The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [77]
From an economic point of view, the nuclear deal is not that crucial for India. It would provide the country with greater access to civilian nuclear technologies, which is important to its energy needs. But that’s a small part of its overall development trajectory. The incentives of globalization would seem to push New Delhi to stop wasting its time on this matter, focus on development while pushing off these concerns until a later date. There are many forms of alternative energy, and both Germany and Japan have managed to achieve great-power status without nuclear weapons.
India’s nuclear aspirations, however, are about national pride and geopolitical strategy. Many Indian politicians and diplomats resent the fact that India will always have second-class status compared with China, Russia, and the other major nuclear powers. In all those countries, not one reactor is under any inspection regime whatsoever, yet India would place at least two-thirds of its program under the eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The inequity with China especially offends New Delhi. Indian officials will quietly point out that China has a long history of abetting nuclear proliferation, most clearly through Pakistan. Yet the United States has an arrangement to share civilian nuclear technology with Beijing. India, they argue, is a democratic, transparent country with a perfect record of nonproliferation. Yet it has been denied such cooperation for the past thirty-six years.
On this issue, globalization and geopolitics operate on different levels. Many American advocates of nuclear disarmament—whom the Indians call “nonproliferation ayatollahs”—oppose the deal, or would settle for one only if India were to cap its production of fissile material. But, New Delhi says, look at a map: India is bordered by China and Pakistan, both nuclear-weapons states, neither of which has agreed to a mandatory cap. (China appears to have stopped producing plutonium, as have the other major powers, but this is a voluntary decision, made largely because it is awash in fissile material already.) India sees a mandatory cap as a one-sided nuclear freeze. This strategic reality figures into American calculations as well. The United States has long been opposed to a single hegemon dominating either Europe or Asia. Were India to be forced to cap its nuclear force—without corresponding constraints on China—the result would be a vast and growing imbalance of power in China’s favor. A former U.S. ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, has asked, Why is it in the United States’ long-term national interest to favor an arrangement by which China would become Asia’s dominant and unchallenged nuclear power?10
Bizarrely, the real stumbling block to the deal has come not from Washington—Congress ratified the treaty in 2008—but from New Delhi. On being handed the offer of a lifetime, some leading Indian politicians and intellectuals have refused. “We don’t seem to know how to take yes for an answer,” a commentator observed on the Indian all-news channel NDTV. While the Indian prime minister and some others at the top of the Indian government saw the immense opportunities the deal would open up for India, others were blinded by old nostrums and prejudice. Many Indian elites have continued to view the world through a Nehruvian prism—India as a poor, virtuous Third World country, whose foreign policy was neutral and detached (and, one might add, unsuccessful). They understand how to operate in that world, whom to beg from and whom to be belligerent with. But a world in which India is a great power and moves confidently across the global stage, setting rules and not merely being