ABSTRACT
There shall be US–India cooperation. This commandment rings through speeches, official statements of purpose, and learned commentary issuing forth from the United States and India. Indeed, policymakers in both capitals seemingly assume that an entente is part of the order of things. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee coined the phrase ‘natural allies’ in 1998, inaugurating this way of thinking. 1 Both US presidential campaigns espoused such an arrangement during the 2008 election cycle, terming it a ‘league’ or ‘concert’ of democracies. 2 During a 2009 state visit from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, President Barack Obama agreed that the two nations are ‘natural allies’. 3 Another common if somewhat more muted formula is ‘natural strategic partnership’, connoting less formal ties. 4 Think tanks and academic institutions have debated whether some working arrangement between the world’s oldest and largest democracies is fated and, if so, what that means in practical terms. 5
