Choices: Inside the Making of India's Foreign Policy (Geopolitics in the 21st Century) Hardcover – October 18, 2016

very good description of India's foreign policy.

Given his long stint in Beijing and in New Delhi gives Menon first hand knowledge of what he is talking about. His observation of the Mumbai attacks and how Pakistan as society is hard wired as far as terror goes makes for very gloomy reading. This adds to the steady drum beat of assessments by Barack Obama, Madeleine Albright, Christine Fair and Christopher Jaffrelot.Separately, The perspectives from the inside esp. on how PVN handled China border issue is a rare insight into this much under praised great Prime Minister of India (probably the best Prime Minister the Congress ever managed to produce)

very satisfied with the delivery.

“Choices – Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy” by Shivshankar Menon is a major disappointment despite glowing reviews, mostly (and not surprisingly) by American ‘experts’ who have essentially been allowed to run the show. It shows the debasement of India’s foreign service and foreign policy that have come to lack the independence, vision, and self assertion as a nation of the young independent India led by brilliant minds like those of Jawaharlal Nehru whose understanding of the machinations of international powers remains unmatched even today. The chapter (27 pages) on India's nuclear posture and its 'No First Strike' policy is a strong exception. The most reassuring part, however, is the last chapter that asserts the author's unquestionable pride and patriotism as an Indian as also India's commitment to gain its deserved destiny in the least disruptive and constructive manner.The ink is hardly dry, and yet the wisdom or even the pragmatism of economic cooperation with China is belied by its unprincipled support of terrorists and terrorist actors that only confirms it as a nation not to be trusted. The book is laudatory on the 123 Agreement with the USA on civil nuclear cooperation but remains vague on what was really given up, with annoying levels of sycophancy towards Manmohan Singh whom history will judge, in the long run, as having undermined India’s independence substantially. Nowhere is the debasement of Indian foreign policy and its key architects seen than in the apologetic explanations offered for not punishing severely the perpetrators of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. India can stop Pakistani terrorism only by making it too expensive for it and its citizens even to think of indulging in it, and in that effort India has to learn to ignore so-called international (i.e., mainly US) opinion rather than to become constrained by it.More than the price which is indeed insignificant, what will irk a true Indian is the hypocrisy that attempts to paint the actors as successful and having accomplished much, even as the economic benefits their policies have provided are at the expense of uneven development and selling the bulk of the brightest of the nation to enrich others than itself. When will India and Indians really recognize their economic power and begin to exercise it in pursuance of its legitimate demands for security and freedom from terrorism and external meddling?