India’s nuclear vote is a victory for the U.S.

It took some desperate arranging (for example, paroling jailed parliamentarians so they could vote), but Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh managed to get his unruly parliament to approve the long-awaited nuclear energy trade accord with the United States. Although a few significant steps remain before India can begin importing advanced civil nuclear technology from the U.S., the Indian parliament’s approval of this highly controversial agreement represents a watershed moment on many levels for the India-U.S. relationship. In two decades, India and the U.S. will need each other to contain China, establish a balance of power in Asia, and thus protect their common and separate interests. The fact that India and the U.S. have been able to vault the most difficult hurdles in this process augurs well for the kind of relationship the two countries will require in the future.

The main purpose of the agreement is to greatly expand India’s generation of electrical power, the current shortage of which is estimated to reduce India’s annual economic growth rate by two percentage points. Faster economic growth in India will obviously improve the standard of living of India’s poor. But from a national security perspective, India needs a larger economy in order to finance the military spending it will need to maintain its security against China’s rapidly rising military and strategic power. The India-U.S. nuclear agreement will help deliver the economic growth India requires.

Opponents inside India resisted this agreement as an affront to India’s sovereignty, and over concern that India would become too dependent on the U.S. for its security. Outside of India, opponents argued that the agreement would indirectly aid India’s nuclear weapons capability and thus set a bad precedent for the world’s other nuclear non-proliferation problems. It is true that India will now be able to divert resources and expertise to its nuclear weapon programs, resources that the U.S. will replace on the civil side. But it is not true that not helping India would have mollified Iran’s nuclear ambitions in any way.

I first wrote about the India-U.S. nuclear agreement in March 2006 in a post titled “Writing off Pakistan.” That post summed up U.S. interests in the agreement, including America’s problem with Pakistan:

The major reason for the deal is to bring India closer to forming a long-term, unbreakable strategic alliance with the United States, similar in quality to that which the U.S. has (or had) with Europe. The utility of this alliance for the containment of the rising Chinese threat during this century is obvious and requires no further elaboration (the U.S.-Japanese alliance is the most important in the near-term, but will decline in effectiveness as Japan’s population declines). Future U.S.-Indian dealings will very likely include weapons sales, greater military-to-military contacts, regular joint military training exercises, and, someday, a mutual defense treaty.

The U.S. remains friendly with India’s nemesis, Pakistan. The U.S. will stand by President Musharraf as long as he is around. The problem is, how long will that be? Five years? Next month? Tomorrow morning? Who knows?

President Bush has likely concluded that in the long-run Pakistan is inherently unstable and will more than likely descend into some form of chaos. This is a fate beyond the control of the United States government, General Musharraf, or anyone else. What a U.S. president can control is how the U.S. government will prepare for that event. President Bush has chosen to tilt decisively toward India. When Pakistan falls apart, leaving adrift its nuclear weapons stockpile, the U.S. will be glad that it has a solid bond with India when it is forced to clean up the mess.

This still seems true, over two years later.