U.S. attempts to construct and consolidate an alliance to contain China’s seemingly inexorable rise registered another milestone in November when the U.S. Senate passed a bill to allow the government to transfer nuclear fuel and technology to India. The nuclear deal with India flies in the face of long-standing U.S. rhetoric about nuclear proliferation and is yet another blow to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
As the U.S. Senate begins debating the new nuclear agreement with India, far too little attention is being paid to the regional security implications of the deal. Instead of simply rubber stamping the deal, the Senate should examine its far reaching effects on security and nonproliferation efforts.
When India’s Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram presented the government’s budget this past February, he trumpeted the country’s vault into modernity. Economic growth is 8.1% and is projected to rise as high as 10% next year. India has completed its ÂGolden Quadrilateral, a multi-lane highway that links New Delhi in the north, Calcutta in the east, Chennai in the south, and Mumbai in the west. The collective wealth of India’s 311 billionaires jumped 71% in the last year.
IndiaÂs vote in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) against Iran in September came as no surprise to anyone who has followed closely the recent course of IndiaÂs foreign policy. It is a safe guess that support for U.S. actions on Iran was one of the conditions of IndiaÂs nuclear deal with the United States, which was given the final seal of approval by President Bush during the July 2005 visit of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington.
This is a tale about a vote, a strike, and a sleight of hand.
The July 18 joint statement by U.S. President George Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has attracted a great deal of comment. The focus has been on the possible consequences of U.S. promises to support IndiaÂs nuclear energy program in exchange for India clearly separating its military and civilian nuclear facilities and programs and opening the latter to international inspection.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh begins his visit to the United States next week amidst indications that India is preparing to shed the last vestiges of its earlier policy of non-alignment and enter into a stronger, indeed unprecedented, “strategic partnership” with Washington. This would see the two countries launch joint military operations in the future, especially in the Asian continent, and collaborate politically and diplomatically to contain China. More generally, the United States would strategically “embed” itself in Asia through an alliance with India.
On Aug. 14 and 15, the 56th anniversary of the independence of Pakistan and India from British colonial rule, it is a sad commentary on the political condition of South Asia that even though the region has been independent for over half a century, it is still not free.
Responding to the U.S. request to send troops to occupied, post-war Iraq, India’s army is going full steam ahead with preparations for possible deployment. Meanwhile, Indian policymakers are grasping for justifications that the mobilization would be under a UN umbrella and would serve the national interest, neither of which is plausible.
In the wake of the Iraq War, growing tensions with Iran, and a possible confrontation with North Korea, it would be easy to miss the formation of yet another Washington think tank. But the freshly minted U.S.-India Institute for Strategic Policy is an organization to watch and one that may help reveal the next target of American power: containing China.