In many ways, this book sums up my perspective of international relations of my time, a subject that I have taught and lectured around for over thirty years, in India and abroad. This analysis is pegged around the quest for security, which has been the central concern of the era.

During my periodic visits to Europe, and to the United States for the first time as a Fulbright Professor in the late-eighties, I have often felt a little uneasy with some of the axiomatic assumptions of western scholarship in international relations and consequently, their theoretical generalisations. This has been particularly striking in the case of the many American scholars that I have inter-acted with, in my long professional career. In fact, the more high-profile they have been, the more I have found them asserting certitudes on global issues, which ab-initio appeared to be contestable to me. This experience was in sharp contrast to my student days in Heidelberg, where many young American draft-dodgers (unfortunately not Clinton or Bush) in the tumultuous ‘New Left’ era of the anti-Vietnam war protests, would gather in the university, escaping from the nearby Mark Twain and Patrick Henry villages in the US military base, to share with our cross-cultural group of students, over mugs of beer, so many things in common on Vietnam, on the world, and on life.

While I have not had any good reason to drastically change my views on many of those issues since then, I have often wondered how and why my generation of Americans, who shared so much with me in common in their youth, view the world so differently now?