Author: Sunanda K Datta-Ray
Publisher: HarperCollins
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 471
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8172234414
Description
The tragedy of 9/11 presents America with another historic opportunity to underwrite peace and stability in South Asia by acknowledging the region’s geopolitical realities. This work describes how America missed several such opportunities in 1947 when Jawaharlal Nehru’s envoys sought a military relationship.
America is a cause as well as a country. Yet, Pax Americana flaunted the standard of democracy to prop up some of Asia’s worst despots because they spouted anti-Communist rhetoric. Neutral India, the only democracy between Israel and Japan, received scant attention.
The end of the Cold War finds America prepared at last to heed Sir Olaf Caroe, steward of the British Raj and author of America’s Middle East strategy, who warned that it is impossible to see Gulf problems in correct perspective unless the view includes an India which, despite partition, still stands at the centre of the ocean that bears its name.
Prospects of understanding improved further when financial desperation force India’s leaders dramatically to change tack. Architect of change, P V Narasimha Rao knew that only the Lone Superpower can invest in India’s economic revolution and safeguard its parliamentary system from terrorist attack.
His successors must profit from China’s example to overcome psychological and political complexes at a time when the US needs India as much as India needs the US to fight the axis of evil on India’s own borders
WAITING FOR MERICA: India and the US in the New Millennium argues that the stage is set for a mature partnership between the world’s oldest and biggest democracies. Not because they are natural allies in any mystic sense but because strategic interests coincide, reinforced by oil diplomacy, the war on terrorism and the needs of more than a million Indians in the US.
Examining the historical background and drawing on previously unpublished State Department documents, this meticulously researched but lively sequence of interviews, anecdotes and personality sketches warns that instability will persist until the US and China allow South Asia to settle down to its natural equilibrium.
Bill Clinton’s facilitation over Kargil indicated a new realism that confirmed Lord Palmerston’s dictum that countries have permanent interests and not friends.
India is waiting for Clinton’s successor to act on that principle and take a pragmatic view of a subcontinent that threatens to explode in nuclear conflict unless the size, resources and capabilities of its players determine the balance of power.
Contents
Preface
1.Kiss of Death
2.Foot in the Door
3.Many Contraries
4.After the Euphoria
5.Rising Son
6.Rising Hegemon?
7.Going West
8.Natural Allies
9.Against the Tide
10.Made in America
11.Ray of Hope
12.The Economy, Stupid
13.Testing Times
14.Against the World
15.India’s only Friend
16.Footprints in the Snow
17.No Zero Sum Game
18.The Long and the Short
19.Indentured Servants
20.Key in Kabul
21.Who’s Afraid of Uncle Sam?
References
Acronyms
Index