Nuclear deal rattles US media
Dasu Krishnamoorty
This is Santa Claus negotiating, said a Carnegie Foundation expert describing the understanding Bush had reached with Dr Manmohan Singh in Delhi. American media unrest over Bush’s oriental journey provided support to this refrain. Congress should kill it, said the New York Times. The media cauldron was boiling much before their President had left for the Indian capital. A last-minute burst of editorials and editorial analyses, almost fissile in their tone, warned Bush against sealing the nuclear deal with India that he and Dr. Singh had wrapped up in July last year. Though public reaction to Bush’s ‘giveaway’ never reached the street levels it hit in India, if media content is a mirror of popular wrath, the New York Times and other papers cried foul. In two editorials it wrote, extraordinary by US media traditions, the Times said the deal was a wrong-headed decision and should not have been initiated to begin with unless the White House was looking at it as a counterweight to China’s soaring ascendancy.
Even if that was the goal, it was bad in many other ways, media and security experts in the US thought. Bush badly rattled the media thermostat at home. From Boston Globe in the northeast to Los Angeles Times in the southwest, every newspaper barracked the President for making an exception of India and promising a waiver of international safeguards for its fast breeder programme. We should (hereafter) learn to live with a nuclear policy that says yes to India and no to Iran, complained David Ignatius in the Washington Post. Evidently, US media believe that the price Bush had paid for closer ties with India was too high and would undermine the nuclear proliferation regime. The Los Angeles Times, one of the many newspapers that wrote more than once on the nuclear deal, thought that it would reward India which had never signed NPT and reneged on its promise not to test the bomb.
No passage to India is ever entirely smooth, said the Economist (US edition). The negotiations were nerve wracking and continued even when Bush was half way through his flight to Delhi in his Air Force One. Matthew Cooper picturesquely described this suspense in his report to the Time magazine. American media believe that Bush blinked first. However, the consummation of the deal symbolized for him the success of his trip. The American distrust of the Delhi accord in the US can be traced to the actual and imaginary loss of jobs due to outsourcing and an illogical notion that India cannot be trusted to behave as a responsible nuclear power.
Bush’s opening up to India reminded many scribes of Nixon’s handshake with Mao in the 70s. In the 1972 Sino-American rapprochement, both Nixon and Kissinger tried to get Mao and Zhou round by passing on top military intelligence on Soviet forces massed against China. The Economist warned that the notion that India could be turned into a counterweight to China might convince China that the US wants to encircle it and block its rise as a great power. But this sort of balance of power theory ignores the fact that India badly needs China as a trouble-free neighbour. This argument, I think, overlooks the efforts of both Beijing and Delhi to mend fences. Pranab Mukherjee’s scheduled visit to China this month proves how shallow is the Economist line.
Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek denies that the US caved in to China in 1972. Though the US sacrificed Taiwan to win over Beijing, it made China abandon its basic ideology and strategic posture of communist revolution. Zakaria, therefore, says that neither side in the present deal was a loser. According to the American edition of the Financial Times which devoted an entire page to the nuclear deal, India perhaps is planning to take out insurance against China with which it has an unresolved border dispute. It quoted India’s defence analyst C.Raja Mohan as saying that just as Indira Gandhi looked to the Soviet Union to provide a counterbalance to Pakistan’s alliance with the US and China, Delhi now looks to the US as a hedge against the Chinese juggernaut as it rolls across Asia. Not true. Neither India nor the US is naïve enough to regard China as a negative ingredient in their bilateral relations.
The US media are also concerned that Bush’s gesture to India would encourage countries like North Korea, straining at the nuclear leash, to employ this concession as a lever in their case for going ahead with their nuclear plans. Will not Iran which is showing signs of thaw at the Moscow talks harden its stance? Therefore, Bush should have convinced Delhi that the deal needed to be renegotiated if he was seeking the mandatory approval of Congress, wrote the Los Angeles Times hours before Bush announced that he and Dr Singh had finalized the deal. A positive fallout of the deal, according to the Wall Street Journal, is the access to the great Indian arms market that spent $7 billion in 2004 and its growing need for nuclear fuel and technology. Elisabeth Bumiller, reporting for the Times, agreed that one of the strategic calculations of the White House was to capture the booming market for American goods and to turn India into an Asian powerhouse to counterbalance China. France has already begun to woo New Delhi.
American media see hopes of scrapping the deal in sections of Congress opposing it. They point out that Congress has to amend the Atomic Energy Act to permit US nuclear sales to a country that has not even signed NPT. Key law-makers have already warned that exempting India would make it harder to stop Iran and North Korea asking for similar concessions. A group of American officials told Congress how deeply troubling it was that under the deal India could keep expanding its nuclear power generation and its strategic arsenal. Democratic legislator Edward Markey, a leading critic of the Bush-Singh deal said it would make a mockery of the IAEA and the Nonproliferation Treaty.
The longest piece on congressional opposition appeared in the Financial Times. It quoted George Perkovich of the Carnegie endowment, a think tank, as saying, "Members don’t like the deal. But what they were upset about more is a lack of consultation." Like the media in India that complained about lack of details, many Congressmen here are awaiting the details of the deal so that they could craft a strategy to defeat it. But Matthew Cooper believes that Congress will clear the deal in the end.
To Indians, Fareed Zakaria’s three articles are of great interest. The Newsweek he edits made the Bush visit its cover story as did the Economist. On the Newsweek’s cover shone Padma Lakshmi, Salman Rushdie’s wife, greeting the readers with a Namaste. Zakaria forecast that the Delhi agreement could alter the strategic landscape in the region and normalize India’s furtive nuclear status. Zakaria attributes Bush’s change of mind to his understanding that India is a responsible global power.
Even while writing an editorial on Iran on Sunday, the New York Times could not resist admonishing Bush, "The India deal is exactly the wrong message to send right now, just days before Washington and its European allies will be asking the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran`s case to the United Nations Security Council for further action. Iran`s hopes of preventing this depend on convincing the rest of the world that the West is guilty of a double standard on nuclear issues. Mr. Bush might as well have tied a pretty red bow around his India nuclear deal and mailed it as a gift to Tehran."