Changing US Foreign Policy toward India

"The relationship between India and the United States is an ongoing puzzle: potentially one of the most important in the world, yet never quite realizing that potential. Carina van de Wetering has taken on the puzzle with sophistication and depth and found some important answers. Adopting a critical constructivist standpoint and asking how specific relations between India and the US have become possible in particular moments, Wetering's discovery of four primary discourses that shape Indo-American relations will influence scholarship on the subject for years to come. This is an impressive book that is a must read for anyone who wants to study the puzzling relationship between the world's largest and oldest democracies." (Jarrod Hayes, Associate Professor of International Relations, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) "Changing US Foreign Policy toward India takes a refreshing and unconventional approach to understanding US-India relations. After the Cold War, India achieved a much higher profile among US policy makers. The author provides a critical constructivist analysis of this changing profile. The book offers a detailed assessment of how India has been understood and characterised by US policy makers. This volume is a timely and important contribution to the scholarship on US-India relations." (Andrew Wyatt, Senior Lecturer, University of Bristol, UK) "Writing from a critical constructivist viewpoint, Carina van de Wetering offers an original and highly stimulating account of US-India relations in the post-Cold War order. This is a highly intelligent and compelling discussion of a vital, yet sometimes strangely neglected, topic in contemporary International Relations." (John Dumbrell, Professor of Government (retired), Durham University, UK)

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.

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.