Description
What causes leaders, operating within comparable structural constraints, to interpret the same foreign state in radically different ways? This paper develops an affective-cognitive account of presidential perceptions through a comparative study of John F. Kennedy’s and Richard Nixon’s images of India. For Cold War Washington, India was neither ally nor adversary, but an interpretive provocation that was democratic yet non-aligned, postcolonial yet geopolitically indispensable, and rhetorically anti-imperial yet institutionally closer to the West than to the communist bloc. A diachronic comparison of U.S. foreign policy toward India reveals that the same strategic indeterminacy could be read through strikingly different presidential logics. In Kennedy’s case, the Sino-Indian War placed India within a narrative of democratic vulnerability, making its survival appear consequential not just for Asian balance-of-power politics, but the political future of the postcolonial world. Nixon’s India, by contrast, emerged from the Bangladesh crisis as a self-righteous, Soviet-leaning power whose regional ambitions imperiled the Pakistan channel to China and affronted his sense of presidential authority. Drawing on archival documents, memoranda, oral histories, and crisis-era discourse, including newly declassified pre-presidential and crisis-era materials from the Nixon and Kennedy archives, this paper advances a conceptual account of how leaders stabilize ambiguity into meaning, contributing to debates on interpretation, emotion, and cognition in foreign-policy analysis and great-power strategy.