ISN'T CAUTIOUSLY A GIVEN?

John Kerry cautiously endorses India-US nuclear deal (Seema Guha, January 12, 2006, DNA India)

Fortunate we didn't elect a guy who can't even grasp this, India tilts to the west as the world's new poles emerge: Despite public hostility, the country's elite is convinced that its interests are best served by alliance with the US (Charles Grant, January 12, 2006, The Guardian)

[W]hile China is a pole that seems destined to oppose the US, India is experiencing a tectonic shift in the opposite direction. For most of the half-century that followed independence, India kept its distance from the US. Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, helped to found the non-aligned movement, which was defined by opposition to American foreign policy. Nehru also built an alliance with the Soviet Union that survived his death; India supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Although broadly democratic for most of that half-century, India closed its economy to global capitalism and saw no reason to ally with other democracies. But over the past 15 years, while India has slowly opened its economy to the rest of the world, its foreign policy has shifted from non-alignment towards cooperation with the west. One sign of this shift - which shocked many developing countries - came last October when, at the International Atomic Energy Agency, India voted with the US and EU to condemn Iran's nuclear programme. China and Russia abstained.

One force driving this realignment is India's desire to break out of the international isolation that followed its nuclear tests in 1998. The Nuclear Suppliers Group - the club for countries with nuclear power industries - imposed sanctions on India. This hurt: India lacks sufficient nuclear fuel for its power stations. So last July the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, struck a deal with the Bush administration. India promised to separate its civilian and military nuclear facilities, and to put the former under international inspection. In return the US would pass legislation to ease the export of sensitive technologies to India, and urge the group to lift the sanctions.

The implementation of this deal would amount to India being forgiven for building atomic bombs. India would join the big league of nuclear nations, alongside the US, Russia, China, France and Britain. [...]

Many Indians are quite relaxed about China's economic might, because trade between the two countries is booming in both directions. But they worry about being surrounded by unstable countries that are allied to China. The Chinese helped the Pakistanis to build their bomb, and the two countries are still close. China supplies arms to Nepal's mad and autocratic king. In Burma it dominates the eastern provinces and is the junta's best friend. China is also a big influence in war-torn Sri Lanka and in increasingly unstable Bangladesh.

Both China and India have far too many internal problems -- many of them permanent -- to ever rise to the level of opposing poles to the U.S.. But India is wisely throwing in its lot with the Anglosphere and how could it do otherwise given that its current and historic enemies are Islam and China.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 12, 2006 3:23 PM