How Washington Learned to Stop Worrying and Love India's Bomb

The benefit sought by most Americans who favored the India deal was a "strategic partnership": the important but elusive long-term goal of having India--a democratic, multicultural, strategically located state--as a new partner for the United States. But there is little evidence so far that India's policies across the board have changed in favor of the United States. Last September, Prime Minister Singh duly showed up in Fidel Castro's Havana to join Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a thumping anti-American meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement. (A senior Indian official later told me that India recognized the awkwardness of this meeting but believed it could not abruptly abandon the NAM.) India has not weighed in heavily against Iran's nuclear ambitions, although it has voted with the majority in the United Nations for measures to penalize Iran. India's politicians have not even showed gratitude for the American gesture of nuclear recognition, instead maintaining that they were entitled to it and resenting the (few and loose) strings the U.S. Congress attached to the deal.

But much of this was to be expected. The critics' best argument was always that the deal's benefits to the United States were contingent--even hypothetical--and would be long in materializing. Yet these will be fundamental. A strong strategic relationship with India will give the United States options in the event of a fundamentalist cataclysm in neighboring Pakistan or a turn for the worse in U.S.-China relations. Neither of these developments is to be hoped for, or even likely, but insurance policies are worth having anyway. More generally, over time the United States and India seem destined to travel some parallel strategic paths, and the deal allows them to prepare together earlier and more concretely for that journey. An example of this joint preparation are the growing military-to-military ties between the two countries. Debate will probably go on for some time about whether the United States needed to give nuclear recognition to obtain the strategic partnership, or whether it needed to do it when it did. But the partnership itself will likely develop nonetheless.