This case study explores the twists and turns in India’s relations with Iran between 2005 and 2012. It is designed to illustrate the material and ideational factors that drove a rising middle power like India to make policy choices with a backdrop of a major shift in its grand strategy. A secondary focus is how the U.S. deployed diplomacy to help achieve largely favorable outcomes in a key region of the world. Negotiations for the India-Pakistan-Iran (IPI) pipeline and a proposed Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) deal form the fulcrum for process-tracing the narrative. The simultaneous narrative of the India-U.S. negotiations on the nuclear deal (that provides a major intervening variable) are also temporally overlaid and traced at relevant points. When taken together, these narratives provide a composite and more complete picture of choices and decisions that Indian diplomats faced.
ISBN: 978-1-56927-038-7 | Published: 2022