Abstract
Over the past five decades, generations of academics, journalists, and biographers have interrogated seemingly every aspect of John F. Kennedy’s life and presidency. Given the capacious and ever-growing body of work focused on Kennedy’s legacy, Bruce Riedel makes an audacious claim in asserting that his book casts new light on a ‘largely ignored’ (p.3) feature of the New Frontier’s foreign policymaking, namely the United States’ intervention in the Sino-Indian War of 1962. Coinciding as it did with the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the edge of a nuclear precipice in October that year, India’s short border engagement with the People’s Republic of China has loomed less prominently in narratives of the Kennedy presidency, – and the military history of the Cold War more generally – than one might otherwise have expected to be the case. In international affairs, timing, as they say, is everything.
The advent of military hostilities between the world’s two most populous nations, which saw the Indian and Chinese armies clash at both ends of a common Himalayan border, had enduring geo-political consequences, the reverberations from which continue to be felt throughout contemporary Asia. The Sino-Indian War saw Mao Zedong’s Communist China consolidate its status as Asia’s dominant power with a display of raw military might and ruthless realpolitik. It marked the beginning of the end for India’s policy of Cold War non-alignment, and for its architect-in-chief, the country’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Moreover, it marked the start of a process that, over the course of the next decade, would see South Asia’s principal states and regional rivals, India and Pakistan, turn away from Britain and the United States, and embrace military, political and economic support proffered by Moscow and Beijing.
Does Bruce Riedel’s book manage to substantiate its claim to offer up a fresh perspective on a pivotal and hitherto marginalized chapter in the military history of the Cold War? In short, no, it does not. Disappointingly, Riedel fails to provide a comprehensive and convincing account of Kennedy’s management of the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. In large part, the deficiencies in this compact and problematic analysis of the Kennedy administration’s intervention in the Sino-Indian War are rooted in an almost inexplicable failure to engage with prominent studies that directly address the formulation and implementation of Kennedy’s South Asian policy. Important books by Robert McMahon, Andrew Rotter and Srinath Raghavan, amongst others, constitute essential points of reference for any examination of Kennedy’s foray into South Asia, but are overlooked. Indeed, Riedel’s claim that the United States’ role in the border war has been ‘forgotten’ (p.5) and that his work fills a lacuna in Cold War historiography does not stand up to scrutiny.
The propensity to draw firm conclusions from dated collections of published materials, while largely ignoring declassified government records on the War of 1962 that have recently become available in the US, UK and India, may account for Riedel’s tendency to cover well-worn ground and to present a number of unpersuasive arguments. Notably, an appreciation of the extent to which Kennedy’s administration elected to work with the British in South Asia, and utilize London as a stalking horse to offset domestic criticisms of Washington’s tilt toward India, is indispensible to any understanding of Kennedy’s approach to the Sino-Indian imbroglio. However, Riedel’s analysis obscures this central plank in Kennedy’s South Asian policy. The subsequent setbacks, frustrations and equivocations that characterized Kennedy’s bid to leverage the border conflict as a means of co-opting India to become a tacit Cold War ally of the United States can be attributed in large part to his administration’s decision to hitch its wagon to a reluctant and strategically overextended British partner. In downplaying British and, indeed, Indian and Chinese agency in his account of the Sino-Indian War, Riedel does Kennedy a disservice. The American president, as he often bemoaned to his officials, found that his capacity to influence events on the ground in South Asia was far more limited than Riedel suggests.
Moreover, actions taken by Kennedy during and in the immediate aftermath of the border conflict often produced disappointing and unintended outcomes. Preoccupied with events in Cuba, the White House was slower and less effective in responding to the border war than Riedel contends. Having secured an unprecedented degree of Indian goodwill following a somewhat tardy show of military and political support for Nehru’s government, Kennedy and his British ally squandered a gilt-edged opportunity to place Western relations with India on a more intimate and constructive footing. Riedel argues that Kennedy’s reaction to events in India in late 1962 saw New Delhi’s military ties with Washington witness ‘a dramatic improvement’ (p.160), with US, British and Indian fighter pilots conducting joint training exercises in the subcontinent in 1963. But, this tells only part of the story. Riedel neglects to add that, later the same year, and to the Pentagon’s dismay, Nehru’s government summarily cancelled a second round of military manoeuvres involving Indian and US forces. In truth, the Kennedy’s administration’s clumsy efforts to broker a closer military relationship with India were beset by American vacillation and hedging. Washington offered India insufficient military aid to win New Delhi over as an ally, but more than enough to fracture the US alliance with Pakistan.
The thesis at the heart of Riedel’s book, that Kennedy’s management of the Sino-Indian War was deft and effective, and has been unfairly obscured by a long shadow cast by the Cuban Missile Crisis, is flawed. In time, revisionists may construct a compelling argument for assessing John F. Kennedy’s record as a foreign policymaker in South Asia in a more benign and positive light. In Bruce Riedel’s study, however, the case remains unmade.