettled,
India's profile in its extended neighborhood has grown considerably
since the early 9ggos. India's outward economic orientation has allowed
it to reestablish trade and investment linkages with much of its near
abroad. New Delhi is negotiating a slew of free- and preferential-trade
agreements with individual countries as well as multilateral bodies
including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the
Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the Southern African Devel
opment Community. Just as China has become the motor of economic
growth in East Asia, a rising India could become the engine of eco
nomic integration in the Indian Ocean region.
After decades of being marginalized from regional institutions in
different parts of Asia, India is also now a preferred political partner

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 India and the Balance ofPower

for ASEAN, the East Asian Summit, the GCC, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, and the African Union. Moreover, it has emerged as a
major aid donor; having been an aid recipient for so long, India is now
actively leveraging its own external assistance to promote trade as well
as political objectives. For example, India has given $650 million in
aid to Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. Meanwhile, the search
for oil has encouraged Indian energy companies to tail their Western
and Chinese counterparts throughout the world, from Central Asia and
Siberia and to western Africa and Venezuela.
On the security side, India has been actively engaged in defense
diplomacy. Thanks to the strength of its armed forces, India is well
positioned to assist in stabilizing the Indian Ocean region. It helps
that there has been a convergence of U.S. and Indian political interests:
countering terrorism, pacifying Islamic radicalism, promoting democracy,
and ensuring the security of sea-lanes, to name a few. The Indian navy
in particular has been at the cutting edge of India's engagement with
the region-as was evident from its ability to deploy quickly to areas
hit by the tsunami at the end of 2004. The Indian navy today is also
ready to participate in multinational military operations.

AXES AND ALLIES

THE END of the Cold War freed India to pursue engagement with
all the great powers-but especially the United States. At the start of
the 1990s, finding that its relations with the United States, China,Japan,
and Europe were all underdeveloped, India moved quickly to repair
the situation. Discarding old socialist shibboleths, it began to search
for markets for its products and capital to ftiel its long-constrained
domestic growth. Economic partnerships were easy to construct, and
increasing trade flows provided a new basis for stability in India's
relations with other major powers. India's emergence as an outsourcing
destination and its new prowess in information technology also give
it a niche in the world economy--along with the confidence that it
can benefit from economic globalization.
Barely i5 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, India's omni
directional engagement with the great powers has paid off handsomely.
Never before has India had such expansive relations with all the major

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 C. Raja Mohan
powers at the same time a result not only of India's increasing weight
in the global economy and its growing power potential, but also of
New Delhi's savvy and persistent diplomacy.
The evolution of Sino-Indian ties since the 1990S has been espe
cially important and intriguing. Many see violent conffict between
the two rising Asian powers as inevitable. But thanks to New Delhi's
policy of actively engaging China since the late 198os, the tensions
that characterized relations between them from the late 1950S
through the 1970S have become receding memories. Bilateral trade
has boomed, growing from less than $200 million in the early 1990S
to nearly $20 billion in 2005. In fact, China is set to overtake the
European Union and the United States as India's largest trading
partner within a few years. The 3,soo-kilometer Sino-Indian border,
over which the two countries fought a war in 1962, is now tranquil.
And during Wen's visit to India in April 2005, India and China
announced a "strategic partnership"-even though just seven
years earlier New Delhi had cited concerns over China as a reason for
performing nuclear tests, prompting a vicious reaction from Beijing.
India has also cooperated with China in order to neutralize it in
conflicts with Pakistan and other smaller neighbors. In the past,
China tended to be a free rider on regional security issues, proclaiming
noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations while opportunis
tically befriending regimes in pursuit of its long-term strategic interests.
This allowed India's subcontinental neighbors to play the China card
against New Delhi when they wanted to resist India's attempts to nudge
them toward conffict resolution. But now, Beijing has increasingly
avoided taking sides in India's disputes, even as its economic and
security profile in the region has grown.
China is not the only Asian power that India is aiming to engage
and befriend. Japan has also emerged as an important partner for
India, especially since Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi
has transformed Japanese politics in the last few years. During a visit
to New Delhi just a couple of weeks after Wen's in April 2005,
Koizumi announced Japan's own "strategic partnership" with India.
(This came despite Japan's harsh reaction to India's nuclear test in
1998, which prompted Japanese sanctions and an effort by Tokyo to
censure India in the United Nations and other multilateral forums.)

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 India and the Balance ofPower

Amid growing fears of a rising China and the incipient U.S.-Indian

alliance, Japan has elevated India to a key player in its long-term plans
for Asian security.
Recognizing the need to diversify its Asian economic portfolio,
Tokyo has also, for political reasons, begun to direct some of its foreign
investment to India (which has overtaken China as the largest recipient
of Japanese development assistance). Since the start of the Bush
administration, Japan has also shown increasing interest in expanding
military cooperation with India, especially in the maritime domain.
India, too, has recognized that it shares with Japan an interest in energy
security and in maintaining a stable balance of power in Asia. Japan
actively supported India's participation in the inaugural East Asian
Summit, in December 2005, despite China's reluctance to include
New Delhi. Neither India norJapan wants to base their political relation
ship exclusively on a potential threat from China, but both know that
deepening their own security cooperation will open up new strategic
options and that greater coordination between Asian democracies
could limit China's impact.
India's relations with Europe have been limited by the fact that
New Delhi is fairly unimpressed with Europe's role in global politics.
It senses that Europe and India have traded places in terms of their
attitudes toward the United States: while Europe seethes with resent
ment of U.S. policies, India is giving up on habitually being the first,
and most trenchant, critic of Washington. As pessimism overtakes
Europe, growing Indian optimism allows New Delhi to support
unpopular U.S. policies. Indians consistently give both the United
States and the Bush administration very favorable marks; according
to a recent Pew Global Attitudes poll, for example, the percentage of
Indians with a positive view of the United States rose from 54 percent
in 2002 to 71 percent in 2005. And whereas a declining Europe
has tended to be skeptical of India's rise, the Bush administration has
been fully sympathetic to India's great-power aspirations.
Still, India does have growing economic and political ties with
some European powers. Although many smaller European countries
have been critical of the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal, the continent's two
nuclear powers, France and the United Kingdom, have been suppor
tive. Paris, in particular, bet long ago (well before Washington did, in

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 C. Raja Mohan
fact) that a rising India would provide a good market for high-tech
goods; with this in mind, it shielded New Delhi from the ire of the
G-8 (the group of eight highly industrialized nations) after India
tested nuclear weapons in May 1998. In the last several years, the
United Kingdom has also started to seize economic opportunities in
India and has been generally accommodating of New Delhi's regional
and global aspirations.
In the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, India also worked to
maintain a relationship with Russia. The two states resolved residual
issues relating to their old semi-barter rupee-ruble trading arrange
ments, recast their 1971 peace and friendship treaty, and maintained
military cooperation. When President Vladimir Putin succeeded
Boris Yeltsin, in 2000, India's waiting game paid off. A newly assertive
Moscow was determined to revive and expand its strategic cooperation
with India. New Delhi's only problems with Moscow today are the
weakening bilateral trade relationship and the risk of Russia's doing
too much to strengthen China's military capabilities.

CHARM OFFENSIVE
AT THE END of the Cold War, the prospect of India's building a
new political relationship with the United States seemed remote
Washington had long favored Pakistan and China in the region
India had in turn aligned itself with the Soviet Union, and a numbe
of global issues seemed to pit the two countries against each other
Yet after the Cold War, India set about wooing the United States.
For most of the Clinton administration, this sweet-talking fell on
deaf ears, in part because Clinton officials were so focused on the
Kashmir dispute and nonproliferation. Clinton, driven by the unshakable
assumption that Kashmir was one of the world's most dangerou
"nuclear flashpoints" and so needed to be defused, emphasized
"preventive diplomacy" and was determined to "cap, roll back, and
eventually eliminate" India's nuclear capabilities. Of course, Clinton's
approach ran headlong into India's core national security concerns
territorial integrity and preserving its nuclear option. Pressed by
Washington to circumscribe its strategic capabilities, New Delh
reacted by testing nuclear weapons.

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 India and the Balance ofPower

But even as it faced U. S. sanctions, New Delhi also began to proclaim

that India was a natural ally of the United States. Although the Clinton
administration was not interested in an alliance, the nuclear tests
forced the United States to engage India
seriously for the first time in five decades. It took Bush to
That engagement did not resolve the nu
clear differences, but it did bring Clinton to transform the context of
India in March 2000-the first American U.S.-Indian relations.
presidential visit to India in 22 years. Clinton's
personal charm, his genuine empathy for India, and his unexpected
support of India in the 1999 war with Pakistan succeeded in improving
the atmospherics of the relations and in putting New Delhi on
Washington's radar screen in a new way.
It took Bush, however, to transform the strategic context of U.S.
Indian relations. Convinced that India's influence will stretch far beyond
its immediate neighborhood, Bush has reconceived the framework
of U.S. engagement with New Delhi. He has removed many of the
sanctions, opened the door for high-tech cooperation, lent political
support to India's own war on terrorism, ended the historical U.S.
tilt toward Pakistan on Kashmir, and repositioned the United States
in the Sino-Indian equation by drawing closer to New Delhi.
India has responded to these sweeping changes by backing the Bush
administration on missile defense, the International Criminal Court, and
finding alternative approaches to confronting global warming. It lent
active support to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan by pro
tecting U.S. assets in transit through the Strait ofMalacca in 2002, agreed
to work with the United States on multinational military operations
outside of the UN framework, and, in 2005 and 2006, voted twice with
Washington against Iran-an erstwhile Indian ally-at the International
Atomic Energy Agency. India also came close to sending a division of
troops to Iraq in the summer of 2003 before pulling back at the last
moment. Every one of these actions marked a big departure in Indian
foreign policy. And although disappointed by India's decision to stay out
of Iraq, the Bush administration recognized that India was in the midst of
a historic transformation of its foreign policy-and kept faith that India's
own strategic interests would continue to lead it toward deeper political
cooperation with Washington. New Delhi's persistence in reaching

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 C. Raja Mohan
out to Washington since 1991 has been driven by the belief that only by
fmndamentally changing its relationship with the world's sole superpower
could it achieve its larger strategic objectives: improving its global posi
tion and gaining leverage in its relations with other great powers.
But India's ability to engage everyone at the same time might
soon come to an end. As U.S.-Chinese tensions grow and Washington
looks for ways to manage China's influence, questions about India's
attitude toward the new power politics will arise: Can India choose
to remain "nonaligned" between the United States and China, or does
India's current grand strategy show a clear bias toward the United States?
The nuclear pact unveiled by Bush and Singh in July 2005-and
consolidated when Bush went to New Delhi in March 2006-was an
effort by Washington to influence the ultimate answer to that question.
Bush offered to modify U.S. nonproliferation laws (subject to approval
by Congress, of course) and revise the global nuclear order to facilitate
fi ll cooperation with India on civilian nuclear energy. New Delhi, in
return, has promised to separate its civilian and military nuclear programs,
place its civilian nuclear plants under international safeguards, and abide
by a range of nonproliferation obligations. India's interest in such a deal
has been apparent for a long time. Having failed to test weapons before
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was drafted, in 1968, India was
trapped in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the nuclear order: it
was not willing to give up the nuclear option, but it could not be formally
accommodated by the nonproliferation regime as a nuclear weapons state.
India's motives for wanting a change in the nuclear regime are thus
obvious. But for the Bush administration, the deal is less about nuclear
issues than it is about creating the basis for a true alliance between
the United States and India-about encouraging India to work in the
United States' favor as the global balance of power shifts. Ironically, it
was the lack of a history of mutual trust and cooperation-stemming
in part from past nuclear disputes-that convinced the Bush adminis
tration that a nuclear deal was necessary.

AN IMPOSSIBLE ALLY?
MANY CRITICS argue that the Bush administration's hopes for an
alliance are misplaced. They insist that the traditionally nonaligned

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India will never be a true ally of
THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION
the United States. But such critics
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of Gandhi's heir, and his impact on India before and
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lationships with two of its smaller election and the Hearst-Pulitzer
press war are two very different
neighbors, Bhutan and Nepal, that theoretical frameworks: a class
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and Empire assesses the adequacy of those readings.
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to China's entry into Tibet.
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ministration's expectation of an
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tionalists, with the notion of India's

becomlng a "responsible power."
(Autonomy is thought appropriate *i. .: Sf S IILiS Si

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 C. Raja Mohan
for weak states trying to protect themselves from great-power
competition but not for a rising force such as India.) As India starts
to recognize that its political choices have global consequences, it
will become less averse to choosing sides on specific issues. Al
liance formation and balancing are tools in the kits of all great
powers-and so they are likely to be in India's as well.
That India is capable of forming alliances does not, however, mean
that it will necessarily form a long-term one with the United States.
Whether it does will depend on the extent of the countries' shared in
terests and their political capacity to act on them together. The Bush
administration expects that such shared interests-for example, in
balancing China and countering radical Islam in the Middle East
will provide the basis for long-term strategic cooperation. This outcome
is broadly credible, but it is by no means inevitable, especially given the
United States' seeming inability to build partnerships based on equality.
When it comes to facing a rising China, India's tendency to engage
in regional balancing with Beijing has not come to an end with the
proclamation of a strategic partnership between the two nations. Indeed,
preventing China from gaining excessive influence in India's immediate
neighborhood and competing with Beijing in Southeast Asia are still
among the more enduring elements of India's foreign policy. Despite
Western concerns about the military regime in Myanmar, New Delhi
has vigorously worked to prevent Yangon from falling completely
under Beijing's influence, and India's military ties with the Southeast
Asian nations are expanding rapidly. In 2005, when Pakistan pushed
for giving China observer status in the South Asian Association for
Regional Cooperation, India acted quickly to bringJapan, South Korea,
and the United States in as well. Given India's deep-seated reluctance
to play second fiddle to China in Asia and the Indian Ocean region
and the relative comfort of working with a distant superpower-there
is a structural reason for New Delhi to favor greater security cooperation
with Washington.
In the Middle East, too, India has a common interest with the
United States in preventing the rise of radical Islam, which poses an
existential threat to India. Given its large Muslim population-at
nearly iSo million, the third largest in the world-and the ongoing
tensions stemming from the subcontinent's partition, India has in the

[30] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume 85No.4

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past acted on its own to avert the
spread of radical Islam. When
Washington aligned with conser
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 C. Raja Mohan
While New Delhi has acknowledged that U.S. support is necessary
for India's rise to be successftil, Washington has recognized India's
potentially critical role in managing emerging challenges to global order
and security. As a major beneficiary of accelerating globalization, India
could play a crucial role in ensuring that other developing countries
manage their transitions as successfully as it has, that is, by taking
advantage of opportunities while working to reduce the pain of
disruption. Given the pace of its expansion and the scale of its
economy, India will also become an important force in ensuring that
the unfolding global redistribution of economic power occurs in an
orderly fashion. Meanwhile, India could become a key player in the
effort to modernize the politics of the Middle East. If nothing else,
India's success in ensuring the rights and the integration of its own
Muslim minority and in reaching peace with Pakistan would have a
powerful demonstration effect.
To secure a long-term partnership with India, Washington must
build on the argument of "Indian exceptionalism" that it has advanced
in defense of the recent nuclear pact, devising a range of India
specific policies to deepen cooperation. India is unlikely, however, to
become a mere subsidiary partner of the United States, ready to sign
on to every U.S. adventure and misadventure around the world. It
will never become another U.S. ally in the mold of the United
Kingdom or Japan. But nor will it be an Asian France, seeking tactical
independence within the framework of a formal alliance.
Given the magnitude of the global security challenges today, the
United States needs more than meek allies. It should instead be
looking to win capable and compatible partners. A rising India may
be difficult at times, but it will act broadly to defend and promote
the many interests it shares with Washington. Assisting India's rise,
then, is in the United States' own long-term interest.@

[32] FOREIGN AFFAIRS* Volume 8sNo.4

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