S Paul Kapur, an knowledgeable on India-Pakistan safety and nuclear points, is prone to be the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, the highest job for the area in America’s diplomatic arm, folks accustomed to the event stated.
Kapur will substitute Donald Lu, who was requested to depart the place with the shift within the administration, as soon as the Senate confirms him. For now, Eric Meyer, who final served because the US Chargé d’Affaires in Oslo, is the senior bureau official for the area.
A professor within the division of nationwide safety affairs within the US Naval Put up Graduate College and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Establishment, Kapur served within the State Division’s coverage planning staff within the remaining yr of the Trump presidency the place he labored on South Asia. Kapur has additionally taught on the Claremont McKenna School and has been a visiting professor at Stanford.
His books embrace Jihad as Grand Technique: Islamist Militancy, Nationwide Safety and the Pakistani State and Harmful Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Battle in South Asia. He’s additionally the co-author of India, Pakistan and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia and co-editor of The Challenges of Nuclear Safety: U.S. and Indian Views. Kapur did his PhD on the College of Chicago. In response to his bio, Kapur additionally runs US-India Observe 1.5 dialogues for the Division of Protection.
In a 2023 essay co-written with Observer Analysis Basis’s Harsh Pant, Kapur famous that the US-India strategic partnership had an virtually inevitable feeling about it. “The necessity to guarantee a free and open Indo-Pacific area, stability rising Chinese language energy, and improve prosperity by means of commerce and different financial cooperation creates incentives which can be very sturdy.” He additionally famous the emergence of recent establishments from Quad to I2U2 as proof.
However regardless of incentives and constructions, Kapur (and Pant) warned that the deepening of the connection was not inevitable. “The efficient formulation and execution of cooperative insurance policies requires cautious administration. Insufficient administration leaves both nation with the unmet expectations of the opposite, resulting in disagreements and acrimony, as in India-US discord over the conflict in Ukraine…and to met financial promise, as within the lack of a US-India free commerce settlement.”
In one other essay, Kapur, together with tutorial Sumit Ganguly, famous that the India-US safety relationship had largely been concerning the US aiding India with high-end army gear to construct India’s army capability to withstand Chinese language coercion. “A powerful and genuinely impartial India will essentially impede Chinese language efforts to withstand hegemony within the Indo-Pacific area.”
Kapur (and Ganguly) additionally proposed 5 methods to deepen ties — specializing in Indian army capacity-building together with by means of co-production initiatives; increasing joint strategic efforts in new areas together with by means of friendshoring of provide chains to India; basing the connection on shared strategic pursuits slightly than ethical convergences; the US “avoiding” deepening ties with Pakistan, for this may “hurt US relationship with India, ignore Pakistan’s lengthy historical past of help for terrorism, and play immediately into China’s fingers”; and India and the US actively managing their diplomatic relationship.
All of that is music to the ears of Indian policymakers and the strategic neighborhood. With an knowledgeable who is aware of the area properly taking excessive South Asia job, India can have yet another pleasant interlocutor in a crucial purposeful and decision-making place within the Trump administration.
