Left Flank

That the July 22 parliamentary vote of confidence rescuing India-US nuclear cooperation from the trashcan was an ugly thing is no small mark against the whole beast. It is also the worst sort f lie.

That's because so much of the deal's value is psychological. Its architects have sold it as a paradigm-shifting gateway to a new strategic relationship, in which India will finally join the family of Westernized, Democratic great powers and ally with the United States.

But how, one might ask, is a simple technology-sharing deal supposed to accomplish all this? Unless there's a fundamental change in their own interests, India's strategic goals will remain largely the same: They will not start containing China simply because they're using GE reactor parts; nor will they suddenly halt cooperation with Iran. And the development benefits of nuclear power are small, hype notwithstanding--they can't possibly reorient India on their own.

No, the only paradigm-shifting aspect of the deal is related to India's belief that the Nonproliferation Treaty is a form of «nuclear apartheid,» which has kept India a second-class citizen in a world of nuclear great powers. In that view, the United States is breaking the chains of bondage that have held India down for decades. As a Council on Foreign Relations primer puts it, the deal would «gut» the NPT--dismantling a system that India finds fundamentally unfair and granting it recognition it has always felt it deserves.

Any U.S.-India «alliance» would be built on this interaction--and, as such, undoing America's commitment to the nonproliferation regime is the essence of the India deal, rather than an incidental result of it.

Leonard S. Spector, Deputy Director of the Monterey Institute of
International Studies' James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, agrees that this accord is worth more in symbolism than in substance (and that symbolism is still bad). Westhawk trips into this delusion.

Yet, all hope for the nuclear non-proliferation regime is not lost - there's bureaucratic inertia and Speaker Nancy Pelosi to thank for that!

It's the nuke deal that will never die! 

So, the deal may not pass. But a paradox of the current mess is that few doubt that it※perhaps rejigged a bit※will be passed eventually. The task may fall to future governments in Delhi and Washington. If so, the terms can only get worse for India.

Although I prefer multilateral solutions in this case, Indian Communists' absolute intransigence on the 123 Agreement seems petty, and merely the worst sort of populist anti-Americanism. But, if India's government could get the IAEA's and the Nuclear Suppliers Group's approval for the bilateral deal to pass in both legislatures, why not just join the NPT?