The India DividendSeptember/October 2019 175
predecessor, Bill Clinton, had already made some headway with a suc-
cessful visit to New Delhi in March 2000. But a major point o fric-
tion remained: the insistence that relations could not improve unless
India gave up its nuclear weapons, ¿rst developed in the 1970s, in the
face o opposition from Washington.
Bush sought to accelerate cooperation with India in ways that would
overcome existing disagreements and help both sides navigate the new
century. Although the war on terrorism provided a ¿rst opportunity for
cooperation (since both countries faced a threat from jihadist organza-
tions), a larger mutual challenge lay over the horizon: China’s rise. Con-
sidering its long-standing border disputes with China, Chinese support
for its archrival Pakistan, and China’s growing weight in South Asia and
beyond, India had major concerns about China. In particular, leaders in
New Delhi feared that a too-powerful China could abridge the freedom
and security o weaker neighbors. The United States, for its part, was
beginning to view China’s rise as a threat to allies such as Taiwan and Ja-
pan. Washington also worried about Beijing’s ambitions to have China
gradually replace the United States as the key security provider in Asia
and its increasingly vocal opposition to a global system underpinned by
U.S. primacy. Where China was concerned, U.S. and Indian national
interests intersected. Washington sought to maintain stability in Asia
through an order based not on Chinese supremacy but on security and
autonomy for all states in the region. India, driven by its own fears o
Chinese domination, supported Washington’s vision over Beijing’s.
For India, neutralizing the hazards posed by a growing China re-
quired revitalizing its own power—in other words, becoming a great
power itself. But Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his
successors recognized that, in the short term, they could not reach this
goal on their own. India’s fractious democracy, institutional weak-
nesses, and passive strategic culture would impede the rapid accumu-
lation o national power. Concerted support from external powers
could mitigate these weaknesses—and no foreign partner mattered as
much as the United States. American assistance could make the dif-
ference between eective balancing and a losing bet.
The Bush administration appreciated India’s predicament. After
many hard-fought bureaucratic battles, it came to accept the central ar-
gument we had been articulating from the U.S. embassy in New Delhi:
that the United States should set aside its standing nonproliferation
policy in regard to India as a means o building the latter’s power to bal-