THE SPIRITUAL HEIRS OF JIMMY CARTER:

Indo-US ties: The thrill is gone (Rediff, 7/24/09)

The growing uneasiness is as much the result of administration change in Washington as it is of the economic crisis affecting the US.

George W Bush, deeply suspicious of communist China, was personally keen on building strong ties with India. Hence, he was willing to sacrifice long-held US non-proliferation concerns to embrace nuclear India and acknowledge it as the primary actor in South Asia, de-hyphenated from Pakistan.

The Barack Obama administration's concern with protecting the non-proliferation regime, dealing with the immediate challenge of the growing Taliban threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and solving the unprecedented economic challenge have led it to a very different set of priorities and an agenda in which India has a marginal role. The only context in which Obama has mentioned India thus far was the need to resolve Kashmir so as to find a way out of the West's troubles in Afghanistan. Talk of a strategic partnership between the two democracies has all but disappeared.

It's like the 70s all over again, as the UR shafts Israel, Britain, and India to play kissy-face with Russia, the Arabs, and Pakistan.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 24, 2009 11:49 AM