Changing US Foreign Policy toward India, 1st ed. 2016 US-India Relations since the Cold War

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.

Carina van de Wetering is a Lecturer in International Studies at Leiden University, The Hague, in the Netherlands.

Marks one of the first studies to analyze US-India relations based on critical constructivist theory and offers a detailed narrative of the post-Cold War period

Provides new insights into US foreign policy towards India, an increasingly prominent yet still understudied field of inquiry

Presents a comprehensible analysis of how the policy discourse in India enables and constraints US foreign policymakers and may be used to improve US-India relations