ABSTRACT
China’s support for Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programmes met with little American opposition in the 1980s, when Washington was focused on the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, and only weak resistance in the 1990s. As the Bush administration’s geopolitical calculus altered radically in the 2000s, however, it offered an exclusive civil-nuclear deal to India that ended New Delhi’s prolonged nuclear isolation. The US–India civil-nuclear initiative was part of an effort to transform Washington’s bilateral relations with New Delhi and to support India’s rise as a great power. Bhutan, the Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka were once seen as largely irrelevant geopolitically, but all the major powers now recognise their strategic geographical importance and are wooing them with growing intensity. The importance of Afghanistan, a landlocked nation on the subcontinent’s northwestern marches, has often been overlooked. However, in the past few decades there has been no denying the centrality of Afghanistan in shaping South Asian geopolitics.
