Locking-in India on rather cheap terms
OP-ED: “A Pretty Good Deal For America,” by William S. Cohen, Wall Street Journal, 5 April 2005, p. A20.
I know, I know. I have a tendency to focus on locking-in China like a laser beam, and every so often I get emails wondering why I don’t make similarly strong cases for India.
Frankly, I worry about India a lot less in this regard. It doesn’t elicit the sort of fear factor from the region’s main powers like China does from Japan. Its military has great relations with our own. It has a mature outlook and a mature ambition to emerge as a political-military power, and it does so with U.S. approval. In sum, India just presents a lot more strategic maturity in its outlook, and I think that’s why we’re rewarding them on the nuke deal, which is a sensible one from my view.
I haven’t particularly praised William Cohen--frankly ever. I thought he was a really weak SECDEF. But I like this op-ed. It makes some good arguments on why we need to trust India even more, not less. The one quibble? I think his equivalency rejections on Iran are strained. India not signing the NPT just shows they were clever from the start.
The real equivalency here should be China. Australia just felt comfortable enough with China to ink deals on shipping uranium to both China and Taiwan. Anybody got a problem with that? No. So with any problem with a nuke deal with India. Do we want either country producing more CO2 down the road?