Making US Foreign Policy for South Asia:
Off-Shore Balancing in Historical Perspective
Lloyd I. Rudolph
Paper prepared for delivery at the 2006 APSA Annual Meeting,
Philadelphia, Friday, September 1, 4:15 –5:45 pm
Copyright by the American Political Science Association
How has the making of US foreign policy for South Asia
changed in the 30 years since the era of the cold war? The first
thing to notice is how much has changed with respect to the
context of “governmental pluralism” that conditions the making of
US foreign policy for South Asia. In the case of the making of
foreign policy governmental pluralism is organized around the
State Department’s construction of the geo-strategic world into
regional bureaus. They mark the significance of regions in the
making of foreign policy,
In the mid-1970s there were departmental bureaus for Africa,
East Asia, Europe, Near East and South Asia and Latin America.
Each region, we argue, can be profitably dealt with as a separate
policy arena with a distinguishable ‘government.
distinctive constellation of salient bureaus and agencies,
Congressional committees, interest groups, policy NGOs, attentive
publics, and security, economic and cultural determinants. The
constellations wax and wane depending on the changing universe
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.
For our concept of “governmental pluralism” see pp. xx – xx of the Introduction
to The Regional Imperative and for our analysis of “regional governments” as policy
arenas see pp. 8 -10 of the Introduction of The Regional Imperative.
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