The Brookings Institute, of which Professor Cohen is a Senior Fellow, is an independent organisation devoted to non‐partisan research, education and publication in economics, government, foreign policy, and the social sciences generally, whose purposes are to help in the development of sound public policies and to promote public understanding of issues of national importance. Stephen Cohen first examined India’s potential to be a major world power in India: Emergent Power?, written in collaboration with Richard L. Park (Cohen and Park, 1979). His purpose here is to present an assessment of its strategic and political power since becoming a nuclear weapons state in 1998 and waging war with Pakistan a year later. He argues that India must now be regarded as one of the three most important states in Asia, taking its place alongside China and Japan. He also contends that, as a major power, India now commands the attention of the USA to a degree never before attained.
Cohen’s first chapter investigates the various factors needing to be considered when assessing India’s position in the modern world: the traditions it inherited from Hindu/Buddhist, Islamic and British rule; caste; emergent nationalism; its political and economic power; and the influence of geography. Next comes an overview of India’s view of the world and its foreign and defence policies. The direction it followed, set against the background of Gandhian and Nehruvian philosophy, the effect of new military technologies, and India’s long‐standing reluctance to enter into alliances, are also discussed. Its diplomatic relations with Beijing, Moscow and Washington are scrutinised at length. There follows a solitary interlude reviewing India’s domestic policies, concentrating on its economic setbacks, its civil and police bureaucracies, and its social, political, and economic revolutions since the late 1980s. And then it is back to the global outlook.
India’s defence policy since independence is put under close examination: its post‐war origins when both Gandhi and Nehru had serious reservations about the use of force, the period of growing tension with China, successive wars with Pakistan, treaties with the Himalayan states, the continuous suspicion of China, Pakistan and the USA, whose policies were perceived as being hostile to India’s interests. Cohen then switches from defence in general to a chapter‐length study of India as a nuclear power, which encompasses, inter alia, the military dimension, moral considerations, and the effect in relation to Pakistan, the only South Asian state that contests India’s hegemony of the sub‐continent. A further chapter deals with Indian strategies with regard to Pakistan especially over the issue of Kashmir. The dilemmas stemming from the very fluid politics in Karachi and Islamabad are capably expressed and explained.
Cohen’s next concern is India as an Asian power, first its early position as “a great peace‐promoting Asian state”, and then its 40 years’ struggle to reduce US influence in Asia, culminating in the 1991 Gulf War, when India felt isolated in its own backyard. Other topics spotlighted are India’s relations with its neighbours north and south, and with the rest of Asia, notably China. Indo‐US relations were never better than cool or distant principally because of the USA’s fluctuating relationship with China. With the penultimate chapter, “India and the United States”, Cohen’s study arrives at its conclusion, expanding on many of the themes touched on earlier, looking in more detail at the crux of the matter, the mutual incomprehension of two different nations, each destined to play a prominent role in Asian and global affairs, yet each of little relevance to each other’s domestic concerns in two vastly dissimilar societies. At this point Cohen ends his historical analysis and, in a final chapter, allows himself to speculate on India’s present and future role as an Asian and world power. He finds much to encourage him in India’s recent economic rise, its democratic political system, its growing cultural influence, and in its central geostrategic position.
