Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960’s with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States moving closer to Pakistan. But articles like this demonstrate that the situation may have been more complex than that.
Of course geopolitics can sometimes change quickly. The leadership in the US and in India did change between 1965, the early 1970’s and the late 1970’s so that was a factor as well.
The US shifted to becoming de facto allied with China in the early 1970s as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, and Pakistan helped with the initial backdoor diplomacy [0][1] that lead to US-Chinese normalization in the 1970s.
India, having fought a war against both Pakistan and China in the 1960s, pivoted to the Soviet Union as a result, who were also miffed at China because of the Sino-Soviet split and were looking for a bulwark.
> Historians of this time period usually describe India as having a more frigid relationship with America by the mid 1960’s with India moving closer to the Soviet Union and the United States moving closer to Pakistan
A major reason was Brzezinski - LBJ and later Carter's foreign policy czar.
He was a "realist" whose primary goal was boxing in the USSR (he spent his early childhood in Moscow during the Stalinist purge and Poland before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). As such, he pivoted the US away from India in favor of Pakistan and China.
The is why the US went from building IITs and allowing it's tech companies like Burroughs and IBM building joint ventures in 1960s India to de facto sanctions in the 1970s.
Kissinger followed a similar policy as Brzezinski, and IMO a major reason was that both grew up in pre-War Europe and their past experiences colored their views as a result.
[0] - https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2015/10/pakistan-and-ch...
[1] - https://www.isas.nus.edu.sg/papers/pakistan-china-relations-...
I've watched 2 or 3 hours of videos and that isn't what I took away. She does argue that a rules based international order, free trade, democracy and liberalism is a superior system to authoritarianism, but I don't think too many people (in the West, at least) would disagree with that.
I'd recommend following academics affiliated with the FSI@Stanford or the Fairbanks Center@Harvard instead. They tend to be the ones most in touch with policymakers on both sides of the Pacific, and are often a conduit for Track 1.5 and Track 2 dialogues.
There has been a deluge of academics in the US entering "China studies" in the same way you saw "Mid East experts" proliferate in the 2000s and "Kremlinologists" in the 1980s-90s.
That was my take. I don't know that she calls herself that. She certainly seems very knowledgeable about China (and Japan and Russia).
From Wikipedia:
"She spent ten years on her doctoral research in Russian and Chinese history at Columbia University, which included five years of research and language study in China, Taiwan, Russia, Japan, and Australia.'
Most of her early research on China was with regards to Imperial Russia and Imperial China's rivalry in East and North Asia (ended up being published into a book back in the 1980s [0]), but was largely superficial and done in the context of US-China normalization in the 70s as a check against the USSR. Her limited Putonghua fluency is a major issue as well for someone who is a supposed China scholar.
Much of her work about that time period has been superseded by Yuhua Wang [1] and other younger and more quantitative scholars who took more of an institutionalist approach.
Even during my (limited) time, she was not viewed as a significant academic in the space - that remains to be students of John Fairbanks, Kenneth Lieberthal, Mary Gallagher, Rodrick MacFarquhar, and Yasheng Huang because a large portion of Chinese decisionmakers today either studied under them or under faculty who were advised by them in the 1980s-2000s period.
Furthermore, she has a history of media self promotion, and the loudest academics (especially on YouTube) tend to be the least regarded, because media engagements are such a time sink that it means you aren't really participating in policymaking adjacent work like Track Diplomacy.
This is why I take a dim view of her - she started off in the 70s as a Latin America researcher who pivoted to Russian history in the 80s, Japanese history in the 90s, Naval history in the 2000s when trying to get tenure, and China recently in the 2010s. These aren't the hallmarks of a domain expert and I say this as someone who studied under a couple of those. Instead, these are the hallmarks of a pop academic like Perun or Michio Kaku (if you want a STEM equivalent).
Heck, she's started trying to pivot/shoehorn India studies over the past 2 years the same way as the others becuase there is a vacuum in the field now that the most relevant contemporary India academics in the US (Raghuram Rajan, Aravind Subramanian, Karthik Subramanian, Ashutosh Varshney, Karthik Muralidharan, Nirupam Bajpai, and Milan Vaishav) have taken steps back from US academia because they are all either transitioning or transitioned into Indian policymaking roles, or like Ashley Tellis were caught in a Biden-era espionage investigation for leaking documents on behalf of China [2] around the same time his public advocacy suddenly shifted from being China-antagonistic and India-leaning to China-leaning and India-antagonistic [3] (2021-24 period). Now that "Indo-Pac Studies" is where academic funding in the policy space has started shifting towards, and the vacuum that has developed, grifters like Paine are trying to enter the field like they did China studies 15 years ago and MidEast studies 20 years ago.
[0] - https://www.routledge.com/Imperial-Rivals-China-Russia-and-T...
[1] - https://yuhuawang.scholars.harvard.edu/
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/indian-born-...
[3] - https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/ashley-j-tellis
In the eyes of contemporary NatSec leadership like Kissinger (Nixon, Ford) and Brzezinski (LBJ, Carter), leveraging the Sino-Soviet split to box in the Soviets was the ideal option.
As such, from 1972-1992 the US posted soldiers in Xinjiang monitoring the USSR [0], sponsored govenrnent led tech transfers and scientific collaboration [1], provided support for Chinese military modernization [2][3], and expanded economic cooperation [4].
This also played a role as to why US intel in the 2000s assumed Xi Jinping would be pro-American [5], as he started his career working on the US supported modernization of the PLA as a junior secretary to Geng Biao [6] - who was the primary reason the Maoist regime was overthrown in the 1970s.
By the 1970s, the primary NatSec goal was blocking the USSR, and as a result realism became the primary foreign policy strategy used by the US. As such, you ended up seeing policies like ditching India and Taiwan in favor of Pakistan and China, supporting communist Somalia over not-really-communist Dergist Ethiopia during the Ogaden War, and swaying then Soviet-aligned Egypt in favor of the US by cultivating Anwar Sadat and culminating in the Camp David Accords.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/18/world/us-and-peking-join-...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S.%E2%80%93China_Agreement_o...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1981/06/17/world/us-decides-to-sell-...
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/04/archives/study-urges-us-a...
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/26/business/us-china-investm...
[5] - https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09BEIJING3128_a.html
manarth•6h ago