Asia's New Strategic Triangle: US-China-India Relations in Eclectic Perspective.

Today everyone knows that in the coming century India, like the Medici, has the intention and potential to enhance its wealth, prestige, and power.In this context, observers of world politics are wondering: How will India pursue those intentions? What will it do to realize its potential and assure its security? In the last year and half since the proposed Indo-US nuclear deal was announced, numerous experts have tried to induce answers to these questions from what is still a small universe of cases including India's attitude toward Iranian nuclear policy and energy (particularly pipeline) policy, toward US missile defense initiatives, toward the enlargement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, toward Chinese activity in South Asia (particularly vis-à-vis Pakistan and Nepal). But, above all, observers have focused on a proposed deal between the US and India on nuclear cooperation.The dimensions and general features of the arena in which India will act are clear. It is a triangular space with China, India, and the US at the corners. The view that a rising India will be the fulcrum of balance in Asia is now increasingly common. A 2004 editorial in the Chinese People's Daily is a good example. "Steadily warming India-US relations have resulted in widespread attention to the geopolitics of Asia. It is difficult to predict whether or not India will become a strategic ally of the US or of China, but the sudden attractiveness of India will sooner or later alter the regional balance of power between the three countries" (Joseph, 2004). The 2005 Indo-US deal was interpreted by many observers to be an obvious American effort to draw India onto the US bandwagon.In the real world, of course, actors are motivated and constrained by power, wealth, and prestige. Syncretic approaches such as the currently fashionable "analytic eclecticism" draw selectively on all three international relations traditions in rendering "explanatory sketches" of important international security questions such as the durability of US-South Korean alliance, the possible revisionist aspiration of a rising China, or whether it is international institutions rather than balance of power dynamics that are shaping strategy in South East Asia. Explaining the future direction of Indian strategy within the China-India-US triangle is as analytically demanding a problem as one is likely to find in contemporary international relations.The conclusion I draw from what follows is that India is very unlikely to balance or to get on the bandwagon. Equipoise is the policy dictated by India's geography, power capabilities, identity, and potential to be a robust actor in global and regional politics. Like the old and now discredited Indian grand strategy of nonalignment, equipoise shuns formal alliances. The term draws on the realist balance of power idiom to identify an alternative stance - neither balancing nor bandwagoning - that is in dynamic equilibrium. That equilibrium is struck between domestic and international dynamics; balancing contradictory domestic cultural and political forces (such as nationalism/cosmopolitanism, anti-Americanism/pro-Americanism, self-sufficiency/trade-optimism) and international appeals and threats (such as American democratic/technological/commercial affinity, American unilateral neo-Imperialism, Chinese commercial appeal, and Chinese threatening intrusion/pressure). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]