Paul Kapur is Donald Trump’s nominee for top South Asia job in US State Dept

S Paul Kapur, an expert on India-Pakistan security and nuclear issues, is likely to be the Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, the top job for the region in America's diplomatic arm, people familiar with the development said.

Kapur will replace Donald Lu, who was asked to leave the position with the shift in the administration, once the Senate confirms him. 

For now, Eric Meyer, who last served as the US Chargé d'Affaires in Oslo, is the senior bureau official for the region.

A professor in the Department of National Security Affairs at the US Naval Post Graduate School and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, Kapur served in the State Department's policy planning team in the final year of the Trump presidency where he worked on South Asia. Kapur has also taught at the Claremont McKenna College and has been a visiting professor at Stanford.

His books include Jihad as Grand Strategy: Islamist Militancy, National Security and the Pakistani State and Dangerous Deterrent: Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia. He is also the co-author of India, Pakistan, and the Bomb: Debating Nuclear Stability in South Asia and co-editor of The Challenges of Nuclear Security: US and Indian Perspectives. 

Kapur did his PhD at the University of Chicago. According to his bio, Kapur also runs US-India Track 1.5 dialogues for the Department of Defense.

In a 2023 essay co-written with Observer Research Foundation's Harsh Pant, Kapur noted that the US-India strategic partnership had an almost inevitable feeling about it. 

"The need to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific region, balance rising Chinese power, and enhance prosperity through trade and other economic cooperation creates incentives that are very strong." He also noted the emergence of new institutions from Quad to I2U2 as evidence.

But despite incentives and structures, Kapur (and Pant) warned that the deepening of the relationship was not inevitable. 

"The effective formulation and execution of cooperative policies requires careful management. Inadequate management leaves either country with the unmet expectations of the other, leading to disagreements and acrimony, as in India-US discord over the war in Ukraine…and to met economic promise, as in the lack of a US-India free trade agreement."

In another essay, Kapur, along with academic Sumit Ganguly, noted that the India-US security relationship had largely been about the US aiding India with high-end military equipment to build India's military capacity to resist Chinese coercion. 

"A strong and genuinely independent India will necessarily impede Chinese efforts to resist hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region."

Kapur (and Ganguly) also proposed five ways to deepen ties — focusing on Indian military capacity-building including through co-production initiatives; expanding joint strategic efforts in new areas including through friendshoring of supply chains to India; basing the relationship on shared strategic interests rather than moral convergences; the US "avoiding" deepening ties with Pakistan, for this would "harm US relationship with India, ignore Pakistan's long history of support for terrorism, and play directly into China's hands"; and India and the US actively managing their diplomatic relationship.

All of this is music to the ears of Indian policymakers and the strategic community. With an expert who knows the region well taking over the top South Asia job, India will have one more friendly interlocutor in a critical functional and decision-making position in the Trump administration.