Strategic Cultures and Foreign Policy Decision-Making: The Case of India and its Ties with Israel

Abstract

The influence of the domestic in foreign policy decision-making has tended to be one of the prime concerns in international relations and several scholarly works have investigated the role and impact of political parties, coalition politics, bureaucracy, lobbies and diaspora on foreign policy choices of countries. Equally intriguing has been the literature on the influence of strategic culture on external policies of states. This approach, which could be traced to the writings of Sun Tzu, Thucydides and Clausewitz on national character and to Jack Snyder's 1977 account of the nature of the Soviet state, considers strategic culture of countries to change rather slowly if at all. The case of the Indian strategic culture manifests a similar - semipermanence. Rooted in the politico-strategic thought of Nehru, the country's first prime minister, Indian strategic culture has been characterized by a conspicuous restraint in undertaking conventional realist actions in international politics - a trend more or less unchanged over time. Such a restraint can be identified in the country's policy of nuclear minimalism, its military modernization and in its bilateral strategic relationship with the state of Israel. It is the third phenomenon, that this paper seeks to elaborate. Despite its strong ties with Israel, there is an astonishing lack of publicization of the the relationship, an incessant inclination of the Indian political establishment to pay lip service to the Palestinian cause and an identifiable unwillingness to use the relationship to advance direct military strategic interests- demonstrated for example, in India's refusal to accept Israel's offer of help during the 26/11 terrorist sabotage in Mumbai. The paper therefore, seeks to demonstrate the influence of the prevailing strategic culture of a country on its foreign policy behaviour, using the Indian example as a case in point.

Keywords: strategic cultures, coalition politics, India, Israel