Since the nuclear agreement’s unveiling in 2005, the American mainstream press has viewed the deal primarily through a single arms control-tinted lens. The editorial pages of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have all been critical of the deal on non-proliferation grounds. Even supposedly pro-Indian figures such as Thomas Friedman and Jimmy Carter have been unsympathetic. Former Economist editor Bill Emmott’s opinion article in The Washington Post two weeks ago provided a rare argument in a major newspaper explaining the potential benefits of the nuclear agreement.

There are two main reasons for the general apathy and skewed media coverage of the deal. The first is capacity. Washington’s policy research institutes are collectively host to less than a dozen full- or part-time South Asia strategic experts, many of whom have concentrated in the past few years on the more immediate problems (for Americans) in Pakistan. Few genuine attempts have been made by the Indian government, the Indian-American community or US business groups to strategically boost the capacity in India-specific expertise in Washington. India and South Asia experts have consequently been vastly outnumbered by the non-proliferation analysts.

The second reason concerns transparency. Both the US and the Indian governments failed to reach out to the American media and experts, and provided them with little access or clear information at each stage of the deal’s enactment. In part this is to be expected. An eagerness to be transparent could have prevented the deal from even having been brokered given the virulent opposition to it from many quarters. But in the age of blogs and 24-hour television news, the refusal by the government to communicate led inevitably to fast-spreading but frequently inaccurate interpretations of events concerning the deal. The number of times the agreement was prematurely pronounced “dead” is staggering.

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