February 28, 2006

India: Our New Natural Ally & A Nuclear Deal in Our Interests

With the Cold War over and a new Cold War between civilizations brewing, India has become our natural ally in Southeast Asia. Pakistan is only a reluctant ally which only supports the war on terror to the extent that it prevents a U.S. invasion. Pakistan cannot even control vast areas of its own territory. There is little doubt in my mind that a coup or pupular uprising will eventually remove the present pro-U.S. military dictatorship and replace it with an even more overtly Islamist regime.

To prepare for that day, we must earnestly cultivate our friendship with India. India and the U.S. have had shaky relations in the past--especially given our Cold War alliance with Pakistan--but the relationship between us and the Subcontinental state have improved drastically in the past 15 years. Not only do we have strategic mutual interests with India, but our cultures and civilizations both emphasize democracy, pluralism, and tolerance. India is fast becoming more than an ally, they are becoming our friend.

It's good to see that Bush is cultivating this relationship and a pity that the NY Times is such a partisan rag. Instead of focusing on the flowering relationship between our two countries, they instead lay into Bush for neglected issues such as "poverty", "the search for renewable energy", and reaching out to India's Muslim minority. What idiots:

Relations between the United States and India have never been more important, thanks to global terror in the post-Sept. 11 world, the search for sustainable energy resources and the United Nations' pledge to halve world poverty by 2015. More than 500 million of the world's poor are Indian villagers. India is also home to one the largest Muslim populations in the world.

So it's a pity that this trip, which should focus American attention on such a rich array of issues, now revolves largely around whether India and America will manage to conclude a nuclear deal that shouldn't have been initiated to begin with.

President Bush's wrongheaded decision last year to make an end run around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by agreeing to share civilian nuclear technology with New Delhi took America's contain-China-by-building-up-India strategy a step too far. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's basic bargain has been to reward countries that renounced nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import sensitive nuclear technology to help meet their energy needs. For decades, America has imposed nuclear export restrictions on India — and Pakistan, for that matter — in response to those countries' refusal to sign the nonproliferation treaty and their open development of nuclear weapons

This carrot-and-stick approach has dissuaded many other countries capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, from South Korea to Turkey to Saudi Arabia. Now President Bush wants to carve out an exception for India. That's the worst possible message to send to other countries — Iran comes to mind — that America and its nuclear allies in Europe are trying to keep off the nuclear weapons bandwagon. Already, Pakistani officials are requesting the same deal for their country, although it is a request that is unlikely to be granted.

Idiots.

John O'Sullivan, of course, gets it right. Chicago Sun Times:

President Bush arrives Wednesday in New Delhi for a state visit that he hopes will fasten down the strategic partnership between America and India that former U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill began to forge five years ago. Bush's first order of business will be to sign a civilian nuclear agreement with India to supply it with nuclear materials.

That agreement will both reward India for refraining from nuclear proliferation to third powers and remove what has been until recently a large obstacle to good Indo-U.S. relations -- treating India and Pakistan as equal violators of nuclear proliferation agreements. Bush's change of policy here reflects two facts: First, we know that "rogue" Pakistani scientists have passed nuclear know-how onto other Islamic countries; second, U.S. policy distinguishes between democratic states like India, judged reliable enough to be trusted with nuclear secrets and material, and despotic states like Iran judged dangerous on that score....

India is not a neurotic superpower but it is still an ambivalent one. Almost all the economic and political developments cited above point the country toward adopting an economy strategy of free market globalization and a political one of alliance with the United States. The two countries share a common language, common liberal democratic values, similar legal and political institutions (inherited in both cases from the British), a common strategic rival in China, and a common enemy in al-Qaida. These similarities help to explain the growing Indian diaspora in America, the boom in U.S. companies outsourcing to India's own Silicon Valleys, the ease of military cooperation between Indian and U.S. military forces, and the fact that America is more popular in India than in any other country.

Altogether, India's progress is bottom-up rather than top-down. It is also bipartisan. Both government and opposition have advanced the economic reform agenda in the last 14 years. So a change of government would probably not mean a drastic change of policy. It is likely to last.