US Hegemony in World Politics

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: "US Hegemony in World Politics" was Chapter 3 of Contemporary World Politics until the rationalisation of 2022-23 dropped it; the current book (Reprint 2026-27) still refers to the US as "the sole superpower" in its first chapter, asks in its South Asia chapter why that chapter is not called "Indian Hegemony" when "the chapter on US was called 'US Hegemony'", and devotes a section of its chapter on international organisations to "the UN in a unipolar world". This page keeps the dropped chapter from the 2020-21 edition, labelled as such, because GS2 keeps asking its questions: whether China is a graver challenge to the US "than the erstwhile Soviet Union" (Mains 2021), whether NATO's expansion and "a stronger US-Europe strategic partnership" work for India (Mains 2023), the significance of Indo-US against Indo-Russian defence deals (Mains 2020), the Quad (Mains 2020), AUKUS (Mains 2021) and the US-Iran nuclear controversy's effect on India (Mains 2018). Prelims tests the operations and dates, the three kinds of hegemony, and the India-US nuclear deal's chronology. This page follows the dropped chapter's sections in order, quotes NCERT's text and its boxes (including the Lok Sabha extracts the exercises test), prints NCERT's figures first, and dates the India-US record from 2005 to 2026 to the official documents as read in October 2026.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Hegemony is not the same as being a superpower. NCERT prefers "hegemony" to "unipolarity" because "pole" is "a misapplication of the idea ... derived from physics"; hegemony describes "an international system with only one centre of power". It began, "largely", in 1991, with two riders: "some aspects of US hegemony did not emerge in 1991 but in fact go back to the end of the Second World War in 1945", and "the US did not start behaving like a hegemonic power right from 1991; it became clear much later that the world was in fact living in a period of hegemony".

Three meanings, three people. NCERT's device is Ayesha, Jabu and Andrei: a Baghdad schoolgirl who lost a leg to a missile (hegemony as hard power), a Durban artist whose father wants him to do an MBA (hegemony as structural power), and a Perth teenager in blue jeans (hegemony as soft power). Every event in the chapter should be sorted into one of the three.

The constraints are inside the hegemon. "History tells us that empires decline because they decay from within. Similarly, the biggest constraints to American hegemony lie within the heart of hegemony itself." NCERT's three are the American state's "institutional architecture", "the open nature of American society", and NATO. Not the UN, not international law, not rival powers: a distinction that separates the NCERT answer from the coaching answer.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

The Chapter at a Glance

Dates and Figures (NCERT's figures first; the record named in each row)

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Beginning of the "New World Order"

"The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union took everyone by surprise. While one of the two superpowers ceased to exist, the other remained with all its powers intact, even enhanced." Hence hegemony "began in 1991", with the two riders in First Principles.

"In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, rapidly occupying and subsequently annexing it. After a series of diplomatic attempts failed at convincing Iraq to quit its aggression, the United Nations mandated the liberation of Kuwait by force. For the UN, this was a dramatic decision after years of deadlock during the Cold War. The US President George H.W. Bush hailed the emergence of a 'new world order'." "A massive coalition force of 660,000 troops from 34 countries fought against Iraq and defeated it in what came to be known as the First Gulf War. However, the UN operation, which was called 'Operation Desert Storm', was overwhelmingly American. An American general, Norman Schwarzkopf, led the UN coalition and nearly 75 per cent of the coalition forces were from the US. Although the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, had promised 'the mother of all battles', the Iraqi forces were quickly defeated and forced to withdraw from Kuwait." The war "revealed the vast technological gap that had opened up between the US military capability and that of other states": "smart bombs" led observers to call it "a 'computer war'", and television "made it a 'video game war'". "Incredibly, the US may actually have made a profit from the war", receiving "more money from countries like Germany, Japan and Saudi Arabia than it had spent". NCERT's photograph of the "Highway of Death" between Kuwait and Basra records that "many observers have called it a 'war crime'".

The Clinton Years

"Despite winning the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush lost the US presidential elections of 1992 to William Jefferson (Bill) Clinton of the Democratic Party, who had campaigned on domestic rather than foreign policy issues. Bill Clinton won again in 1996 and thus remained the president of the US for eight years." In foreign policy "the Clinton government tended to focus on 'soft issues' like democracy promotion, climate change and world trade rather than on the 'hard politics' of military power and security". Yet "the US on occasion did show its readiness to use military power": "the most important episode occurred in 1999, in response to Yugoslavian actions against the predominantly Albanian population in the province of Kosovo. The air forces of the NATO countries, led by the US, bombarded targets around Yugoslavia for well over two months, forcing the downfall of the government of Slobodan Milosevic and the stationing of a NATO force in Kosovo." And "in response to the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania in 1998", attributed to Al-Qaeda, "President Clinton ordered Operation Infinite Reach, a series of cruise missile strikes on Al-Qaeda terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. The US did not bother about the UN sanction or provisions of international law in this regard. It was alleged that some of the targets were civilian facilities unconnected to terrorism. In retrospect, this was merely the beginning."

9/11 and the "Global War on Terror"

"On 11 September 2001, nineteen hijackers hailing from a number of Arab countries took control of four American commercial aircraft shortly after takeoff and flew them into important buildings in the US. One airliner each crashed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. A third aircraft crashed into the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia, where the US Defence Department is headquartered. The fourth aircraft, presumably bound for the Capitol building of the US Congress, came down in a field in Pennsylvania." NCERT explains the name: "in America the convention is to write the month first, followed by the date; hence the short form '9/11' instead of '11/9' as we would write in India". "The attacks killed nearly three thousand persons"; in shock they "have been compared to the British burning of Washington, DC in 1814 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941", and "in terms of loss of life, 9/11 was the most severe attack on US soil since the founding of the country in 1776".

"The US response to 9/11 was swift and ferocious." George W. Bush, "son of the earlier President George H. W. Bush", "had a much harder view of US interests and of the means by which to advance them. As a part of its 'Global War on Terror', the US launched 'Operation Enduring Freedom' against all those suspected to be behind this attack, mainly Al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Taliban regime was easily overthrown, but remnants of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda have remained potent." "The US forces made arrests all over the world, often without the knowledge of the government of the persons being arrested, transported these persons across countries and detained them in secret prisons. Some of them were brought to Guantanamo Bay, a US Naval base in Cuba, where the prisoners did not enjoy the protection of international law or the law of their own country or that of the US. Even the UN representatives were not allowed to meet these prisoners." The legal authority at home was the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which became Public Law 107-40 on 18 September 2001.

The Iraq Invasion

"On 19 March 2003, the US launched its invasion of Iraq under the codename 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'. More than forty other countries joined in the US-led 'coalition of the willing' after the UN refused to give its mandate to the invasion. The ostensible purpose of the invasion was to prevent Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Since no evidence of WMD has been unearthed in Iraq, it is speculated that the invasion was motivated by other objectives, such as controlling Iraqi oilfields and installing a regime friendly to the US." "Although the government of Saddam Hussein fell swiftly, the US has not been able to 'pacify' Iraq. Instead, a full-fledged insurgency against US occupation was ignited in Iraq. While the US has lost over 3,000 military personnel in the war, Iraqi casualties are very much higher. It is conservatively estimated that 50,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US-led invasion. It is now widely recognised that the US invasion of Iraq was, in some crucial respects, both a military and political failure."

What Does Hegemony Mean?

"Politics is about power." Countries "are engaged in constantly trying to gain and retain power ... in the form of military domination, economic power, political clout and cultural superiority". During the Cold War "power was divided between the two groups of countries"; "the collapse of the Soviet Union left the world with only a single power, the United States of America. Sometimes, the international system dominated by a sole superpower, or hyper-power, is called a 'unipolar' system. This appears to be a misapplication of the idea of 'pole' derived from physics. It may be more appropriate to describe an international system with only one centre of power by the term 'hegemony'." "The roots of the word hegemony lie in classical Greek. The word implies the leadership or predominance of one state, and was originally used to denote the preponderant position of Athens vis-à-vis the other city-states of ancient Greece." The three meanings are in the key-term box.

Hegemony as Hard Power

"The bedrock of contemporary US power lies in the overwhelming superiority of its military power. American military dominance today is both absolute and relative. In absolute terms, the US today has military capabilities that can reach any point on the planet accurately, lethally and in real time, thereby crippling the adversary while its own forces are sheltered to the maximum extent possible from the dangers of war. But even more awesome than the absolute capabilities of the US is the fact that no other power today can remotely match them. The US today spends more on its military capability than the next 12 powers combined" (NCERT's graphic: "Top 15 defence budgets 2017", from the IISS Military Balance 2018, with the note that "most of the other countries that are big military spenders are US friends and allies. Thus, balancing US power is not a feasible strategy today"). "A large chunk of the Pentagon's budget goes into military research and development", so the dominance rests on "a qualitative gap, a technological chasm that no other power can at present conceivably span". Iraq "reveals several American vulnerabilities": "imperial powers through history have used military forces to accomplish only four tasks: to conquer, deter, punish and police. As the Iraq invasion shows, the American capacity to conquer is formidable. Similarly, the US capability to deter and to punish is self-evident. Where US military capability has thus far been shown to have serious weaknesses is in policing an occupied territory." NCERT's map of the six geographic commands shows that "the commands of the US military are not limited to the area of the United States; it extends to include the whole world".

Hegemony as Structural Power

The concept and the public-goods examples are in the key-term boxes. "The US is present in all parts of the world, in all sectors of the world economy and in all areas of technology. The US share of the world economy remains an enormous 21 per cent. The US also accounts for almost 14 per cent of world trade, if intra-European Union trade is included in world trade data. There is not a single sector of the world economy in which an American firm does not feature in the 'top three' list." "The economic preponderance of the US is inseparable from its structural power, which is the power to shape the global economy in a particular way. After all, the Bretton Woods system, set up by the US after the Second World War, still constitutes the basic structure of the world economy. Thus, we can regard the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organisation (WTO) as the products of American hegemony." NCERT's graphic contrasts GDP at market rates with purchasing power parity, under which "the US faces credible competitors in the world economy" (page 4 carries the World Bank's 2025 figures). "A classic example of the structural power of the US is the academic degree called the Master's in Business Administration (MBA). The idea that business is a profession that depends upon skills that can be taught in a university is uniquely American. The first business school in the world, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, was established in 1881. The first MBA courses were initiated around 1900. The first MBA course outside the US was established only in 1950. Today, there is no country in the world in which the MBA is not a prestigious academic degree." That is Jabu's father.

Hegemony as Soft Power

"It would however be a mistake to see US hegemony in purely military and economic terms without considering the ideological or the cultural dimension of US hegemony." The third sense "is about the capacity to 'manufacture consent'": "hegemony implies class ascendancy in the social, political and particularly ideological spheres. Hegemony arises when the dominant class or country can win the consent of dominated classes, by persuading the dominated classes to view the world in a manner favourable to the ascendancy of the dominant class." "The predominance of the US in the world today is based not only on its military power and economic prowess, but also on its cultural presence. Whether we choose to recognise the fact or not, all ideas of the good life and personal success, most of the dreams of individuals and societies across the globe, are dreams churned out by practices prevailing in twentieth-century America. America is the most seductive, and in this sense the most powerful, culture on earth. This attribute is called 'soft power': the ability to persuade rather than coerce." Andrei's jeans: "when his parents were youngsters in the Soviet Union, blue jeans were the ultimate symbol of 'liberation' for their generation. Young men and women often spent over a year's salary to buy blue jeans from foreign tourists on the black market." "During the Cold War, the US found it difficult to score victories against the Soviet Union in the realm of hard power. It was in the area of structural power and soft power that the US scored notable victories": the world economy "remained a world capitalist economy", and "it was in the area of soft power that the US was ultimately triumphant", able "to engineer a generational divide in Soviet society on the basis of a cultural product".

Constraints on American Power

"History tells us that empires decline because they decay from within. Similarly, the biggest constraints to American hegemony lie within the heart of hegemony itself. We can identify three constraints on American power. None of these constraints seemed to operate in the years following 9/11. However, it now appears that all three of these constraints are slowly beginning to operate again." First, "the institutional architecture of the American state itself. A system of division of powers between the three branches of government places significant brakes upon the unrestrained and immoderate exercise of America's military power by the executive branch." Second, "the open nature of American society. Although the American mass media may from time to time impose or promote a particular perspective on domestic public opinion in the US, there is nevertheless a deep scepticism regarding the purposes and methods of government in American political culture. This factor, in the long run, is a huge constraint on US military action overseas." Third, "perhaps the most important": "There is only one organisation in the international system that could possibly moderate the exercise of American power today, and that is the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The US obviously has an enormous interest in keeping the alliance of democracies that follow the market economies alive and therefore it is possible that its allies in the NATO will be able to moderate the exercise of US hegemony." NCERT's photographs of the 2004 exhibition on the human costs of the Iraq war illustrate the second constraint.

India's Relationship with the US

"During the Cold War years, India found itself on the opposite side of the divide from the US. India's closest friendship during those years was with the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, India suddenly found itself friendless in an increasingly hostile international environment. However, these were also the years when India decided to liberalise its economy and integrate it with the global economy. This policy and India's impressive economic growth rates in recent years have made the country an attractive economic partner for a number of countries including the US." Two new factors, "the technological dimension and the role of the Indian-American diaspora", which "are interrelated": NCERT's facts are that "the US absorbs about 65 per cent of India's total exports in the software sector", "35 per cent of the technical staff of Boeing is estimated to be of Indian origin", "300,000 Indians work in Silicon Valley", and "15 per cent of all high-tech start-ups are by Indian-Americans" (NCERT's figures, of its edition).

"Within India, the debate seems to be around three possible strategies." First, "those Indian analysts who see international politics largely in terms of military power are fearful of the growing closeness between India and the US. They would prefer that India maintains its aloofness from Washington and focuses upon increasing its own comprehensive national power." Second, "other analysts see the growing convergence of interests between the US and India as a historic opportunity for India. They advocate a strategy that would allow India to take advantage of US hegemony and the mutual convergences to establish the best possible options for itself. Opposing the US, they argue, is a futile strategy that will only hurt India in the long run." Third, "a third group of analysts would advocate that India should take the lead in establishing a coalition of countries from the developing world. Over time, this coalition would become more powerful and may succeed in weaning the hegemon away from its dominating ways." NCERT's own view: "India-US relations are perhaps too complex to be managed by a single strategy. India needs to develop an appropriate mix of foreign policy strategies to deal with the US."

The Lok Sabha debate (NCERT's box, which exercise 8 tests). Dr Manmohan Singh (Congress): "I would respectfully urge this august House to recognise the changed mood of the world towards India. This is not to say that power politics is a thing of the past; that there will never be any attempt to twist our arms. We will protect ourselves to ensure against the risks that are there. But it would be wrong for us not to take advantage of the opportunities that are now on the horizon. I sincerely believe that it is in the interest of our country to have good relations with all the major powers. I make no apology that we seek good relations with the United States. The United States is a pre-eminent power." Shri Basu Deb Acharia (CPI(M)): "Since Independence, we have been pursuing independent foreign policy because of our national interest. What have we seen in case of Iraq and in case of Iran? After the July statement, and when there was voting in International Atomic Energy Agency, we found that we sided with the United States of America. ... There we find that the independent foreign policy has been affected." Maj. Gen. (Retd.) B. C. Khanduri (BJP): "today US is — whether we like it or not — the only super power in this unipolar world. But at the same time, we must also remember that India is also emerging as a world power, and a super power. Therefore, we feel that we should have good relations with the USA in the international scenario, but it should not be at the cost of our security." NCERT asks: "Are these three positions in some way linked to the three strategies mentioned in the chapter?"

How Can Hegemony Be Overcome?

"How long will hegemony last? How do we get beyond hegemony?" NCERT's Layne box answers from history: "by convention, we regard 1648 as the year in which the sovereign territorial state emerged as the principal actor in world politics. In the over three and a half centuries since then, there have been only two previous occasions when a single state succeeded in gaining preponderance in the system to a similar degree as the US predominates the system today. France from 1660 to 1713 in the context of European continental politics in the first instance of hegemony, Britain with its global maritime empire from 1860 to 1910 is the second." Both ended as "balance of power politics over time reduces the relative power of the hegemon": "by 1713, England, Habsburg Austria and Russia were contesting French power"; "by 1910, it was clear that Germany, Japan and the US had emerged as contenders to British power". So "twenty years from now, another great power, or may be a coalition of great powers could well emerge just as US capabilities are declining in relative terms".

For the present, "in international politics, very few factors formally curtail the exercise of military power by any country. There is no world government like the government of a country. ... international organisation is not world government. Thus, international politics is 'politics without government'." "In the short term, we must recognise that no single power is anywhere near balancing the US militarily. A military coalition against the US is even less likely given the differences that exist among big countries like China, India, and Russia that have the potential to challenge US hegemony." The options: bandwagon: "it is strategically more prudent to take advantage of the opportunities that hegemony creates", since "raising economic growth rates requires increased trade, technology transfers, and investment, which are best acquired by working with rather than against the hegemon"; hide: "staying as far removed from the dominant power as possible", as "China, Russia, the European Union—all of them, in different ways, are seeking to stay below the radar", which "would not seem to be viable for the big, second-rank powers for very long"; and resistance from non-state actors: "a combination of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), social movements, and public opinion; it may arise from sections of the media and intellectuals, artists, and writers", who "may well form links across national boundaries, including with Americans". NCERT's closing image: "in this global village, we are all neighbours of the village headman. If the behaviour of the headman becomes intolerable, we will not have the option of leaving the global village ... Resistance will then be the only option available."

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Three Frameworks

1. Hard, structural, soft. Classify every US action in a question before analysing it: Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom (hard); the dollar, Bretton Woods, the MBA, the tariffs of 2025 (structural); films, universities, jeans (soft). NCERT's claim that the US won the Cold War on structural and soft power is the frame for GS2 2021.

2. The three constraints, read in 2026. Institutions (the Supreme Court's IEEPA ruling of 20 February 2026 is the first constraint in action); open society (NCERT's "deep scepticism"); NATO (the alliance's 32 members and GS2 2023). Resist the coaching list (UN, law, rivals), which NCERT discusses elsewhere.

3. Three strategies, one mix. Aloofness, advantage, coalition. Map India's record onto them: the nuclear deal and the 2025 defence framework (advantage), BRICS and the SCO chairships (coalition), the refusal of alliance commitments and the Russia relationship (aloofness). NCERT's answer, "an appropriate mix", is the answer the examiner expects.

Confused Pairs

• First Gulf War (1991, UN resolution 678, 34 countries) vs Iraq invasion (2003, no UN mandate, "coalition of the willing").
• Operation Desert Storm (1991) vs Infinite Reach (1998) vs Enduring Freedom (2001) vs Iraqi Freedom (2003): NCERT's exercise 6.
• Unipolarity (a "pole", from physics) vs hegemony (predominance, from Greek).
• Hard power (coerce) vs structural power (set the rules and supply the public goods) vs soft power (persuade; "manufacture consent").
• NCERT's three constraints (institutions, open society, NATO) vs the coaching list (UN Charter, public opinion, rival powers).
• Bandwagon (work within the hegemonic system) vs hide (stay below the radar) vs resist (non-state actors).
• Joint statement (18 July 2005) vs Hyde Act (18 December 2006) vs NSG decision (6 September 2008) vs 123 Agreement (10 October 2008).
• A framework for an interim trade agreement (6-7 February 2026) vs a signed agreement (none recorded when this page was read).

Exam Strategy

• Prelims: memorise NCERT's dates and figures as printed (34 countries, 660,000, 75 per cent; "next 12 powers"; 21 per cent and 14 per cent; Wharton 1881; 1648, 1660-1713, 1860-1910), the four operations, the three meanings, the three constraints, the three strategies, and the nuclear-deal chronology.
• Mains: open with NCERT's two riders on when hegemony began; structure on hard, structural and soft; use the constraints and the "how to overcome" options; for India, the three strategies and the dated 2005-26 record; cite the National Security Strategy of 2002 and resolution 678 by name.
• Avoid: "the invasion began on 20 March 2003" without noting NCERT's 19 March; "the UN authorised the Iraq war"; "NCERT's constraints are the UN, public opinion and rival powers"; "the US withdrew from Iraq under Obama's agreement" (signed 17 November 2008); "the Glenn Amendment sanctions followed Pokhran-I" (the 1974 test was under President Nixon; the Glenn Amendment sanctions followed the 1998 tests); "an interim trade deal was signed in February 2026" (a framework was announced); unsourced counts of US bases or budgets.
• Cross-reading: page 1 (the Cold War this hegemony followed); page 2 (the Soviet collapse); page 4 (the centres that limit hegemony; the World Bank's PPP figures); page 6 (the UN in a unipolar world; the US withdrawals of 2026); the sister book's "Recent Developments" (the nuclear deal in India's politics).

Practice Questions

NCERT's exercises, worked

1. (d) is incorrect: NCERT's Layne box shows hegemony is not fixed ("it does not last forever"); (a), (b) and (c) are NCERT's statements.
2. (d) is wrong: "states, which violate international law, are severely punished by the UN" contradicts "politics without government"; (a), (b) and (c) are right.
3. (c) is wrong: "the action was taken with the prior approval of the UN" contradicts NCERT ("the UN refused to give its mandate"); (a), (b) and (d) match the text.
4. Hard: the Kosovo bombing of 1999 or Infinite Reach (1998). Structural: the dollar's role in trade and reserves, or the IMF's conditions on borrowers. Soft: American universities as the destination of ambitious students, or Hollywood's share of film audiences. (Examples other than the chapter's, as the exercise asks.)
5. No rival superpower; the ability to act without UN mandate (Iraq 2003) where the Cold War had required restraint; dominance of the world economy's rules through Bretton Woods and the WTO (1995); and a cultural reach no longer contested by a rival ideology.
6. (i) Operation Infinite Reach: (c) missile attack in Sudan; (ii) Operation Enduring Freedom: (a) war against Al-Qaeda and Taliban; (iii) Operation Desert Storm: (d) First Gulf War; (iv) Operation Iraqi Freedom: (b) coalition of the willing.
7. The institutional architecture of the American state (division of powers), the open nature of American society (scepticism of government), and NATO. NCERT expects the third to matter most; the 2026 ruling on tariffs shows the first operating.
8. Develop one extract into a speech: Singh's "changed mood of the world" and "good relations with all the major powers" (the advantage strategy); Acharia's "independent foreign policy" and the IAEA votes (the aloofness and coalition strategies); Khanduri's "not at the cost of our security" (advantage with limits).
9. Examine: NCERT argues that resistance "may not come from other states, which ... are powerless to confront the US today, but rather from non-state actors", through NGOs, movements, media and public opinion linking "across national boundaries, including with Americans"; their power is over consent (soft and structural hegemony), not over force. Opinion: non-state resistance can erode legitimacy and raise costs (NCERT's second constraint works through opinion) but cannot substitute for the institutional and alliance constraints, so the proposition is half right.

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers)

10. "It is in the area of soft power that the US was ultimately triumphant." Examine NCERT's claim about the Cold War and assess whether it still holds in a world of Chinese structural power. (GS2, 15 marks)
11. NCERT names three constraints on American power. Using the Supreme Court's ruling of 20 February 2026 on tariffs and NATO's record since 2022, assess which constraint has operated most. (GS2, 15 marks)
12. "India-US relations are perhaps too complex to be managed by a single strategy." Trace the relationship from the joint statement of 18 July 2005 to the defence framework of 31 October 2025 and the tariff episode of 2025-26, and identify the mix of NCERT's three strategies India has used. (GS2, 15 marks)
13. Distinguish the legal basis of Operation Desert Storm from that of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and explain why NCERT calls the latter "both a military and political failure". (GS2, 10 marks)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Contemporary World Politics (Class XII), ch. 3 "US Hegemony in World Politics", 2020-21 edition (dropped in 2022-23), via the Wayback copy of 9 April 2022 of NCERT's whole-book zip.
• United Nations, Security Council resolution 678 (1990), in Resolutions and Decisions of the Security Council 1990: documents.un.org.
• Authorization for Use of Military Force, Public Law 107-40, 18 September 2001: govinfo.gov.
• The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002: State Department archive PDF.
• Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq, 17 November 2008: State Department archive PDF; Iraq Body Count, database.
• The White House (archive), Joint Statement Between President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, 18 July 2005: georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov; US Department of State archive, U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation, fact sheet 2008 and signing remarks, 10 October 2008.
• The White House, United States-India Joint Leaders' Statement, 13 February 2025 and United States-India Joint Statement, 6 February 2026; Ministry of Commerce and Industry copy: commerce.gov.in PDF; PIB, 7 February 2026: pib.gov.in.
• Federal Register: Executive Order 14257 of 2 April 2025, 90 FR 15041 (federalregister.gov); Executive Order 14329 of 6 August 2025, 90 FR 38701 (govinfo.gov PDF); Executive Order 14384 of 6 February 2026, 91 FR 6501 (govinfo.gov PDF).
• Supreme Court of the United States, Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287, decided 20 February 2026: supremecourt.gov PDF.
• PIB, Ministry of Defence, "Raksha Mantri & US Secretary of War meet on the margins of 12th ADMM-Plus in Kuala Lumpur", 31 October 2025: pib.gov.in; PIB, "DAC clears Rs 3.60 lakh crore worth of capital acquisition proposals", 12 February 2026: pib.gov.in.