The realist paradigm of national security, in its process of globalisation was extended to South Asia through political subversion of Pakistan, by a series of military alliances with the United States and its allies, beginning in April/May 1954. To India, it was pirated more surreptitiously much later in the early sixties. This story, and its asymmetrical consequences to the US political economy and global diplomacy, on the one hand, and in South Asia as part of the Third World on the other, as a case study, would help us to underscore the long-term consequences of the clash of priorities between the postwar reconstruction project of the western industrial states, and the postcolonial agenda of nation-building in the newly-liberated countries of the Third World. This may also explain many historical legacies of Third World ‘mind-sets’ around conflict-situations in the region, like Kashmir in South Asia, long after the Cold War ended in Europe. The irreversibility of the realist ‘mind-sets’ in the region, spawning the nuclear-deterrence syndrome in South Asia, is an inheritance of the era of globalisation, of western realism. All, at the cost of the ideology of collective security.

Pakistan in ‘Global Containment’

From its origin in 1947, united Pakistan as it existed till 1971, was of considerable significance to the post-war US policy of ‘global containment’. Geopolitically located within its ‘Forward Defence Area’ close to both the Soviet Union and China, its western wing bordered West Asia and its eastern wing opened out to the land-routes of Southeast Asia, through Burma and Thailand, all the way upto Indo-China.