ABSTRACT

In the Post-Cold War era, US nuclear foreign policies towards India witnessed a major turnaround as a demand for ‘cap, reduce, eliminate’ under the Clinton administration was replaced by the implementation of the historic ‘civil nuclear deal’ in 2008 by Bush, a policy which continued under Obama’s administration.

This book addresses the change in US nuclear foreign policy by focusing on three core categories of identity, inequality, and great power narratives. Building upon the theoretical paradigm of critical constructivism, the concept of the ‘state’ is problematised by focusing on identity-related questions arguing that the ‘state’ becomes a constructed entity standing as valid only within relations of identity and difference. Focusing on postcolonial principles, Pate argues that imperialism as an organising principle of identity/difference enables us to understand how difference was maintained in unequal terms through US nuclear foreign policy. This manifested in five great power narratives constructed around peace and justice; India-Pakistan deterrence; democracy; economic progress; and scientific development. Identities of ‘race’, ‘political economy’, and ‘gender’, in terms of ‘radical otherness’ and ‘otherness’ were recurrently utilised through these narratives to maintain a difference enabling the respective administrations to maintain ‘US’ identity as a progressive and developed western nation, intrinsically justifying the US role as an arbiter of the global nuclear order.

A useful work for scholars researching identity construction and US foreign and security policies, US-India bilateral nuclear relations, South Asian nuclear politics, critical security, and postcolonial studies.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|27 pages

Reconceptualising theory and methodology of foreign policy

Narrative, state identity and action from a critical constructivist-postcolonial viewpoint

chapter 2|25 pages

Creating American nuclear subjectivity

‘Atoms for Peace’ in the campaign for a new global nuclear order

chapter 4|30 pages

Establishing a post-Cold War global nuclear order

The Bill Clinton administration’s conflicting images of India as the ‘other’ (1993–2001)

chapter 5|31 pages

A nuclear America in the post-9/11 world

India as the ‘other’ in the narratives of the George W. Bush administration (2001–2009)

chapter 6|32 pages

America as the leader of non-proliferation

The continuation of US-India nuclear partnership during the Barack Obama administration (2009–2017)

chapter 7|16 pages

Understanding the complexity of identity/difference

Analysing great power narratives of the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations from a postcolonial viewpoint

chapter |15 pages

Conclusion