Sunday, June 3, 2001
End of Cold War INDIA'S RUSH to welcome President Bush's controversial missile defense plan, even as long-time U.S. allies Japan and South Korea dithered, came as measure of the distance New Delhi has traveled since the collapse of its Cold War ally, the Soviet union, a decade ago.
also thaws relations
between U.S., India
India appears to be
positioning itself as America's
newest ally in AsiaBy J. Mohan Malik
Special to the Star-BulletinEarlier, when the EP-3 intelligence plane crew was held hostage in China, Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh praised Washington's "restraint and cautious attitude" in dealing with Beijing. India, like many other Asian countries, saw China using the incident to demonstrate not only its determination to "stand up" to the United States but to show "who's the boss" in the region.
These developments, coupled with the dispatch of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to brief Japan, South Korea and India on missile defenses, signaled the end of what Samuel Huntington, the Harvard scholar, once described as "lonely and friendless" India's search for new allies.
A statement from the Indian External Affairs Ministry welcomed the Bush administration's stated intent to make "deep cuts in America's nuclear armory." It made two other points. First, that Bush's concept of missile defense was a "significant and far-reaching effort" to move away from the "adversarial legacy of the Cold War." Second, that there was "strategic and technological inevitability" in stepping away from a world held hostage by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, to "a cooperative defensive transition".THE LAST REFLECTS a recognition that every generation of weapons experiences a process of birth, development, ascent and decline. Accepting nuclear weapons as the end of weapons development is thus historically and technologically indefensible.
Just as anti-aircraft defenses were built to counter air attacks and surface fleets saw the evolution of submarines, so missile defenses are aimed at rendering nuclear weapons, long seen as "the ultimate strategic weapon," less effective, if not obsolete.
Bush's statement that missile defenses would be aimed at "states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life" finds resonance within India's national security establishment. Behind this thinking also lies the belief that missile defenses would neutralize the offensive nuclear strategies of India's hostile neighbors --China and Pakistan.
India's strategic community supports the idea of a close and mutually beneficial relationship with the United States as a restraint on China's destabilizing activities in India's neighborhood. New Delhi has long accused Beijing of doing everything it can to undermine India's interests and using its ties with other powers to contain India.
Some Indian strategic thinkers even see in the emerging Indo-U.S. quasi-alliance an opportunity for "payback" to China. As the former Indian ambassador to Pakistan and Burma, G. Parthasarthy, put it: "Whether it was the Bangladesh conflict of 1971, or in the Clinton-Jiang Declaration in the aftermath of our nuclear tests, China has never hesitated to use its leverage with the Americans to undermine our security."
In the Bush administration's description of China as a "strategic competitor," many Indians see a vindication of their belief that China's patronage of militarist, rogue states poses a serious threat to global security.
CRITICS OF MISSILE defense say that it would antagonize China, undermine arms control and usher in an arms race in Asia. The counter-argument is that an arms race is already under way and that missile defense itself would be a response, particularly to nuclear and missile proliferation.
In that view, Beijing's missile build-up, growing belligerence and proliferation helped create the context within which India decided to unveil its nuclear weapons and the U.S. opted for missile defense. Even before missile defense came on the scene, China was engaged in an expansion of its nuclear force, qualitatively and quantitatively.
Strategically, India remains vulnerable to a pre-emptive Chinese nuclear strike because it lacks a reliable second-strike capability with which to retaliate. India today is where China was vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in the 1960s when Moscow threatened to wipe out China's small nuclear arsenal, forcing Beijing to turn to the United States. India's desire to ingratiate itself with the United States is motivated by this vulnerability vis-a-vis China.
Given the adversarial nature of Sino-Indian relations, India could not afford to be seen as siding with China on a strategic issue such as missile defense. India's new stance is also motivated by New Delhi's realization that opposition was not going to make any difference. Therefore, it would be better to support and, if possible, participate in developing a missile-defense system with the United States that would also protect its own territory.
Professor J. Mohan Malik teaches at the
Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.
These are his personal views.