E-Paper
The Asiatic Society
The George Bush-Manmohan Singh summit on March 2 is the third attempt by the United States to reshape the international order to its advantage.
The George Bush-Manmohan Singh summit on March 2 is the third attempt by the United States to reshape the international order to its advantage. The first attempt was the formulation of the containment policy and the creation of Nato and other alliance systems. The second attempt was Henry Kissinger’s trip to Beijing, which resulted in China being weaned away from communism and embracing the market economy. These two attempts were within the framework of a bipolar world. That world order came to an end with the Paris Peace Conference of November 19, 1991, followed by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and collapse of international communism. Now the third attempt is to befriend India as a balancer of power in Asia and the world.
The first two attempts were within the framework of a bipolar world. Bush made it clear in reply to a question in the Hyderabad House press briefing that the new policy towards India was necessitated by changes the international system.
The US is no longer an unchallenged superpower. It is the foremost power in a world of balance of power, consisting of besides the US, the EU, Russia, China and India. While the US will continue to be militarily unchallengeable, its dominance in other areas, economy, science, technology and industrial and agricultural production is diminishing. Other major powers are no longer prepared to line up behind it seeking security protection against a perceived threat from another superpower as happened during the Cold War. The centre of gravity of global economy is shifting from the trans-Atlantic area to Asia. Four out of the six balancers of power are in Asia. The threat to US homeland is posed by terrorists hailing from West Asian countries. Asia also has most of the oil and gas reserves of the world. Hence Asia’s importance today.
China, the economic growth of which was helped by its proximity to the US during the latter half of Cold War, now threatens to overtake US in terms of GDP in the next two to three decades. The US fears that unless a stable balance of power is promoted in Asia, it will be dominated by China. Promoting balance of power does not constitute containment of China. In the US view, prospects of violent conflict between great powers are becoming ever more unthinkable. It also does not make sense to talk of containment when China has $ 200 billion trade with the US and an equivalent trade with Japan. Balance of power means having a number of major nations with an appropriate equation of power, with no adversarial relations among themselves, competing with each other in peace.
Having had experience in building up Germany and Japan and helping China to build itself up, the US is attempting to help India in its moves to become a world-class power. Without the US permitting and encouraging China, it would not have had the massive investments it received from other countries under US influence and the US itself and gigantic trade relations with American chainstores. There is no denying that China helped the US too. Building a balance of power in Asia is good for Asia and good for the world stability. For these reasons, as perceived by the US leadership, the Bush administration had decided on its policy towards India.
There are those who advocate an alternate model of China-Russia-India cooperation. There is no harm in trying it out, provided China stops proliferation to Pakistan. Second, Indians are English-speaking, their children go to American universities, they get outsourced jobs from the US and outsourced R&D centres from that country. One wonders whether a similar relationship with China and Russia is possible.
The reason advanced by Bush to justify exceptionalisation of India from the Non-Proliferation Treaty is the energy issue. Bush opposed the Kyoto protocol, which advocated that countries should cut down on greenhouse gas emissions. The country which has stepped up greenhouse gas emission at the fastest pace is China, which is now second only to the US in contributing to global warming. Today, China’s emission is 18 per cent compared to 25 per cent of the US. India is now responsible for 4 per cent of greenhouse gas emission and as India sustains an annual growth rate of 8 per cent and above, it will further exacerbate the problem of global warming.
Bush is of the view that nuclear energy and other new technologies are the solution to the problem reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He also feels strongly that dependence on oil should be reduced through new technologies (cars driven by hydrogen or electric batteries). He has publicly advocated that large demanders of energy in the 21st century like the US, China and India should take to nuclear power.
He has come up with the proposal of advanced burner reactors for energy generation. The US has, in cooperation with Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Japan launched a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. The nuclear weapon powers and countries with large nuclear energy programmes have accumulated mountainous quantities of reactor-grade plutonium. Till now, the US policy — also followed by others — was not to reprocess the plutonium but to keep it in storage.
Plutonium is highly radioactive and poses a radiation hazard. Opinion in the US is now veering round in favour of reprocessing and burning up the plutonium in reactors for clean energy generation rather than to store radioactive plutonium waste deep within mountains. India, along with Japan, Russia and France, has made significant advance on plutonium technology and fast breeder reactor, which burns up plutonium and also leads to generation of further reactor usable fuel.
Bush saw it in US interests to bring India into the plutonium economy and ensure that India will not follow the Chinese path of energy generation by excessive use of hydrocarbon fuels for its accelerated economic growth, exacerbating the problem of climate change. Increased pressure from India on hydrocarbon fuels will have an adverse impact on petroleum price in US gasoline stations.
India has also a record of 32 years since the nuclear test of 1974 of behaving very responsibly and observing non-proliferation norms more rigorously than China, which proliferated to Pakistan and western European companies, which proliferated to Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. Out of the three countries outside the NPT (Israel, India and Pakistan), the energy needs of India is many times more than those of the other two and its non-proliferation record is also unmatched by the other two.
The US considers bringing India into the modified non-proliferation regime through exceptionalisation from the NPT that will reinforce non-proliferation norms by bringing more Indian reactors under safeguards and getting India’s active cooperation for post-9/11 non-proliferation measures such as container security initiative, proliferation security initiative, etc. While these are the benefits for the US in strategic terms and in the area of world energy security, India too gains in terms of access to civil nuclear energy without sacrificing, in anyway, its strategic capabilities, present, foreseeable and long-term contingent ones.
The two leaderships have, in fact, recognised the changes taking place in the international system and have adjusted themselves to them. In that sense, this agreement is not only good for the two countries but also for the emerging balance of power global system.
