ABSTRACT
India's thriving bilateral relationships with Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia—each having adversarial relations with the other—continue to confound the West Asia watchers. Saudi Arabia may caution India over its ties with Iran and its apprehensions will certainly overstretch New Delhi's capability of balancing its relations with the two regional heavyweights. With the erosion of the political and ideological relevance of NAM at the end of the Cold War, Israel's close relationship with the US was no longer an anathema to the normalisation of India–Israel ties. The Indo-Israeli security cooperation is also based on a shared perception of dangers from terrorism and its purveyors. The Iranian nuclear programme is a serious challenge to India's bilateral relations with Israel. In fact, Indo-Saudi relations began with the confluence of views on international issues. Israel's display of intense insecurity visa-vis Iran's nuclear programme is based on four plausible and sometimes far-fetched scenarios.
