ABSTRACT
States, the latter's relations with Pakistan and China and India's ties with the Soviet Union created a political dynamic that was impossible to reverse.
However, US policy toward India's neighbors in the Cold War era was not rooted in an inherent American hostility toward India. It was driven by the imperative of the American global geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. Nor was India's policy built around an ideological premise that the United States was the fountainhead of all evil. The deepening of America's strategic nexus with India's two major neighbors accentuated India's security problems. To compensate for this, India drew closer to the Soviet Union, and the political distance between India and the United States steadily widened. An occasional effort by the United States to break this vicious circle by engaging India and limiting the spillover from the Cold War never really succeeded.
