The guided missile destroyer USS Roosevelt prepares to receive a fuel hose from the multipurpose amphibious assault ship USS Bataan during a refueling at sea in the Atlantic, February 12, 2011 (US Navy)

While observers of international relations like to talk about a post-American world order in which nations as Brazil, China, India and Russia call the shots, it seems nobody seriously considers the possibility that the United States may be here to stay anymore.

While American hegemony may be declining, what should concern the BRICs is that America is still very much in their backyards. The killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden at the hands of US special forces earlier this month amply demonstrated this reality.

China and Russia watched events unfold silently while India vowed never to replicate America’s actions in Pakistan even as terrorists wanted by India are probably hiding there. Imagine Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announcing to the world that India had found and killed bin Laden in Pakistan because he was instrumental in terrorist activity in that country. It is difficult to conceive, not only because Pakistan would never have allowed it but because the intelligence services of rising powers are evidently incapable of tracking down the world’s most wanted terrorist who was indirectly responsible for attacks against all of these countries.

While international news media blamed Pakistan’s intelligence services for either sheltering bin Laden or failing to apprehend him within their own borders, the Chinese, Indian and Russian intelligence communities were proved equally inapt. New Delhi is just seven hundred kilometers from the place where bin Laden was found. If China, India and Russia can’t establish supremacy in their own neighborhood, it will be difficult for them to persuade other nations in Africa, East Asia and Latin America that they should accept the BRICs as security providers. In fact, those nations would probably refer to the United States for their security concerns.

Judging from America’s history, its future as a global security guarantor seems certain. The American military and intelligence apparatus is able to attract highly educated personnel that operates in a far less hierarchical and far more institutionalized bureaucracy than their BRIC counterparts. The American political system, for all its partisan bickering, has time and again produced leaders who are able and willing to project power abroad to both serve the nation’s interests and advance the cause of liberal democracy and open markets.

Unless emerging powers manage to emulate the American system, there is a good chance that we will continue to live in a world in which the United States remain the “last best hope of Earth,” as once predicted by Abraham Lincoln.

Although skeptics have dismissed the concept of the BRIC or the new BRICS as an alliance without cement, it makes sense for these countries to cooperate. While NATO is bombing Libya and the United States remain entrenched in two long wars in the Middle East, emerging powers are seeking security—particularly economic security. They seek a global balance of power that equally serves their interests as it does the West’s.

In 2008, America’s National Intelligence Council recognized the shifting trend, predicting that,

The whole international system—as constructed following WW II—will be revolutionized. Not only will new players—Brazil, Russia, India and China—have a seat at the international high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.

During the most recent BRICS summit in China, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, said that the challenge facing these nations was to “harness the vast potential that exists among [them].”

We are rich in resources, material and human. We are strengthened by the complementarities of our resource endowments. We share the vision of inclusive growth and prosperity in the world. We stand for a rule based, stable and predictable global order. We respect each other’s political systems and stages of development. We value diversity and plurality. Our priority is the rapid socioeconomic transformation of our people and those of the developing world. Our cooperation is neither directed against nor at the expense of anyone.

The “developing country” tag is one that unites not just the BRICS but countries as far apart as Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, even South Korea. While much of the Western world is struggling to recover from a recession that it home made, China has asserted itself more forcefully on the world stage; Russia has been reminiscing about its good old days as a superpower while Brazil and India are trying to finding a place for themselves as greater powers.

India is mostly concerned about stability within its own region and the Middle East. From this perspective, it is not at all clear whether it would benefit from standing with the protesters demanding political reform in the Arab world; with China and Russia or with the current managers of the international system, NATO and the United States.

India’s initial response to the popular uprisings was a balanced one therefore. It has an economic as well as a strategic interest in supporting democratic sentiments across the world to foster and strengthen plural and secular societies like its own. But its foreign policy hasn’t been driven by self interest alone nor by an unrealistically strict commitment to national sovereignty. While it hesitates to provide moralistic running commentary on world events, India is willing to help build a more liberal global system.

The BRICS is a game changer in international relations but the critics are right to point out one possible source of discord among them. Two of its members—Brazil and India—aspire to permanent United Nations Security Council membership while two others—China and Russia—certainly intend to guard their privileged positions as the only non-Western power brokers in the organization.

President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, July 16, 2009

An odd coupling occurred at the most recent summit of G20 leaders in Seoul. China and Germany teamed up to defeat an American proposal that would forcefully “rebalance” global trade in favor of net importers—i.e., the United States.

The German chancellor was unimpressed with reminders from across the Atlantic that her country’s recovery was partly due to America’s willingness to buy German products. “In the task ahead, the benchmark has to be the countries that have been most competitive, not to reduce to the lowest common denominator,” she professed. In other words: America should stop complaining and be more like Germany.

China and Germany, the world’s major surplus economies, managed to win at least some support in preventing the Americans from getting their way in Seoul. It wasn’t the first time for Germany to challenge Washington and find common ground with an emerging economy—and it wouldn’t be the last.

A month before South Korea, the leaders of France, Germany and Russia met privately at a Normandy seaside resort to discuss future economic and security cooperation in Europe. The French have long favored special relations with Moscow but Germany remained a staunch ally of America’s throughout the Cold War. Warm German-Russian ties are a fairly recent phenomenon and gas is what keeps it at temperature.

Merkel’s predecessor at the chancellorship, Gerhard Schröder, cultivated close ties with Vladimir Putin and went on to shepherd the construction of the Nord Stream pipeline after his tenure. Bypassing non-EU transit countries as well as the Baltic states and Poland, the project is supposed to bring an additional fifty-five billion cubic meters of natural gas to Europe every year.

Many in Central Europe remember the many gas disputes between Russia and the Ukraine between 2005 and 2009 which eventually left some countries coping with shortages. The Nord Stream pipeline frees Germany of its dependence on former Soviet satellite states which occasionally squabble with Moscow.

With France and Russia, Schröder was a prominent critic of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There was another country opposed at the time—China.

China and Germany are major trading partners. Their total trade volume has far surpassed $100 billion a year. Last summer, when Chancellor Merkel visited Beijing, the two countries signed an additional $4.4 billion worth of trade agreements.

There has been some push back against Germany’s cozying up with authoritarian China and Russia. Merkel’s own party urged the government to focus on Brazil and India instead if liberal democracy was not to lose appeal across the developing world. As early as 2007, a christian democrat policy paper warned that Germany’s policy in East Asia was “too business-centric and too China-centric.” It stirred a fierce rebuke from Beijing where a magazine blamed Berlin of conniving to “impose the Western model of values” on China.

Sino-German relations recovered however and recently, Germany had an opportunity to publicly side with all of the BRIC nations.

When Britain, France and the United States sought a UN mandate for military intervention in Libya this month, Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia all abstained from voting on the Security Council.

Germany had many reasons not to spring into action while allied fighter jets began patrolling the Libyan skies. Foremost among them was the unpopularity of its right wing government which is haunted by the accidental killing of more than a hundred civilians in an Afghanistan air strike in September 2009.

Chancellor Merkel and her liberal coalition partners have also taken a beating in recent local elections for having to save the rest of Europe from fiscal collapse. The Greek and Irish bailouts have cost German taxpayers dearly. They believe that they’ve shouldered their fair share of international responsibility for the time being.

The abstentions from the United Nations vote benefited some countries more than others. Just two days after the Security Council authorized military action, Muammar Gaddafi threatened that if the West attacked, he would hand Libya’s juicy energy contracts to Chinese, Indian and Russian firms. It didn’t deter the coalition and in a post-Gaddafi Libya, the nations that did come to the rebels’ aid may find the North African country more recipient to their overtures.

Germany played it safe though and as a result, it found itself in the fortunate company of four expanding economies that will likely prove pertinent to its future prosperity.

There is a downside to being in BRIC’s company. Along with Germany’s resurgent pacifism, it may guarantee that it won’t have a permanent seat at the Security Council table any time soon.

The BRIC leaders first met in Russia in 2009 and convened most recently in Brasília last April. Whether their interest in one another will actually promote political cooperation abroad remains to be seen though. Each of the BRIC states is at odds with at least one its comrades while none stands to benefit from forming anything resembling a formal bloc or organization.

Moscow is naturally loath to dilute its remaining influence on the international stage by supporting either Brazil’s or India’s bid for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council. Russia is redefining its relations with India though it’s largely because of China that these former Cold War allies are driven closer once again. They haven’t much in common, politically or economically, besides.

China’s growth and mounting military and political assertiveness is also threatening its relations with Brazil. Whereas President Lula da Silva heralded an era of close economic ties with China, his administration’s easing of restrictions on Chinese imports hasn’t translated into greater political collaboration yet.

In general, there is far more that divides the four BRICs than unites them. Grouping these countries together may be attractive to academics and commentators trying to recognize trends among rising powers but BRIC diplomacy and summitry in recent years can’t obscure the fact that the club is beset by internal conflicts.

Unlike China and Russia, Brazil and India pride themselves on being huge and diverse democracies that are promoting multilateralism abroad. India, indeed, favors a soft power approach to international relations whereas the Chinese have been willing to act more aggressively, in the South China Sea for instance, where it is trying to coerce the rest of Southeast Asia into accepting its view of where the maritime borders should run.

Russia, too, is quick to resort to intimidation, in its former sphere of interest as in the Arctic. Both vying for influence in Central Asia, China and Russia, hardly good friends to begin with, are only likely to collide more often in the near future.

In their opposition to American hegemony, the BRICs may find common ground but the foursome can’t possibly develop into an alternative to the American world order. China is obsessed with perpetuating its stellar growth rates before anything else, fretting that any hiccup in economic development may unleash its internal forces of discontent. Brazil is still struggling to be recognized as the hegemon of South America while the near hopeless situation in Pakistan means that India can’t aspire to regional power status any time soon.

The BRICs, in short, aren’t able to lead, nor are they willing to. Brazil, China and India will likely continue to grow and naturally expect to have a greater say in international affairs as a result. Their inclusion in the G20 is an encouraging sign of Europe and the United States realizing that they stand little to lose from having these countries participate. But as their own democracies are fragile and their populations still partly impoverished, they’ll do more to try to secure resources and international regulations that work in their favor too, than promote freedom and democracy around the world as the United States have been doing for the past fifty years.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil speaks in Lisbon, Portugal, March 29, 2011 (Deborah Bergamini)

Brazil is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and emerging on the world stage as a major power. Its next president will have a formidable task at reforming the country in order to meet the challenges of the decades ahead nonetheless.

Brazilians headed to the polls last week to elect a new president. Neither of the major party candidates, Workers’ Party nominee Dilma Rousseff nor social democrat José Serra, managed to win an overall majority of the votes in the first round. A second round of voting, pitting the two candidates against one another, is scheduled for October 31.

Whichever candidate wins owes much to his or her predecessor, Brazilian President Lula da Silva. This former labor leader was one of the founders of the Workers’ Party and managed to combine, during his eight in office, Third Way economic policies at home with an ability to foster alliances with former Third World countries abroad. Under his administration, some twenty million Brazilians were able to escape from desolate poverty while income disparities and regional inequalities narrowed considerably. His likely successor and protégé, former energy secretary Rousseff, has announced that, if elected, she will continue Lula’s popular domestic policies, including his huge welfare programs.

In the very year that he assumed office, President Lula professed that Brazil was prepared to “assume its greatness” and he worked diligently ever since to make that promise come true.

Brazil’s rapid ascendancy to greater power status was made possible to a considerable extent by the American postwar international order. The liberalization of global finance and trade as well as the extension of America’s defense umbrella over the whole of Latin America helped Brazil develop during the last half century. Despite all of Brazil’s complaints about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the country has profited immensely from both institutions, relying on their willingness to borrow and lend assistance when times were tough.

Now that Brazil has matured and is showing some willingness to assert leadership in South America, it is starting to pick up the tab. Brazil’s defense spending has increased from $9 to almost $24 billion during Lula’s presidency, permitting the purchase of advanced weapons systems and allowing the military to sophisticate tactics. The focus of Brazil’s armed forces has shifted in recent years from conventional warfare to urban guerrilla and protecting the hazardous border regions in the Amazon. The country is also setting up a navy in order to guard its offshore hydrocarbon resources.

With dreams of South American hegemony, Brazil has promoted the growth of interregional cooperation councils, including Mercosur, which is a free trade region composed of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, as well as the Union of South American Nations, or UNASUR, which aims to imitate the European Union model. Despite these efforts, something of an unease continues to pervade Brazil’s relations with its many neighbors.

Boxed in between the leftish Bolivarian Alliance, which is led by Venezuela, and more conservative regional power brokers Colombia and Argentina, moderate, centrist Brazil hasn’t managed to stir much enthusiasm with either side. Its diplomats like to talk in terms of the common good but in truth, Brazil, like any state, pursues its own interest before anything else. If it intends to assert leadership in South America, it will have to give something in return to allow the rest of the continent to accept such a proposition.

Brazil has also exploited international platforms as the World Trade Organization to make its voice heard. It is largely responsible for stalling the Doha Round of trade negotiation, having rallied much of the developing world to oppose Western agricultural subsidies.

Lula also worked hard to win support for his effort to gain permanent membership to the United Nations Security Council for Brazil. Germany, India and Japan have pledged to back one another in their quest for permanent Security Council membership; Brazil has shrewdly framed this attempt as part of a broader, altruistic campaign to make the international framework more consensual.

On the bilateral front, President Lula has been more attentive to the benefits to be derived from a closer relationship with China than any of his predecessors. Trade with East Asia increased tremendously during Lula’s tenure. China is now Brazil’s largest commercial partner and an important ally as well.

More controversial has been Lula’s outspoken support for the Islamic regime in Iran. His administration affirmed Tehran’s right to pursue a peaceful atomic energy capacity—which Brazil also enjoys—and negotiated a nuclear fuel exchange agreement with the country in May; one that was immediately rejected by the Americans. President Lula appears to have regarded relations with Iran as a way to simultaneously establish Brazil as an interest power in the Middle East and assert independence from the United States. His successor may well have to tread more carefully here. From Washington’s perspective, it looks like Brazil is granting Iran’s ambitions legitimacy at an extremely inopportune time.

President Lula has occasionally admonished the United States in order to placate the more radical elements of his Workers’ Party coalition and led in opposition against unilateral American tariffs and warmongering. His posture was characteristic of a more confident Brazil that is no longer willing to abide by American foreign policy objectives. At the same time, it was understood that the bilateral relationship as such was never in peril. Rousseff, who fought Brazil’s military dictatorship as a Marxist revolutionary in her youth and is typically regarded as more of an outspoken leftist than Lula, should assure America than she understands that it is still Brazil’s most important friend and ally.

There is a lot of work to be done at home in oder to perpetuate Brazil’s impressive growth rates. As Rousseff’s foremost contender in the election, São Paulo Governor José Serra, liked to point out, Brazil holds three negative world records: it maintains the highest interest rates in the world (the central bank’s benchmark rate is 10.25 percent), it has the highest tax burden of any developing country and it has among the lowest rates of public investment. Innovation has indeed been stifled by a maze of regulation and red tape. Payroll taxes are high at 60 percent, forcing small businesses into the black market. Infrastructure is underdeveloped, particularly in the north and northeast, while corruption remains rampant, even in the more urbanized regions.

Whether Rousseff will dare to challenge her own party and part of Lula’s legacy remains to be seen. What is certain is that Brazil’s regulatory and welfare regimes are in dire need of reform and that the country’s likely next president hasn’t shown much willingness to take on the task yet.

Jorge G. Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign secretary, complains in Foreign Affairs that the BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa too—are immature and indifferent. “Their shaky commitment to democracy, human rights, nuclear nonproliferation, and environmental protection would only weaken the international system’s core values,” were they to be admitted to, say, the United Nations Security Council permanently or granted a larger role in institutions as the World Bank or World Trade Organization.

Brazil, India, and South Africa are representative democracies that basically respect human rights at home, but when it comes to defending democracy and human rights outside their borders, there is not much difference between them and authoritarian China. On those questions, all four states remain attached to the rallying cries of their independence or national liberation struggles: sovereignty, self-determination, nonintervention, autonomous economic development.

Such appeals to nonintervention “contradict the values enshrined in the international order,” according to Castañeda. Evidently, states minding their own business and urging others to do the same are rather considered inconvenient than virtuous, if we are to take Castañeda’s word for it.

One is tempted to point out that Mexico, formerly the de facto representative of Latin America and closest to the United States, is frustrated with neighboring Brazil far outperforming it this past decade. Recent Brazilian initiatives—negotiating a nuclear fuel exchange agreement with Iran and spending billions of dollars on international aid—are only likely to amplify the South American giant’s leverage on the world stage while Mexico, plagued with an ongoing internal drug war, may well succumb to chaos and corruption unless anyone bothers to intervene. Castañeda certainly has reason to fear that his country will be sidelined in the process of multilateralism.

Indeed, oftentimes the loudest opponents of granting either of the BRICs a permanent seat on the Security Council or some high level appointment in any multinational forum are not established powers but nearby competitors who fear being overshadowed by their regional hegemon.

Their fears would be justified if those rising powers showed any signs of powerhungryness. Except they don’t. China may be scrambling for resources worldwide and vying for influence with Russia and the United States in Central Asia; India may occasionally poke its nose in the affairs of neighboring countries but that’s largely to ensure its own security; Brazil is promoting all sorts of Latin American cooperation clubs which goes to show how little ambition it has to dominate its own continent; and Russia—hardly a “rising power” to begin with—is certainly still roaring but no superpower anymore. Smaller countries, like Germany and Japan, or smaller economies, as Indonesia and South Africa, are either too integrated in or too disconnected from the international order to seriously consider challenging it at all.

Underlying the foreign policy aims of nearly all aforementioned countries—certainly all the “rising” ones—is a clear and uncompromising sense of self preservation. Even China, which recently surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy, is worried that its impressive growth track could be interrupted when its people start to demand greater political freedoms. Brazil and India, too, each harbor hundreds of millions of people living in desolate poverty. Their governments are genuinely concerned with doing something about that first before they’ll start trying to box out neighboring states in some sort of zero-sum regional power struggle.

Brazil, China and India are each huge countries which, as they continue to grow, will expect to have a greater say in international rules and games. Their inclusion in the G20 is an encouraging sign of Europe and the United States realizing that they stand little to lose from having these countries participate. But as their own democracies are fragile and their populations still partly impoverished, they’ll do more to try to secure resources and international regulations that work in their favor too, than promote freedom and democracy around the world as the United States have been doing for the past fifty years.

Brazil has long maintained that it wants proof of Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions before it agrees to push for sanctions with the United Nations. Part of the reason for Brazil’s reluctance in this matter are its own intentions: the South American giant increasingly relies on alternative energies, nuclear power among them. The country has no wish to acquire atomic weapons, but it doesn’t believe in dictating American rules to the rest of the world either.

It is not alone. The BRICs as well as Indonesia and South Africa are leading the emerging economies of the world in an effort to counter what they perceive to be Western interventionism. Evidence of this can be seen in opposition to World Trade Organization policies and international efforts to fight global warming. Basically, the Rest has no desire to curtail its growth potential now that decades of staggering prosperity seem to be catching up with the West.

China, being the most potent of rising powers, is naturally leading the charge, recently frustrating, almost single-handedly, the Copenhagen climate change talks for instance. Chinese leadership appeals to many developing nations because of Beijing’s traditional insistence on state sovereignty. The Middle Kingdom happily trades with dictatorships without ever questioning their internal politics and it expects to be treated the same way by others.

The United States is in part to blame for letting this happen. Soon after President Barack Obama was elected, Brazil and India signaled that they were willing to take things one step further. New Delhi, especially, was very receptive to the Bush Administration’s efforts to engage it, yet both seem to have been neglected in favor of “resetting” relations with Russia and an irrational Sinophobia that is hampering US foreign policy in East Asia.

After a year of trying, it took until this weekend for the Russians to agree to a new START treaty for reducing nuclear stockpiles while little progress seems to have been made toward “strategically reassuring” China, as is the White House’s stated goal.

China could help in Pakistan and India is quite willing to invest in the war in Afghanistan but neither appear to be taken quite seriously in this regard. The United States instead is trying to get them to back sanctions on Iran, not realizing that the BRICs don’t care whether that country acquires the Bomb or not.

Clinton’s rebuff from the Brazilians was hardly unexpected then. Hopefully, it will be interpreted in Washington as a reminder that although the president’s rhetoric did much to reinvigorate America’s appeal to moral leadership in the world, it won’t be enough to extract foreign policy support.

There is reason to be optimistic for East Asia nevertheless. Katie Baker reports for Newsweek that the region far outperforms Europe and the United States, with China leading the rebound. This year, the Middle Kingdom is expected to enjoy a ten percent growth while India, Taiwan and Vietnam follow with similarly impressive figures.

Driving the East’s recovery are its rapidly bourgeoning domestic markets. “Throughout the slump, household spending has held up well in China,” writes Baker, “thanks to tax breaks and Cash for Clunkers-type schemes.” In India and Indonesia, consumer confidence has already returned to pre-recession levels, “and retail sales growth remains strong thanks to rising incomes, low personal debt, and high household savings.”

Add to that the continued demand for cheap products from Asia and the investments that flow back to the West, and there is ample reason to presume that the twenty-first century will indeed turn out to be an Asian one.

Bear with gun (Biomega)

“The bear still has teeth,” notes Robert D. Kaplan, writing for The Atlantic. The Obama Administration’s decision to scrap the Eastern European missile defense system has left some former Soviet satellite states at the mercy of Moscow once again—or at least, that’s how they see it.

Understandably, some Poles and Czechs reacted to Obama’s announcement with outrage. They’ve backed the United States in most of the wars and deployments of the past decade. Now their reward turns out to be continued exposure to the designs of Russia.

Moreover, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 “still sends shivers down the spines of Poles,” according to Kaplan, because they fear an economically powerful but energy-dependent Germany joining forces with the military powerful Russia. Poland has no geographical barrier to protect itself against such an unholy alliance while it is exactly for the sake of having barriers that Russia is resistant to the pro-Western course of many Eastern European governments.

There is little threat of actual invasion, that much Kaplan admits, but Russia has other methods at its disposal: “organized crime networks, intelligence operations, and constant intimidation.” Besides, no matter how Westernized countries as Poland and the Czech Republican may have become, “Russians will always be able to operate there more easily than most Westerners, because of their related Slavic languages.”

So why is the United States letting this happen? Because it needs Russia’s help—”to put pressure on Iran, to help us with supply routes into Afghanistan, and, perhaps, to balance against China.” But Russia is far from a reliable partner. It maintains its own agenda with regard to Iran which it does not want to upset and enflame Islamic extremism on Russia’s fringes. And with China, Russia sits in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and in the informal BRIC alliance along with Brazil and India. It seems unlikely that Russia will ever definitively pick the American side in its struggle against either, present and future, antagonist.

Is it worth to risk the allegiance of Eastern Europe in order to please Russia then? Yes. Because as much as losing that allegiance would hurt Washington, making an enemy out of Russia once again would be all the more devastating.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India addresses the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington DC, November 22(David Hawxhurst)

Reaffirming US relations with India was one of the few foreign policy successes of the Bush Administration. A nuclear power with an impressive but stable economic growth, India is already the South Asian superpower and likely to become more than that. It works with Brazil and Russia and even with China (the so-called “BRIC”) to strengthen its international position and it plays a pivotal, albeit an oftentimes overlooked, role in the Middle East.

President Obama was wise to invite his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh for the White House’s first state dinner on November 24—a clear sign that the current administration also intends for India to be part of its “multilateral” strategy. According to the president, India is “indispensable” in the building of “a future of security and prosperity for all nations.”

Singh, as finance minister during the first half of the 1990s, broke with India’s past of moderate socialism and instituted a series of reforms that carried the country out of recession. As prime minister, he continues to promote privatization and free trade while while investing generously in a massive campaign against poverty. Obama recognized these achievements when he declared that, “[a]s leading economies, the United States and India can strengthen the global economic recovery, promote trade that creates jobs for both our people, and pursue growth that is balanced and sustained.”

In another one of the president’s crusades, bringing proliferation to a halt, he also acknowledged the importance of India. “As nuclear powers, we can be full partners in preventing the spread of the world’s most deadly weapons, securing loose nuclear materials from terrorists, and pursuing our shared vision of a world without nuclear weapons.” Both countries have known the “pain and anguish of terrorism,” the president spoke, so they must stand together to “promote the development and prosperity that undermines violent extremism.”

Prime Minister Singh responded in kind when he opined that India and the United States are “bound together” by common values and a shared dedication “to meet [the] challenges of a fast-changing world in this twenty-first century.”

There is an elephant in the room that neither leader spoke of. The US is investing in Pakistan to support its war on terror at a time when India and Pakistan are accusing one another of involvements in terrorist attacks in their countries. After fighting three wars the two countries are still engaged in something of a nuclear cold war. Pervez Hoodbhoy notes however on the New Atlanticist, that most of India “would like to forget that Pakistan exists.” Fast on its way to become a true superpower, India “has no need to engage a struggling Pakistan with its endless litany of problems,” according to Hoodbhoy.

That’s not how Pakistan sees it. Islamabad is by no means comfortable with India’s newfound American approval. The Obama Administration will have to carefully balance its commitment to Pakistan against its relationship with India. It needs the first to bring the war in Afghanistan to a successful end but once that’s done, India is really the onle country in South Asia that matters.