India's Strategic Culture, Foreign and Security Policy, and Relations with the United States.

This paper examines how well the concept of "strategic culture" explains the tendency for India's foreign policy to lag behind its rapidly expanding economic interests. Realist analyses of Indian foreign policy and security strategy tend to find that the country is not living up to its potential. This leads to a consideration of strategic culture as an explanatory variable for India's suboptimal performance. The strategic culture aspects of political military culture (civil-military relations) and military culture (martial traditions of the armed forces) tend to point towards a strategic culture that has been shaped by civilian politicians and bureaucrats. The dominance of civilians and general exclusion of the military from decision-making has hindered India from becoming a power that regularly uses the military as an instrument of policy. The factor of domestic strategic culture (including attitudes towards the use of violence and the domestic political order) explains the short-term focus of Indian leaders and the lack of strategic vision. Structural factors, such as the entrenched foreign affairs and defense bureaucracy, produce a narrow and procedural focus and prevent the development of strategic analyses and planning. In conclusion, the strategic culture concept appears to play a significant role in explaining India's suboptimal foreign policy and security strategy. On the basis of those findings, one must expect the India-US relationship to move forward slowly on a number of issues and on future interactions. The possibility of an eventual alliance between the two powers is unlikely given India's strategic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]