Joint U.S. Korea Academic Studies
From the Issue
Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies 2014About Joint U.S. Korea Academic Studies
For over twenty years, KEI has sponsored annual major academic symposiums at universities across the country and major academic conferences. Each year, papers are specially commissioned to fit panel topics of current policy relevance to the U.S.-ROK alliance and implications for the Korean peninsula. Following the symposium, KEI edits and publishes those papers in an annual volume entitled “Joint U.S.-Korea Academic Studies.”
The major international structural changes over the last 25 years—the end of the Cold War and rapid ascent of China—have direct impact on India’s national interests. The dominant strategic theory of realism would predict that given the emergence of China as a great power in the Asia-Pacific, and the loss of its erstwhile partner, the Soviet Union, India would seek to bolster its power through external or internal balancing. Given its asymmetrical power with China, the unresolved border dispute, and the history of the 1962 war, realist logic sees India and the United States as natural partners against a common threat from the rising power of China. But at the end of the Cold War, India also faced an economic crisis that fundamentally changed the outlook toward liberalization, which over time has pushed India closer to China, as well as to the United States. Amidst these strategic and economic shifts, the question that this chapter seeks to answer is the extent to which Indian foreign policy has been responsive to realist expectations. The chapter concludes that realist explanations fall short on a range of Indian foreign policy issues related to the United States and China, shortcomings that are best understood by an examination of India’s national identity through its changing domestic foreign policy discourse.