by CKR
Glenn Kessler has a long article in the Washington Post today. I'd have given it the title I've given this post, but we know it's the editors, not the reporters, who choose the headlines.
Some highlights:
The story behind the agreement also sheds light on how foreign policy is conducted in Bush's second term. For an administration frequently criticized for not being nimble, the India deal highlights the flexibility of Rice's foreign-policy team, which has also shifted policies toward Europe, on Iran and other areas in the past year. It demonstrates how, in contrast to the first term, foreign policy is largely driven by Rice and a close circle of advisers, not the White House staff.But the India deal also shows the drawbacks of this approach, critics say. The agreement is in trouble partly because -- in what some critics say is an echo of the Iraq invasion -- there was little consultation with Congress or within the foreign-affairs bureaucracy before it was announced. Last month in New Delhi, Bush and Singh reached agreement on how India will implement the deal. But nuclear specialists in the U.S. government say their concerns about weapons proliferation also were overridden in final talks.
one of the leading skeptics of a nuclear deal with India -- John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control -- was nominated U.N. ambassador.It would be interesting to know what Bolton's objections were.
Leading the nonproliferation interests of the administration, Rood and Joseph envisioned a deal in which India would, among other things, agree to limit production of plutonium to a level that ensured the minimal deterrent capability it sought.So some people I've thought of as relatively hawkish recognized the danger of letting India continue to make fissile material unrestricted.
The two nuclear experts also wanted India to place all of its electricity-producing reactors under permanent safeguards to be monitored by U.N. inspectors. Such an arrangement would ensure, in accordance with U.S. law, that any American technology going to India would not be used for its weapons program.But by the time U.S. negotiators agreed on a number of requests -- just days before Singh's arrival on July 18 -- many of the key items on the Joseph-Rood list had been taken off the table, said senior officials who were involved. "We never even got to the stage where we could negotiate them," one official said. The Indians had already made clear to Burns in discussions weeks earlier that they were not interested in outside influence over their nuclear weapons program. "We knew well before Singh's arrival that the Indians wouldn't accept most of that," another senior U.S. negotiator said.
Bush had reached the conclusion that the nuclear concerns carried less weight than the enormous benefits that a broad partnership with a large and friendly democracy could bring.This, of course, is the key. Conclusions first, then the evidence, to paraphrase the trial in Alice in Wonderland. The conclusion also seems naive in light of India's previous studied nonalignment. That stance seems to be the continuing preference of some Indian commentators.
According to Kessler, the Indians were firm in their stands. The United States was not.
There were several highly technical issues holding up the announcement. But, in essence, India wanted the coveted status of an official nuclear state, a recognition that would get it into the most exclusive club in the world. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, only the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain are weapons states. All other countries, except for Pakistan, India and Israel, signed on to the agreement, promising to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for civilian nuclear technology. Now India wanted the technology, wanted to remain outside the treaty and wanted membership in the club. The final agreement fudged the issue.I would say that India got exactly what it wanted, except for the words. India must be satisfied with being "a leading country with advanced nuclear technology," not "a nuclear weapon state." India isn't even constrained by Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires those mere nuclear weapon states to reduce their arsenals and work for general disarmament.
"They were really demanding that we recognize them as a weapons state," said a senior official who was knowledgeable about the discussions. "Thank God we said no to that, but they almost got it. The Indians were incredibly greedy that day. They were getting 99 percent of what they asked for and still they pushed for 100."This is a very, very optimistic reading.
We can hope that Kessler's last paragraph is predictive.
Only after the announcement did the administration begin to brief members of Congress. One U.S. official involved in the negotiations said the failure to consult with Congress or to build support for the agreement within the bureaucracy has created lasting problems: "The way they jammed it through is going to haunt us."
Siddarth Varadarajan looks to the future and sees a much more independent Indian foreign policy than Mr. Bush seems to.
India must reject the notion that there can be any trade-off between the prospects of greater civil nuclear cooperation and those of cooperative hydrocarbon ventures of the kind the country is looking at with Iran, Pakistan, and even China. That the US is looking at these two as a trade-off should be amply evident both from the timing of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s initial offer of an energy dialogue in March 2005 as well as from the pronouncements made since then by her, by the US ambassador to India David Mulford, and by the sundry officials and legislators in the US. The US president George W Bush’s remarks in Islamabad on 4 March 2006 that the US has a problem not with the Iran pipeline but with Iran’s nuclear ambitions is not a shift in line as some have suggested but a cleverer reformulation of the same objection.
Above all, India and China need to keep in mind the big picture: evolution of an Asian market for crude and products with long-term supply contracts and stable prices, and, eventually, an Asian Energy Union.