Don’t count on a third chance

The Indo-US nuclear deal is a historic opportunity not so much because it will immediately solve all of our energy problems or make us a great power. It may do all that eventually, but what is more important is that it will remove India from the ranks of an abnormal minority in the international community, whose only other members are Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. That company was the price we paid for our strategic dithering in the 1960s, when, instead of conducting a nuclear test and joining the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nuclear-weapon state, we procrastinated on an important strategic opportunity. Today, four decades later, we are being offered a rare second chance to correct our blunder. Letting this opportunity slip would compound that original blunder because it is unlikely that we will be offered a third bite of the apple.

There are some, inside and outside the government, who labour under the illusion that even if the nuclear deal is not concluded now, it can be done later, maybe even after a new and more politically palatable administration takes over in Washington in January 2009. This is pure fantasy. This deal was the consequence of a peculiar concatenation of factors that are unlikely to be repeated.

The first factor was that the Bush administration came to believe, very early on, that India was so important to Washington that it could suffer the displeasure of its allies and the powerful domestic non-proliferation lobby in order to remove a central impediment to closer US-India relations — the nuclear issue. This became an article of faith in this administration, but this will not necessarily be shared by future administrations in Washington. We would like to believe that this is the consequence of ‘India rising’, and as such, the same imperative would drive subsequent administrations to either offer a similar deal or even, indeed, a better one.

This is highly improbable because future US administrations are unlikely to respond to India’s increasing global importance in the same way that the Bush administration responded. Even when driven by the same imperatives, specifics of policies and strategies will change. The next administration in Washington may seek closer military ties or an arms transfer relationship, or even support India’s case for membership to the UN Security Council, but not necessarily a nuclear deal. The highly contingent nature of strategy should not be overlooked.

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