Abstract
Great powers in international politics do not rise suddenly. Their rise is facilitated by several catalysts over a considerable period. As Paul Kennedy has noted in his magnum opus The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the more states increase their power, the larger the proportion of resources they devote in order to maintain it. If too much of national resource is diverted to military purposes, this in the long run leads to depletion and ultimate fall of a power. The capacity to sustain a conflict with a comparable state or coalition of states ultimately depends on economic strength; but states apparently at the zenith of their political power runs the risk of ‘imperial overstretch’ running the risk of decline and collapse. In a more recent work titled Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, the author Ian Morris argues that civilizations throughout history have waxed and waned, usually for reasons their rulers were powerless to influence; and second, that the West’s dominance of the past 200 years was not inevitable but determined by inanimate factors like climate change, famine, migration, disease and state failure (what the author describes as the ‘five horsemen of the apocalypse’).
In case of the rise of the USA as a great power, favourable geographical factors certainly helped in her rise but the process was a long one. Becoming independent in 1776, the US could emerge as a hegemon in the New World only during the early twentieth century. By the end of the First World War she had emerged as the one of the world’s biggest economic power and by the end of the Second World War she had become the global hegemon. Her rise and exercising of power was, however, not uncontested and the post–Second World War period would witness competition and rivalry particularly within the context of the Cold War. The quest for greatness or the process of hubris leading to nemesis, however, also requires policy-makers and leaders. Archival records, in this connection, could reveal a lot of important information as to the processes of decision-making and idiosyncrasies of crucial US decision-makers. While revealing of archival secrets has taken a completely new turn since the appearance of the Wikileaks documents from 2007, there is still need for serious works based on archival sources particularly on periods of contemporary and current history.
The present volumes under discussion are based on a wide range of US-based archival sources including the presidential libraries (Roosevelt-Carter), White House Papers, National Security Council, Office of Strategic Services, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Foreign Relations archives. These are essentially continuations of earlier volume on India-US bilateral relations during the formative years. The present volumes focus on the ‘later years’ covering the crucial periods of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon presidential tenures between 1965 and 1972, when Cold War politics had already set in and rival alliances were evolving for both the US and the Soviet blocs, and Indira Gandhi’s prime ministerial tenure in India. The period covered were crucial for both the countries and the archival materials compiled in the two volumes are not restricted to only documents related to Indo-US bilateral relations but also include relevant and related documents significant to the process of evolving bilateralism. As the editors note, the Johnson administration and Democrats, in general, were consistently inconsistent towards the Indian subcontinent. Under Nixon administration, on the other hand, Nixon and Kissenger had a decisive say in the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s in US policy towards the Indian subcontinent. The policy they adopted was quite hostile to democratic India and favourable to the military regime in Pakistan to a great extent. Nixon, in particular, as revealed in some of the documents, seemed to have had an almost pathological hatred and was derogatory to India and the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. This further substantiates the fact that idiosyncrasies of leaders and decision-makers do matter in policy-making of even great powers.
The period covered is also important in terms of global political developments both in terms of Cold War politics and United States’ policy of engagement with the People’s Republic of China and the developing powers within the Third World bloc. In terms of Indo-US bilateral engagement, the period was important in terms of India’s regional as well as global engagement, and provides us with crucial documentary evidence of the nature of US policy-making during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 and the views of US decision-makers on important issues like India’s nuclear programme. In essence, the archival documents reveal a pattern of US decision-making which was more favourable to Pakistan and also trying for a rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China which in turn made India move towards Soviet Union leading to signing of a bilateral treaty of cooperation in 1971.
While there is no ‘breaking news’ element in the declassified documents included in the two volumes and most facts have already been known to analysts and researchers, compilation of these documents within two volumes would be a valuable asset to researchers and students interested in contemporary and current history. In times when expanding Indo-US relations seems to be the order of the day, so much so, that much of Indian foreign policy-making seemed to be getting influenced by US concerns, these volumes would help in providing a historical context to the process of evolving bilateralism helping the researchers in the field to understand nuances of ‘great power-ism’ and inter-state relations in global politics in a better manner.