The U.S. should consider the Indian nuclear
tests as the muscle-flexing of a potential ally.

MARTIN SIEFF Mr. Sieff is a reporter for the Washington Times.

http://www.nationalreview.com/21dec98/sieff062298.html

INDIA'S detonation of five nuclear devices has predictably set off other explosions, and not just in Pakistan. Official Washington has exploded with outrage and alarm. This reaction was predictable, both because of Washington's arms-control fetish and because of its misunderstandings of India. It is unfortunate because the United States seems to be about to blow the brightest strategic opportunity to have dropped into its lap in thirty years.

The last such opportunity came in the early 1970s, when China emerged as a counterbalance to Russia in Asia. Fortunately for the cause of freedom and American national interests around the world, we had a President of genuine global vision and a national security advisor of rare genius in Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. If they had not made their opening to China, it is doubtful that a United States reeling from the bitter domestic divisions brought on by Vietnam could have held the Soviet Union at bay until economic and political tides started to turn in the 1980s.

Now it is China to which we need a counterweight. India could play that role, and also aid us in the Persian Gulf. All we lack is a Nixon or Kissinger to see it.

India is forced by its own geopolitical circumstances to oppose China. Indeed, its detonations were in large part a way of serving notice that it will no longer be cowed by China's nuclear superiority. This is not a bad thing from an American point of view, considering that China's leaders have openly threatened to nuke Los Angeles.

As Reagan administration official Paul Wolfowitz has argued, the containment of China in the first half of the twenty-first century might well prove as difficult as the containment of Imperial and then Nazi Germany did in the first half of this century. China's gravitational pull will over the next few decades increasingly draw South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and even Taiwan into its orbit -- unless India and the U.S. build a strong working military relationship. In that case, countries in the region would naturally gravitate toward the U.S. - India axis as the best guarantee of their continued freedom and security.

A relationship with India along the lines of the one Nixon and Kissinger forged with China would also do more to avert either conventional or nuclear war on the subcontinent than pious exhortations to sign arms-control treaties. An India that looked upon Washington as its protector against China would be far more likely to heed American calls of restraint. In Pakistan, too, where U.S. influence has been declining, our calls for compromise would have more force if our support could no longer be taken for granted. While India is more strategically valuable than Pakistan, we should avoid a clear choice between them to create a constructive ambiguity.

India could also help defend the oil reserves of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, obviously a major strategic priority for the U.S., which rightly went to war over the issue. In 1991 the Gulf War operation was possible only because the Saudi leadership courageously allowed the United States to mount on its territory a larger military build-up than that required by the Vietnam War. The erosion of U.S. prestige in the Middle East since then makes a repeat of such favorable circumstances highly unlikely.

Our current policies have set us on repeated collision courses with both Iran and Iraq, which threaten our oil supplies. So the United States may be forced to face the prospect of taking on Iran, Iraq, or both, with Saudi Arabia neutral. Worse, Russia and China, which openly and proudly reached a strategic accord last year, might lend our enemies at least tacit support.

This is especially troubling because the Persian Gulf is literally half a world away from the United States. Our loyal major allies nearest there are Japan and Australia, and neither of these has a naval reach remotely capable of supporting U.S. operations in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. To fight from bases in Japan and Australia would be like fighting in the European Theater of Operations in 1944 - 45 not from the United Kingdom, but directly from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

India is a lot closer. In both world wars, Britain was able to secure the crucial oil wealth of Mesopotamia and Kuwait, not to mention Iran, only because it could deploy very large and entirely reliable Indian forces in the Gulf. Now, India shares our interest in secure and cheap oil supplies, in addition to having an interest of its own in preventing Pakistan's natural allies in the world of radical Islam from amassing too much power.

Our moderate Arab friends, meanwhile, would not be alienated by an alliance with India, whatever they might find it necessary to say in public. The Soviet Union's thirty-year alliance with India never hurt its relations with Syria, Iraq, or even Iran. A U.S. - Indian alliance would do more than a thousand assertions by Madeleine Albright to show that we are serious about defending our friends in the Middle East.

So, the biggest geopolitical interests of Washington and New Delhi coincide. An alliance would also be more morally comfortable than the previous one with China. India is a democracy -- the world's largest -- and it has successfully functioned as one for decades. It has freedom of the press and a strong, vibrant legal system based on English Common Law. But an alliance is not in the offing because of three American blind spots regarding India: one liberal, one conservative, one bipartisan.

The Clinton Administration's reaction to the nuclear tests typifies the liberal approach to India. True, American non-proliferation laws leave the President with no choice but to impose economic sanctions. But the Administration's moral lectures to India's new nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government are a product of its own theological obsession with non-proliferation and arms control.

There is also the matter of American liberals' wounded pride. In their eyes, India is now completing the metamorphosis that Israel went through in the decade between its victory in the Six-Day War and the election of its first nationalist Likud government under Menachem Begin in 1977. In both cases, a nation which they had romantically idealized as somehow beyond the carnal, power-and-interest concerns of international relations has abandoned its duty to be purer than anyone else. Of course, the governments of both nations had in actual practice been anything but pure and high-minded, but they knew the value of presenting themselves in that light. What made matters worse for liberals is that both regimes were replaced by unsophisticated, loud types who were popular among coarse, unrefined mobs. Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, like the late Mr. Begin, is not someone whom most sophisticates would care to have at their dinner tables.

So it should not be surprising that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has not said a word defending or even expressing understanding of India's actions. Some American conservatives share the Administration's outrage.

Conservatives have often bought into arms-control theologies more than they may consciously realize. They also have their own stereotypes about India. India for them was the land of maharishis and yoga, a place for stoned hippies to wander around -- and for sensible conservatives to ignore when its diplomats routinely castigated American activities in Vietnam in the 1960s.

The last obstacle to a U.S. - India alliance? Everyone in Washington ignores India. Washington is routinely obsessed by nations that should rationally be dismissed as tiny and obscure -- think of the endless Irish troubles -- while there are major nations of immense population and wealth that never inspire a policy conference or even an article. France's very real importance for the world goes unnoticed in Washington.

India has fallen into this black hole of perception. Americans do not know about India's impressive twentieth-century military and strategic record. They do not know that the greatest defeat inflicted on Japanese warriors in 2,600 years came not at the hands of MacArthur in the Philippines, but in 1944 at Kohima and Imphal when British-led but predominantly Indian troops smashed Japanese land forces in Southeast Asia.

One can almost understand why India's leaders might regard nuclear detonations as the only way to get attention and win a place among the nations -- especially now that Russia, India's ally of the past thirty years, is making no secret of its higher regard for China. India right now would almost certainly be receptive to American courtship.

But this great opportunity will probably be missed by our current policymakers. Liberal activists and arms-control advocates will continue to fulminate. Sanctions will be imposed. It seems that even Senate Republicans will continue to be distracted. And the chance to secure an enormously important ally will be forever lost.