South Asia

Robert D. Blackwill presented for The Ananta Aspen Center a speech entitled "The United States, India, and the Rise of Geoeconomics," on June 10, 2014 in New Delhi.

"It wasn’t that our motives were cynical or misplaced or that we wished misfortune for each other.  We were never adversaries.  In fact, time and again, from Harry Truman to JFK to Ronald Reagan, American Presidents called for a positive breakthrough in our relations with India.  But, more often than not, and for different reasons, we never found the trust that governments need to develop a true partnership. Happily, that all changed when, on the American side, President Clinton and then President Bush made the ambitious and prescient strategic bet that India would rise in our time as one of the world’s great powers and that therefore we had, as a matter of basic self-interest, to forge a much closer relationship with it."

A discussion of the latest political crisis in Pakistan with VOA correspondent in Islamabad Barry Newhouse and political scientist Hassan Abbas, a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center's Project on Managing the Atom and International Security Program.

Hassan Abbas and Samina Ahmed provided the analysis following the news story.