The Israel Factor in Growing Indo-US Strategic Ties

Indo-Israel strategic ties have been growing at a great pace in the last few decades and this growth is stimulating interests and concerns among foreign policy makers as well as in academia. India under Nehru maintained a very strict stance vis-à-vis Israel’s Palestine policy. Being a part of and the leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, Nehru was critical of injustice done to Palestinians and the US role in consolidating the state of Israel. India’s growing intimacy with Israel, starting from 1990s, is seen as a major divergence from the policy set by the country’s founding fathers. Close diplomatic and defense ties somehow exhibit the geostrategic needs of both the countries as well as the requirement of time where systematic changes have taken place in the post-Cold War period. The disintegration of the Soviet Union left no option for India but to pursue a more pragmatic policy towards the United States, the new hegemon, and its allies. The Jewish lobby in the US Congress was of great support to put forward India’s agendas and to counter opponents. India reciprocated for that goodwill diplomacy by strengthening its ties with Israel. Post-Cold War growth of Indo-US strategic relations has many regional and global dimensions and vested interests. These interests are better served in geostrategic collaboration with Israel or making a mutual interest based informal alliance (Indo-US-Israel triangle for balancing the threat in Asia) between three countries. The cordial ties between Israel and the US facilitate India forwarding its regional and global agendas from the very platform of friendship. Therefore, the research problem at hand is to dissect and understand the trilateral bond based on its balancing the threat in the region and how it is the source of convergence for all three of them. In brief, this paper is an attempt to understand the very basis of growing Indo-Israel relations and the role that this strategic partnership plays in facilitating the cordial ties between the US and India in the post-Cold War era.