The nuclear deal represents a rather unlikely product of a George W. Bush administration, one that few would have predicted at the start of his presidency almost eight years ago. When he was first running for president, Bush was seen as something of a foreign policy novice, his most significant experience to date being interactions with Mexico as governor of Texas. When asked by a journalist to name several world leaders — including the Prime Minister of India — as a presidential candidate in 1999, Bush proved famously ignorant. Yet according to his close adviser Robert Blackwill, Bush long held India in high regard, impressed by “a billion people in a functioning democracy”.

When Bush was inaugurated president in January 2001, domestic policy was widely expected to take precedence over foreign engagement or adventurism in his administration’s agenda. The United States was in what was then seen as an unstable economic period , and his administration was anticipated as “the CEO presidency”, with Bush, the first American president with an MBA , at its helm.

It took the 9/11 attacks to focus the Bush presidency on foreign policy issues, and South Asia immediately came into the spotlight. Forced to work with a Pakistan seen as sympathetic to al Qaeda’s Taliban hosts in Afghanistan, Bush chose to pursue a strategy of dehyphenation on the subcontinent. This effectively diluted a forty-year-old strategic triangle between the United States, India and Pakistan, so that American bilateral relations with each state had minimal effects on its relations with the other, and on ties between the two South Asian nations. This was deemed a risky strategy at the time, but it appears to have paid dividends.

... contd.