A budding relationship between U.S. and India
Through a period of foreign policy upheaval dominated by the Bush administration's war on terrorism, a major shift in U.S. policy with enduring consequences has received far less public attention in America: Washington's embrace of New Delhi and its aspirations to great-power status.
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After decades of strategic distance, occasionally surly relations, and political resistance to change, U.S. policymakers have come to see the world's largest democracy as a partner that shares a remarkable array of interests–and as a rapidly emerging power that can lend unique weight to the Bush administration's ambition of promoting democracy globally. Policymakers in Washington are conscious of making history.
"I think if you look at American foreign policy worldwide, the greatest change you will see in the next three or four years is a new American focus on South Asia, particularly in establishing a closer strategic partnership with India," Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, said last May. "It will be the area of greatest dynamic positive change in American foreign policy."
The administration has decided not simply to welcome India's rise but to assist it. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited New Delhi last March, she presented to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh an outline for a "strategic relationship," a senior administration official said later. "Its goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement."
Despite continuing concerns about India's nuclear posture, there is now in Washington a broad consensus on the desirability of welcoming–and, if possible, influencing–the way Indian power expands in economics, diplomacy, and military affairs. The administration, which touts improved ties with all of the great powers as one of its main foreign policy achievements, has shed any of the lingering Cold War-era instincts to view India as a sometime anti-U.S. power that for decades favored the now defunct Soviet Union. Now, U.S. officials talk of a "global partnership." The new mood was crystallized in July 2005 at a Washington summit between President George Bush and Prime Minister Singh. And the mood is likely to get even rosier–if image makers in both capitals have their way–when Bush visits India next month.
The July summit's most tangible outcome was a proposed deal that–if accepted by other nuclear countries and approved by Congress–will allow countries to sell civilian nuclear technology to India. Such sales have been forbidden because of India's development of nuclear weapons and its refusal to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Since first testing an atomic bomb in 1974–and more recently in 1998–India has been treated as a pariah state on nuclear matters. In Washington, the agreement has become a symbol of India's growing global stature, even as bilateral talks over its many sensitive details continue. The agreement is intended to put the pariah question to rest and to carve out a space for India in the club of nuclear-weapons states–albeit without the formal recognition. In return for the removal of restrictions on civilian nuclear technology, India would need to separate civilian from military nuclear facilities and place the civilian side under international inspection. It would also have to agree formally to international nonproliferation standards and to continue its moratorium on nuclear test blasts.
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