Indian Nukes

So Bush did a nuclear deal with India that’ll cause difficulties for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Some pundits are claiming it’ll cause Bush more difficulties than the Dubai Ports thing.

I don’t think so. I don’t claim to know the inner workings of the Washington elite, but I think a lot of people who try and cause trouble for this deal are going to get run over... and not by the neo-cons. Some lip-smacking politicians might not see this coming, because American businesses have been very coy in talking about India. Most US firms don’t like to publicise the fact that they’re outsourcing increasing thousands of jobs to India, and don’t particularly want their political representatives to be aware of the fact least they try and make a protectionist issue out of it.

But the high-tech and service industries have huge stakes in this. The nuclear deal is seen by many as the lynchpin that proves America’s good faith to India, thus allowing India’s prickly politicians to back Prime Minister Singh’s further liberalisation efforts that will open Indian markets to US companies. Anyone blocking the nuclear deal is going to make such US companies unhappy. Cisco, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, etc, etc... all are projecting big investments and returns to and from India over the coming years. I’m sure they can find the telephone numbers of their local representatives easily enough, and I’m sure they can quote the figures of how much they contributed to various political campaigns in the last election.

Ditto Boeing, which is landing deals for hundreds of Indian aircraft at present, with hopes for many hundreds more. If India-US relations encountered a rocky patch, with the nuclear deal held up in acrimonious Congress and Senate debates, I wonder how many of the mushrooming Indian private airlines might decide it would be easier all-round to buy from Airbus? And then there’s defence contractors. The Indian military has always traditionally bought Russian, but there’s a push on to change that. In another few decades, India’s military expenditure will be amongst the highest in the world. Do defence industries have political clout? Gee, do you think?

If I were an American politician, I just wouldn’t go there... not unless I had no defence, aerospace or high-tech interests in my constituency. Or retail. Wal-Mart hopes to make billions in India. Who doesn’t have Wal-Mart in their constituency? To say nothing of the 2.4 million Indian-Americans, who just happen to be by far the wealthiest ethnic group in the nation, and are increasingly less shy about spending it on political interests. And if certain politicians do start thumping the drum on this, and getting lots of public opposition to the nuclear deal, they risk squeezing themselves between a rock and a hard place when all the pro-India interests start squeezing from the other direction. The most interesting development from all of this could be the education it will provide, to many American politicians, of just how strong those pro-India interests actually are.

Money usually wins these arguments. It’s not always a bad thing.

Personally I think the non-proliferation treaty itself is fairly silly, as much as non-proliferation remains a very good idea. India hasn’t proliferated so far, and probably wouldn’t even if this deal fell through -- they’re more principled than some, and know their credibility as a civilised, trustworthy nation would suffer. The treaty’s an ancient document reflecting an obsolete view of world power, and the only real moral authority any current nuclear power could gain, by which to deny a nation like India its own nukes, would be to declare unilateral disarmament itself. Which isn’t going to happen.

The world has nukes, that’s a fact. Best to deal with their proliferation in an orderly, case-by-case basis, getting the reliable nations (democracies) onside so as to better contain the unreliable ones (North Korea, Iran, Pakistan). India will be more help within the fold than out of it, and anyhow, the broader strategic opportunities presented by India’s growth won’t wait. I don't mind at all if we have a double standard favouring democracies with possession of nukes over non-democracies. In fact, I don't mind at all if we favour democracies in most things... and as I've stated before, India's policies and intentions just don't alarm me very much. If Iran huffs at the double-standard, tough. When they hold their first fully democratic election, I'll start caring what they think.

If this whole situation proves anything, it’s the utter inability of so-called global law, global bodies or global treaties to contain or direct anything in the world today. The nation state rules, and there’s no such thing as a workable global consensus. There’s just nations that act, and nations that don’t, and the rest is all sophistry.