In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Narasimha Rao government reworked India’s dysfunctional economic and foreign policies to improve India’s abysmal terms of trade with the rest of the world.
The latest global financial crisis seems to have shaken the United States’ global dominance and is forcing India to revisit its post-Soviet foreign policy. Choices Asian countries like India make in the near future will affect the chances of the emergence of an ‘Asian Concert’ that, in turn, will influence the United States’ ability to sustain its dominance by ‘rebalancing’ toward Asia. A second term for President Obama means that Asian countries may be compelled to respond to ‘rebalancing’ sooner rather than later. Obama’s first foreign tour since his re-election is a case in point.
But as usual India is struggling to discover the right balance between strategic independence and alignment, and soft and hard powers.
looking beyond borders 