Cutting a fair deal

For that to happen, Congress must stop trying to use the deal as leverage to force India to back the US line on Iran. And the Bush administration, as well as Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, should produce plans for a US-led revamping of the world’s anti-proliferation rules. Such US leadership would be greatly assisted by the sort of grand gesture of nuclear arms reduction recently proposed by Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and others.

The US-India nuclear deal is that rare thing, a foreign policy move by the Bush administration that could look strategically smart to future historians. Signed in 2005, the deal sought to bring an end to four decades of hostility and suspicion between the United States and India and, crucially, almost a decade of semi-isolation imposed on India after it shocked the world by testing nuclear weapons in 1998.

The deal thus makes a huge exception of India, endorsing its status as a nuclear-weapons state and granting it a more lenient regime of inspections of its nuclear power facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency than is normal. Why? The answer is China.

Neither the US nor the Indian government wants to say so, but the basic reason to make India an exception and to bring it closer to the United States is the desire to balance the rising power of China in Asia.

Such a balance is in both countries’ clear interests. Yet until now the three-year-old deal has been held up by India’s complicated politics. Prime Minister Singh’s government lacks a parliamentary majority and has relied on communist parties’ votes to govern. Those parties are instinctively anti-American and have threatened to bring down the government if it proceeded with the nuclear deal.

... contd.