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Synopsis Based on more recently declassified documents of the United States, this book examines the American decision in February 1954 to provide military aid to Pakistan for the modernization and expansion of its armed forces. That decision was a momentous development for the international politics of the Indian intervention in the postwar period by a superpower in the affairs of the subcontinent, and in the process generated a rivalry with the other superpower in the interstate politics of the region. This book provides an in-depth investigation of the motivations of the United States in undertaking this enormously important step. On the basis of formerly classified documents pertaining to South Asia, it underlines that containment as U.A. policy is addressed more broadly to middle or regional powers like India that aspire to the status of independent centers of power, and not simply limited to the Soviet Union. The central ideas of the book are of paramount significance to the understanding of international politics of various regional systems in the 1990s, especially now that the globe has once again been transformed into a unipolar world under American hegemony.