(The article was first published in Vijay Times, 12th November 2006).
In their eagerness to sell the nuclear deal with the US to a sceptical India, pro-nuclear deal strategic experts have compared the Bush administration’s initiative with India to the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China in 1971. But that comparison is wholly inappropriate, and has led to wrong expectations about the deal and its larger strategic possibilities.
For one, the US and China were not even on talking terms with each other in 1971. Kissinger had to undertake a school-boyish secret trip to China to accomplish that opening. For another, that trip was about America striking a deal with a Communist regime to take on the Soviet Union.
In 2005, neither were America’s relations with India so strained, nor was it an attempted tango between two ideologically opposed nations aimed against a common nuclear superpower enemy.
But, in fact, the Bush initiative with India is of far more historic import than the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China. The timeframe in which its full effects will begin to play out is not this decade or the next but 30, 40, 50 years from now. Whether or not the Manmohan Singh government finally signs up to a deal that constrains Indian nuclear weapons development depends on whether it understands that historic import and that strategic timeframe or not.
In the last quarter of the 19th century when Britain, the superpower of the day, was faced with the rise of America and Germany, it chose to encourage America, a fellow English-speaking nation founded by Anglo-Saxon ancestors to rise to global power quickly. It wanted America to help it maintain the international order and trading system it had created.
The Bush administration’s initiative with India took off with the announcement in March 2005 by Condoleeza Rice of her president’s intention to help India become a global power quickly. Rice’s declaration came at a time when the world was, as Foreign Affairs Editor James Hoge put it, at the beginning of a power shift from the West to Asia, with China and India as the rising global powers. It was reminiscent of Britain’s decision to help America rise to global power.
That’s the reason why the relationship with the US is so undeniably valuable to India. It presents a way for India to rise to global power more quickly and more efficiently than would be possible without that partnership.
Yet, the very deliberateness of Rice’s announcement tells us much about the limits to American generosity. America has adopted this strategy fully conscious of the fact that the British decision to help it rise eventually cost the former superpower its own position in the international hierarchy. Therefore, while America might have chosen the same strategy as Britain did, it will tread this path with far greater deliberation.
In its eagerness to court America, Britain encouraged American imperial expansion and even let America surpass it in the most important currency of power of that era – sea power.
But today’s America – one that does not yet foresee its own decline -- is far too alert and conscious of its own history to let any other power, even an ally, upstage it.
That’s why even as it attempts to quicken India’s rise, it will seek to maneuver India into exactly where it wants India to be: it should have the ability, afforded by US-supplied technology and weaponry, to act as a counterweight to China, but at the same time it should not have capability that would allow it to think and act in ways inimical to the US.
Crucial to putting India in that exact orbit is to increase American technological assistance to India – or seen from another viewpoint, to increase India’s dependence on American technological assistance -- to raise its economic and conventional military capability, but at the same time to curb India’s nuclear weapons capability, most assuredly by prohibiting India from conducting further nuclear tests.
If a lot of strategic experts are still wondering whether the US Congress will pass the final nuclear deal bill in a way that does not seek to halt India’s nuclear progress, they must remember something about the nature of nuclear weapons and their owners: nuclear weapons allow their possessors to raise their ambitions, and they allow them to pursue independent foreign policies. America will not allow it. Ask Britain, parts of whose ‘independent nuclear deterrent’ happens to be in America’s physical custody.
