India: the part Bush got right

As George W. Bush thankfully prepares to slink away forever from an office to which he was disastrously unsuited, and as we all dust off our litanies of his numerous epic failures, I thought I'd write one final pro-Bush post, in the interest of fairness.

What George Bush got right was India policy. The "opening of India" achieved under Bush was not limited to the "1-2-3" nuclear deal, but included vastly expanded economic, military, and political ties. The NYT reports:

Eight years ago, Mr. Bush inherited a peculiar relationship with India: a natural partnership in theory that was in practice unnaturally fraught. Despite their being multiethnic and multireligious democracies with an entrepreneurial streak, the two countries had drifted apart during the cold war, and nuclear politics remained an irritant: When there was a Soviet Union, India was loosely in its orbit, while America’s fierce anti-Communism drove it toward Pakistan, India’s archrival. When India conducted a nuclear test, in 1974, a chilled relationship became cooler still, as the United States blacklisted its civilian nuclear energy program and slapped restrictions on its imports of essential dual-use technologies.

In July 2006, 15 years after the Soviet Union collapsed and five years after Islamic terrorists became America’s principal enemy, Mr. Bush decisively reversed course. Raising India to the status of a strategic ally, he cut a unique exception in the global nonproliferation regime, proposing that India be allowed to keep its military stockpile even as it gained access to technologies and fuel for its civilian reactors. Over the next two years Mr. Bush used dwindling political capital to get the deal approved by the Congress and foreign governments. When Pakistan requested a similar pact, it was told that such deals were reserved for “responsible” states.

This was the diplomacy of the grand gesture, and when this barrier fell others followed. The American and Indian militaries increased joint exercises. They exchanged trade delegations. Their companies won expanded access to the other’s markets. American officials began to talk up India as a rising great power in a new century.

Gautam Adhikari, the editorial page editor of The Times of India, a leading English-language daily, said the turnaround was “on par with the turnaround in U.S.-China ties brought about by Nixon starting in 1972.”

And I think it's important to realize that this engagement with India is not something that any president could have done. President Clinton, an avowed multilateralist, was essentially forced to ostracize India after its 1998 nuclear tests - even though India had been known to possess nuclear weapons decades earlier - because those tests violated international norms. Bush, as we all know, doesn't care about international norms. Nine times out of ten, international norms are a better guide for our foreign policy than great-power balancing, but that tenth time can be really important. It was important when Nixon struck a deal with communist China, and I think it was important with India now - only Bush could go to India.

In the short term, India will be an important (possibly our most important) ally, business partner, customer, and source of high-skilled immigrants. In the long term, as the Times agrues, India could be essential to the continued international promotion of the "American" way of life:

When empires wane, they live on, as the political scientist David Singh Grewal has argued, by embedding their values, systems and standards in a presumptive heir, as ancient Greece did through Rome and as Britain has done through the United States. Should it falter in due course, might America achieve the same through India — the preservation at least of the American idea and way of life?

That is implied in a cherished vision here — that if India does become as dynamic and powerful as China, then democracy, multiculturalism and the rule of law will continue to have a forceful champion, with or without America. So will free expression, irreverent newspapers, the separation of powers, elections that actually oust people, the English language as the medium of business, movies that end happily, reality television and the bedrock belief that the best things in a society happen uncoordinated on its streets rather than in its Central Committee.

Many Indians believe they are the heirs to this tradition, that it is their special destiny to be a new America.

In a way, in previous millennia India was the original "America" - a large, religiously tolerant nation that became the destination for immigrants from all over the Old World. So of all our possible successors as global powers, I'm by far the most comfortable with India; It was past time the world's two big multiethnic democracies became friends. We don't have much to thank Bush for, but we do have that.