It is difficult – for anyone, I imagine – to reconstruct the process by which one comes to write the book that one writes. Many factors shape the choice of a project and the way one goes about developing it. I think the early trigger for this book was my desire to explore the paradoxes revealed by one event: the India–US Nuclear Deal. But that exercise grew into a much larger exploration of strategically created treaty conflicts and what they might teach us about the politics of law. The Nuclear Deal was announced in 2005, revealed in specific bilateral form in August 2007, and pronounced nearly dead a few weeks later. In the course of these developments, it had made some news in the United States, where I was then based, and had a compelling hold on public debate back home, in India, where it was variously regarded as a major foreign policy triumph (in his January 2014 exit interview, the two-term Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, identified it as his greatest moment in office), and as a foreign policy disaster that had signed away India’s autonomy in international relations to the United States. In a country dogged by massive corruption scandals, rocketing inflation, fierce debates over social and economic spending, and controversies relating to the deployment of the military in Kashmir, the northeast, and against Maoists, the Nuclear Deal was the only issue on which the government was challenged through a no-confidence motion.