To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.
The role of dual-use assistance to indigenous nuclear programs continues to be understudied while the historiography of post-1947 Indian foreign policymaking remains underdeveloped. In this MTA Seminar, MTA/ISP Research Fellow Jayita Sarkar will address these lacunae through an examination of French assistance to India’s nuclear program in the backdrop of U.S. nonproliferation efforts during the Cold War (1948-1978). Both countries — a difficult U.S. ally and a nonaligned country—posed significant political challenges to U.S. nonproliferation efforts, which encouraged their cooperation. The speaker concludes that technology transfers and joint R&D in emerging technologies constituted the unique character of French-Indian cooperation — a trend that continues till this day.