India, Kenneth Waltz and the Iran War

The war in Iran has reignited the debate on the role of nuclear weapons in regional security in West Asia. And in April, I found myself re-reading American International Relations (IR) theorist Kenneth Waltz and recalling why his “pro-nuclear” and “neo-realist” thesis were so popular in India in the past, and why they may remain so today.

On April 18, I visited India’s College of Air Warfare (CAW) in Secunderabad, in the central Indian state of Telangana. My task was to facilitate a discussion as part of the Warfare and Aerospace Strategy Program (WASP), a professional military education programme through which the Indian Air Force (IAF) trains a select group of tri-service officers to think through “politico-military environmental layers, to interpret the frameworks within which decisions are made, and to assess outcomes including second-order effects.”

The course is concurrently held at CAW and at the Center for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies (CAPSS) in New Delhi, with a programme that involves an intense reading of 50–100 books (250–300 pages/day) during 3–4 months across different domains, from theory and international security to strategic culture and public policy. This is akin to a series of battles, stretching course participants to their limits, which is why, at the end of it (as here, in 2025), I like to congratulate them on having won a war in the intellectual sense.

It also reminded me of this 2013 essay I wrote for a Portuguese journal, where I engaged with what I found to be Waltz’s striking popularity here in India, at least compared with Europe and other places.

This year, I was asked to travel back in time to 1959 and discuss with them Kenneth Waltz’s seminal “Man, The State and War.” It brought back many memories from my MA studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, where, twenty years ago, I learned a lot about IR theory from brilliant professors and colleagues. It also reminded me of this 2013 essay I wrote for a Portuguese journal, where I engaged with what I found to be Waltz’s striking popularity here in India, at least compared with Europe and other places.

Some time has passed since then, but Waltz’s inclusion in this year’s WASP syllabus—and US President Trump’s determination to prevent Iran’s nuclear weaponisation by any means—made me wonder whether his theses remain popular and influential here in India today.

Edited and Translated Version of “Um Americano Adorado em Nova Deli”: Originally Published in Portuguese in Relações Internacionais, n. 39, September, 2013:

As a master’s student in New Delhi at JNU, a bastion of India’s radical left, I did not expect to find much sympathy for American theorists. This was, after all, a campus that welcomed and doctored Baburam Bhattarai, the ideological leader of the Maoist guerrilla in Nepal; where the Israeli ambassador was prevented from delivering a guest talk at a course on the Middle East; and where Hugo Chávez was welcomed in apotheosis while the Indian Prime Minister himself was received with boos and accusations of being a lackey of the “imperialist” George W. Bush.

Yet, whenever we read the “neo-realist” Kenneth Waltz in those dusty old classrooms, the teachers and students would sigh in adoration. The Berkeley professor remains one of the rare American theorists studied and respected among India’s academic and strategic elites. Even at the height of the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s, in a staunchly non-aligned India where any American academic visiting New Delhi was immediately suspected of working for the CIA, the doors were always pulled wide open for Professor Waltz. (He visited New Delhi and JNU in the early 1980s, where he interacted with K. Subrahmanyam and other proponents of India’s nuclear weaponisation.)

The explanation for this favourable reception is simple: Breaking with the conventional American thinking of the time, mostly pro-Pakistan and hostile to nuclear proliferation, Waltz argued that the nuclearisation of South Asia—more than a legitimate Indian and Pakistani right—was desirable because it would have stabilising effects, promoting parity and peace in the subcontinent.

While Washington’s diplomats doubled down on their efforts, including sanctions, to prevent the development of India’s nuclear programme, the theorist Waltz advocated for its acceleration

So, while Washington’s diplomats doubled down on their efforts, including sanctions, to prevent the development of India’s nuclear programme, the theorist Waltz advocated for its acceleration: the sooner, the better. In his view, this was actually a US national interest in a region undermined by Indo-Pakistani constant tension, crises, and wars that consumed important American diplomatic resources.

Waltz’s popularity is even more obvious if contrasted with the resentment that Indian elites reserved for the dogmatic hostility with which Americans in Washington opposed New Delhi’s nuclear programme—the “ayatollahs of non-proliferation”, in the words of prominent strategist K. Subrahmanyam.

This dogma against the emergence of new nuclear powers rested on four arguments: first, that peace and systemic stability between the United States and Soviet Union dyad during the Cold War would be impossible to replicate at the regional level, either in South Asia (India–Pakistan) or in the Middle East (Israel–Iran, as Waltz defended as recently as 2012); second, that unlike Washington and Moscow, new nuclear powers [like India] suffered from institutional weaknesses in managing, safeguarding and executing their nuclear capability (Scott Sagan); third, that India, in particular, lacked the institutional culture and strategic doctrine for the complex game of signalling and deterrence (Vipin Narang, Gaurav Kampani); and, finally, that the nuclearisation of the subcontinent would lead to greater conventional conflict, with both countries taking increasingly offensive postures, in the shadow of the costs and risks of nuclear escalation (the South Asian version of the stability–instability paradox by Michael Krepon, among others).

In radical opposition to these theses that many Indian policymakers and scholars dismissed as reflections of American ethnocentrism, Waltz’s radical structuralism was obviously more successful in India. Rather than fearing the possible irresponsibility of a new nuclear power, “Ken” always argued for the opposite: that nuclear capability inevitably leads to greater behavioural responsibility, moderation, and thus better chances for stability and peace.

New historical research into the embryonic nuclear strategic debates in the United States and the Soviet Union of the 1950s suggests exactly this: denying the simplistic idea that some countries are more strategic than others and therefore supposedly more capable of developing and managing a nuclear arsenal “rationally” and “optimally”, to use two core paradigmatic concepts of the behaviouralist IR canon.

Waltz engaged India as an ideologically neutral and culturally indistinct unit, capable of strategic thought and influence in a world shaped solely by the relative distribution of material capabilities.

Paradoxically, it is precisely for this reason that Waltz’s universalist structuralism enjoyed so much popularity in an Indian academy normally hostile to the realist and rationalist theses that dominate the American study of international relations. In keeping with his purist understanding of anarchy, Waltz engaged India as an ideologically neutral and culturally indistinct unit, capable of strategic thought and influence in a world shaped solely by the relative distribution of material capabilities. He not only developed this theoretically, but actively defended it at a policy level, arguing for India’s nuclear capability as desirable peace in South Asia and American regional interests there.

In the West, structural realism is often accused of neglecting domestic factors in shaping foreign policy—including ideology, history, regime type, or leadership personality—and this is part of a continued debate. But this analytical blindness was always profoundly liberating for Indian strategists accustomed to seeing their country analysed using archaic cultural and Orientalist paradigms (e.g. through the images of a Gandhian and pacifist India, incapable of using violence as a political strategy).

But here, in the person of Kenneth Waltz was finally an American theorist who, in his structural determinism, promised to analyse and judge India’s strategic posture on an equal footing with that of the great Western powers. In a country that had been colonised for centuries, this approach naturally found immediate receptivity.

In 2008, India and the United States signed a bilateral agreement for civil nuclear cooperation that effectively ended India’s pariah status since it tested and declared itself a nuclear power in 1998. Washington’s ayatollahs objected then—including through the imposition of hard sanctions—but they were unable to resist the changing geopolitical winds: unlike in the past, India is now an essential piece in the Asian chess of a declining American superpower that is seeking new partners and allies to contain China’s rise.

This rapprochement with New Delhi also goes through the ideological plane, with the sudden discovery of “common values” and references to the two countries as “natural allies” in search of a “liberal order” based, for example, on freedom of navigation, multilateral management of global goods, or the promotion of democracy and human rights.

For a cynical realist, this is a mere rhetorical spring, based on a cold calculation of converging interests. If India has been democratic since incompatible with a normative explanation of the rapprochement between 1947, why has Washington only now remembered and valued this? This is an important argument, but not necessarily the two countries: Common interests are essential to rapprochement, but cooperation is facilitated by the democratic and pluralistic quality of both regimes and their open societies.

Contrary to what is suggested by theoretical caricatures, often through the fault of a very controversial Waltz, the work of the “father of neo-realism” (or maybe “grandfather”?) recognises the importance of democracy as a political system in the formation of foreign policy. One of his lesser-known works, comparing the United States and the United Kingdom, even suggests that democratic states are more capable and efficient in executing foreign policy.  This is not the Waltz that the IR “theory” textbooks present today, but it is the same Waltz who, as a rather over-confident epistemological star, argued that it is not only “reductionist” and unnecessary, but even harmful to study the domestic dimensions of foreign policy.

In addition to Waltz’s 2.0 structuralism, this original and more normative approach of Waltz 1.0 offers important clues to study how the Indian regime and democratic values will influence the future of its foreign policy, its nuclear doctrine, and the strategic posture of a rapidly changing country.