Along with the United States, China and India are projected to be the three largest global economies within the next two decades or so. How Asia's rising giants behave in the international system and how they relate with the system's leading power, the United States, will have major implications for the system's stability. In different ways, the two books under review help us understand what Asia's rising powers want. However, while George J. Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham are motivated by the implications for the United States of the rise of China and India, especially from the perspective of American policy toward these states, Andrew Bingham Kennedy is more interested in understanding China and India on their own terms, and he focuses on the foreign policy ambitions of the most important Chinese and Indian leaders of the twentieth century, Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Gilboy and Heginbotham's work is a systematic comparison of Chinese and Indian strategic behavior along four dimensions—strategic culture, foreign policy and use of force, military modernization (including defense spending and doctrinal developments), and economic strategies. At the same time, these authors are also interested in exploring whether democratic India and authoritarian China are likely to exhibit divergent strategic behavior as a consequence of their different regime types. On the issue of regime type and foreign policy behavior, they analyze whether or not American and Indian foreign policy goals will tend to converge as a consequence of their shared democratic values. While there is no theoretical basis for this hypothesis, the authors believe that the possibility of foreign policy convergence is nevertheless important, given the prevalence of the view in official statements, and to a lesser extent in academic discourse, that such convergence is likely.

On the basis of their detailed analysis, Gilboy and Heginbotham conclude that Indian and Chinese strategic behavior since both countries emerged as modern nation-states in the mid-twentieth century (1947 and 1949, respectively) is not widely divergent. For example, the authors argue that both of these states have shown a similar propensity in using force in support of their perceived national interests; that they are both moving toward offensively oriented operational military doctrines; that they are both equally interested in cultivating ties with states such as Iran and Sudan that the United States considers “rogue regimes”; and that an analysis of their strategic cultures does not provide any grounds for expecting different strategic behavior from these states. Their analysis leads them to conclude that the United States faces a “dual challenge” in Asia as a consequence of the simultaneous rise of China and India, and, thus, the United States needs to rethink the conventional wisdom among policymakers in Washington (and even among some academics) that leads them to view China as a potential competitor and India as a potential partner.

That China and India have exhibited similar strategic behavior since their emergence as modern nation-states is an important finding, and Gilboy and Heginbotham must be applauded for forcefully arguing this point; however, their analysis of the various dimensions of Chinese and Indian strategic behavior is not without important issues. For example, while noting the “logical and methodological” issues involved with the concept of strategic culture, they reduce their analysis to only the “classic texts” of China and India. The exclusive reliance on Kautilya's Arthashastra for understanding India's strategic culture is problematic for a number of reasons, but especially because the text itself was “lost” to history for several hundred years and was only “rediscovered” in the first decade of the twentieth century. Moreover, the Arthashastra is a strategic manual for the ruler of a small state in the subcontinent who wants to create a large subcontinental-sized polity. Arguably, the Republic of India is already this subcontinental-sized polity, and the Arthashastra has little to say about the strategic behavior of such a state. Finally, there are no book-length analyses of the Arthashastra written by India-based scholars (with the exception of translations) and no studies on how the Arthashastra should (or already does) inform contemporary Indian foreign policy. In other words, it is not clear if this text indeed forms the basis of Indian strategic culture. It must be noted that Gilboy and Heginbotham make one passing reference (along with one solitary citation) to another ancient Indian text, the Mahabharata.

In spite of the flaws in their methodology, the authors make an important contribution by showing that there is little difference between the strategic behaviors of contemporary China and India, such as in their propensity to use force in support of their foreign policy goals or in their voting record vis-à-vis the United States on United Nations General Assembly resolutions. By doing so, they are correct to show that the rise of India will present the United States with challenges that Washington needs to pay attention to as America “hedges” against China by helping to increase India's power as a potential partner. However, their neglect of two important factors in their analysis leaves their study incomplete for US-China and US-India relations, especially in the context of the emerging US-China-India triangle.

Firstly, Gilboy and Heginbotham fail to account for the presence of the US-China and China-India “rivalry” in their analysis. While China and India may be equally likely to use force in support of their national interests, China has been involved in a number of militarized crises with the United States in addition to fighting one major war, the 1950–53 Korean War. On the other hand, India and the United States have not been involved in any militarized crises, let alone wars. Similarly, while both China and India are moving toward offensively oriented operational military doctrines, the Chinese military is modernizing with conflict scenarios involving the United States as a consequence of the US-China rivalry. The Indian military is focused instead on its two traditional rivals, Pakistan and China, rather than on the United States. Although the authors acknowledge the importance of Taiwan for the US-China relationship, there is more to the US-China rivalry, which also includes a “positional” element. (On rivalries, see Michael P. Colaresi, Karen Rasler, and William R. Thompson, Strategic Rivalries in World Politics, 2007). So even as China and India may exhibit similar strategic behavior, the presence of the US-China rivalry means that Washington is often the target of China's strategic actions. However, this situation does not arise in the US-India relationship. Therefore, the challenges presented by the rise of China and India look fundamentally different from Washington's perspective, and the simultaneous existence of the China-India rivalry presents India as an important US partner in Asia.

Secondly, Gilboy and Heginbotham ignore the fact that unlike India, China has the potential to displace the United States as the “lead economy” in the international system. By many estimates, China is well on its way to becoming the largest global economy by 2020 or so. The conflict potential inherent in such a “power transition” is completely absent in the US-India relationship. Furthermore, given its demography, India is the only other major Asian state capable of balancing China in the long run (even as Japan will remain a useful Asian player in the near to medium term). The absence of a US-India rivalry, coupled with India's economic potential in the context of China's rise, make trends in Indian and Chinese strategic behavior appear very different when looked at from Washington, but Gilboy and Heginbotham are not fully cognizant of this.

Unlike Chinese and Indian Strategic Behavior, which is driven by the implications of the rise of China and India for the United States, The International Ambitions of Mao and Nehru aims to explain China and India on their own terms by focusing on the “national efficacy beliefs” of these leaders. Kennedy's work is theoretically supple, provides agency to individual leaders, and draws extensively from the vast literature in political psychology. In contrast to explaining a state's foreign policy behavior by looking at its material capabilities (or the perceptions of its leaders of its material capabilities), Kennedy looks at Mao's and Nehru's national efficacy beliefs, or the convictions about the ability of one's state to accomplish specific military and diplomatic tasks.

More specifically, Kennedy looks at a leader's “martial efficacy”—beliefs about the ability of its military to overcome material disadvantages—and “moral efficacy”—beliefs that inspire leaders in costly forms of cooperation—to argue that leaders not only respond to systemic pressures but also possess the agency to accomplish important goals in international relations. Based on the operationalization of these variables, Kennedy derives a number of hypotheses, which he then systematically tests across a wide range of cases. In the case of China, he tests his hypotheses to explain Mao's decision to intervene in the Korean War in 1950 and his decision to reject cease-fire negotiations in 1951 in terms of his martial efficacy. He also explains Mao's decision regarding the involvement of Chinese troops in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, as well as his conservative approach to nuclear arms control. In the case of India, Kennedy tests his hypotheses to explain Nehru's bold decision to approach the UN Security Council as a consequence of the 1947–48 India–Pakistan War over Kashmir. The author also explains how Nehru's moral efficacy shaped India's approach toward nuclear disarmament. Finally, he sheds light on India's approach toward Tibet and Nehru's more forceful policy toward China in September 1962.

Kennedy is theoretically innovative and provides rich and detailed case studies based upon research in India, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His in-depth cases cannot be ignored by any scholar trying to understand Chinese and Indian foreign policy behavior under Mao and Nehru, respectively. However, Kennedy's work raises an important theoretical question. In terms of explaining a state's foreign policy, what is the difference in utility between an analysis based on a leader's threat perceptions and one based on that leader's national efficacy beliefs? It is very likely that explanations based on these cognitive variables at the individual level of analysis complement each other and work best in tandem. Kennedy's book is thus an important theoretical contribution that broadens the research agenda of the cognitive approach to foreign policymaking.

With the publication of these two books, China–India comparisons that have been quite common in the field of comparative political economy have finally spilled over into the domain of international relations and foreign policymaking. This is an important development given the importance of these states for Asian security and for the United States.