America's Strategic Opportunity With India

The New U.S.-India Partnership

R. Nicholas Burns

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007

Summary:  The rise of a democratic and increasingly powerful India is a positive development for U.S. interests. Rarely has the United States shared so many interests and values with a growing power as we do today with India. By reaching out to India, we have made the bet that the future lies in pluralism, democracy, and market economics.

R. NICHOLAS BURNS is U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

The arrival of globalization as a defining feature of the age caused Americans to understand that Washington needs like-minded global allies to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world. As Washington thought about how best to contend with the greatest of globalization's challenges -- international drug and other criminal cartels, trafficking in women and children, climate change, and especially the rise of terrorism and its potential intersection with weapons of mass destruction -- it became clear to most of us in the U.S. government that we needed to combine forces with powerful emerging countries such as India (Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa are others) to respond to these threats. In this radically changed global landscape, the basic interests of India and the United States -- the world's largest democracy and the world's oldest -- increasingly converged.

That this new U.S.-India partnership is supported by a bipartisan consensus in both countries considerably strengthens the prospects for its success. In India, both the ruling Indian National Congress and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party have worked for over a decade to elevate India's ties with the United States. In the United States, shortly after the beginning of India's economic liberalization, President Clinton signaled Washington's desire to forge a new era of commerce and investment between the two countries. And after India's May 1998 nuclear tests, then Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott engaged India's then foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, in 14 rounds of talks over two and a half years. Talbott's negotiations with Singh were Washington's first truly sustained strategic engagement with the Indian leadership.

When he entered office in 2001, President Bush recognized early on the power and importance of India's large and vibrant democracy in global politics. He essentially doubled the United States' strategic bet on India, pursuing an uncommonly ambitious and wide-ranging opening toward it and displaying the courage and foresight to take on the complex nonproliferation issues that had separated the two countries for three decades. President Bush called for the two countries to jump-start their relationship in four strategic areas: civil nuclear energy, civilian space programs, high-tech commerce, and missile defense.

NUCLEAR SPRING

When Condoleezza Rice visited India in March 2005, shortly after taking office as secretary of state, she set out to lay a new cornerstone for the transformed relationship. She emphasized to Prime Minister Singh that the United States would alter its long-held framework that tied and balanced its relations with "India-Pakistan." We would effectively "de-hyphenate" our South Asia policy by seeking highly individual relations with both India and Pakistan. That meant an entirely new and comprehensive engagement between the United States and India. Secretary Rice also told Prime Minister Singh that the United States would break with long-standing nonproliferation orthodoxy and work to establish full civil nuclear cooperation with energy-starved India.

At the start of President Bush's second term, we knew that the nuclear issue was the proverbial elephant in the room in the U.S. relationship with India. We also understood that resolving it would allow us to define a more truly ambitious partnership. India had decided not to participate in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in the 1970s, and the United States and other NPT countries had, for three decades, sanctioned India for developing a nuclear weapons program outside the NPT regime. The result was India's isolation from the rest of the world on all nuclear issues.

Yet by 2005 it had become clear -- especially to those of us who wished to see a more effective nonproliferation regime -- that this state of affairs benefited no one. One of the world's largest and most peaceful states with advanced nuclear technology was outside the regime, whereas countries that cheated, such as Iran and North Korea, had been inside it. Despite India's outsider nuclear status, it had been a largely responsible steward of its nuclear material and had played by the rules of a system to which it did not belong. By bringing India into the nonproliferation regime, we would modernize and strengthen it while allowing India and the United States to forge a larger and more ambitious partnership.

When Prime Minister Singh visited Washington in July 2005, President Bush made this bold proposition: after 30 years, the United States was prepared to offer India the benefits of full civil nuclear energy cooperation. We would not assist India's nuclear weapons program, but we would help India construct new power plants and would provide it with the latest in nuclear fuel and technology to run them. In New Delhi in March 2006, President Bush and Prime Minister Singh announced the realization of this vision through the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative.

Nine months later, in December 2006, a strong bipartisan majority in Congress passed the Hyde Act, which approved the initiative, permitting American investment in India's civil nuclear power industry. These steps marked a huge change in U.S. and global thinking about how to work with India. They transformed India overnight from a target of the international nonproliferation regime to a stakeholder in it. Beyond those first moves, the U.S. Atomic Energy Act required a formal agreement to lay the legal basis for bilateral nuclear collaboration. We concluded the "123 agreement" this July, after long and sometimes difficult negotiations.