About Chellaney

Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator

India-U.S. Nuclear Deal: Long-Maul Exercise

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Chellaney

Long Maul

The July 2005 accord’s main benefit for India remains the symbolically important message that the United States, reversing a three-decade punitive approach toward India, has embraced it as a “responsible” nuclear state. The actual incentive proffered by the United States for a final deal — the lifting of civil nuclear sanctions — is of less significance because high-priced imported commercial power reactors can play only a marginal role in meeting India’s energy needs. In other words, India is already savoring the main gain from the original deal.

Brahma Chellaney

The controversial US-India nuclear deal may not be in the news these days but it quietly continues to ferment new issues. Even as America and its friends persist with their hard sell of the deal, increasing doubts about the wisdom and costs of pushing ahead with it on terms set by the US Congress have gripped the Indian establishment.

After the conditions-laden Hyde Act was passed, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had told Parliament, “Clarifications are necessary, and will be sought from the US, because there are areas which cause us concern.” However, instead of clearing India’s specific concerns, Washington continues to project a rosy picture and make light of the PM’s statement. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher gloated before a congressional panel three days ago that the Hyde Act has been “very well crafted” to let President George W. Bush and Dr. Singh “move forward in a way that is prudent and in a way that meets their own expectations.”

Yet the projected timeframe for stitching up the final deal continues to slip. When the agreement-in-principle was unveiled on July 18, 2005, it was sanguinely claimed by both sides that by spring of 2006, the deal would take effect. Then when the Hyde Act was passed, US officials voiced optimism that the final deal would be before Congress by July 2007.

Now Washington has further revised the deadline to late 2007 or early 2008. Even that seems overly optimistic when one bears in mind that after almost 20 months, only the first of the five phases has been completed to clinch the final deal. There is still a long road ahead for the two sides to traverse.

Let’s not forget that the US-China nuclear deal, signed in 1984, took nearly 14 years to come into force, and another nine years thereafter for Beijing to place its first import order for US reactors. The US-India deal, in fact, involves more processes and complicating factors. Long after the original actors involved in the July 18, 2005, accord have faded into history, India would still be grappling with the deal-related issues.

Indeed the deal’s main benefit for India remains the symbolically important message of July 18, 2005 that the United States, reversing a three-decade punitive approach toward India, has embraced it as a “responsible” nuclear state. The actual incentive proffered by the US — the lifting of civil nuclear sanctions — is of less significance because high-priced imported commercial power reactors can play only a marginal role in meeting India’s energy needs. In other words, India is already savouring the main gain from the deal.

Still, the US continues to flog the deal when in reality the Hyde Act has become an epitome of Washington’s penchant to overplay its hand. Such overdo in seeking to hold India to a plethora of concessions and good-behaviour conditions could have made sense if the only choice New Delhi had was to take it or lump it. Fortunately for India, it has more than wiggle room. Indeed its interests do not dictate any urgency in wrapping up a final deal. Even if it deferred a decision ad infinitum, any future terms for gaining a right to import power reactors and fuel can only be better, not more mortifying, than those laid down in the Hyde Act.

Any dispassionate appraisal shows that, on balance, America stands to gain financially and politically more than India from the final deal. Even in the nuclear-power sector, the deal would help create thousands of new American jobs through exports to India, and provide US industry — which hasn’t built a power reactor in almost three decades — access to broad-based Indian engineering expertise in areas ranging from uranium processing to heavy-forging capabilities in reactor construction, as a currently-visiting delegation of executives of 18 US nuclear companies acknowledges.

So it is astonishing that the American executive and legislature should have framed the terms of a final deal in such a manner as to engender growing misgivings in India. Washington clearly miscalculated that India was so desperate for a final deal that it would accept debasing terms, even if reluctantly.

Ironically, while India needs to be in no hurry, the deal is a matter of urgency for American strategic and financial interests. For America, the deal opens the way to not only India’s strategic co-optation but also securing tens of billions of dollars worth of contracts, as the US-India Business Council admits. It is not an accident that the most-fervent force still pushing for a final deal continues to be US corporate and political interests.

The delay and uncertainty over a final deal have only prompted American officials to demand that India start delivering to the US on the promised rewards now. Many of the coveted rewards have little to do with the nuclear-power sector. Rather they extend from arms contracts to the opening up of the Indian retail and financial sectors. The nuclear deal is also at the core of US foreign-policy efforts to bring New Delhi closer to the American position on issues ranging from Pakistan and Iran to the Doha Development Round negotiations.

Far from the cards being stacked against it, India today has sufficient leverage to manoeuvre negotiations with the US in a way that its interests are safeguarded. What it needs is tact, patience and perseverance for a potentially long-haul exercise.

The correct response to Washington’s overplaying of its hand will be to focus on Indian concerns and not allow the country to be cornered by a US legislation patently beyond the pale. Shining the spotlight on India’s concerns and insisting that the US satisfactorily address them also obviates the need to reject the Hyde Act or disengage from any process.

Put simply, India ought to buy time to shield its long-term interests. Sound diplomacy doesn’t come without statecraft. Nor can diplomacy deliver results without team work or with the other side setting the agenda and timetable. New Delhi needs to sort out several issues.

● The sequence in which the remaining processes are to be carried out cannot disadvantage India. To some extent, this already is happening, as the US has tacitly revised the sequencing. After having complained last year that New Delhi was not doing enough to lobby member-states of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group for a special exemption from the cartel’s export controls, the US now says the NSG process can wait. And after having announced in December that the next phase would involve negotiations to conclude a bilateral civil nuclear cooperation agreement (the so-called 123 accord), the US says India’s proposed agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency demands equally high priority.

It is apparent now that the NSG would consider an exemption only after India has reached an agreement with the IAEA to bring its entire civil nuclear programme under external inspections (safeguards). The US is pressing India for an early conclusion of such an agreement with the IAEA.

While an accommodating India has agreed to parallel processes with the IAEA and the US to negotiate a safeguards pact and a 123 agreement, respectively, the sequencing issue is far from settled. How can India finalize a safeguards pact without clarity on an NSG decision and the 123 agreement? Given that the US Congress legislated a conditional exemption for India from US export controls without awaiting the safeguards pact, why should the NSG insist on awaiting the outcome of the India-IAEA process before carving out an India-specific exception?

New Delhi believes that with IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei’s support, a safeguards agreement could be reached quickly, although no one can predict how such an accord would fare with the Agency’s 35-nation governing board. But once India has finalized a safeguards pact and “concluded all legal steps required prior to signature,” as sought by the US, drawing back from those “legal steps” would not be easy.

While it is true that some other NSG members also think that the nature and scope of IAEA safeguards India agrees to would be crucial to getting the NSG to fashion a special exemption, relegating the NSG action to the penultimate process very much suits Washington. In the fifth and final phase of the deal-making process, the US would have to take the entire package of actions to its legislature for approval, as required by the Hyde Act.

An early NSG exemption would only arm India with leverage vis-à-vis the US. But keeping the NSG decision hanging till the last-but-one stage, Washington believes, would help make New Delhi comply with the extraneous preconditions mandated by the Hyde Act, such as the requirement that India adhere to the Missile Technology Control Regime, yet remain subject to US missile and space sanctions. The US has now submitted a detailed dossier on how India should unilaterally but formally adhere to MTCR by implementing “specific procedures.”

● The increasingly strained relations between the Ministry of External Affairs and the Department of Atomic Energy call for urgent repair. The bad blood between the DAE and the MEA, as personified by special envoy Shyam Saran and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon, is an open secret. Their thinking and approach on the deal remain not in sync.

If India is to advance its interests, this sorry state of affairs needs to end. How can India conduct effective negotiations on a nuclear deal if the chief negotiator does not inspire confidence in the nuclear establishment? Or when a media campaign now and then is scripted against nuclear scientists by a still-mysterious force? Without team play and mutual respect, diplomacy cannot work.
In the latest disagreement, the DAE wanted the MEA to secure clarifications from the US on key Indian concerns before submitting an Indian draft of the planned 123 agreement. After all, the PM had himself underscored the necessity of such clarifications. The US-Indian differences on some fundamental issues remain so wide that without finding ways to narrow them, it would be pointless and even counterproductive, the DAE argued, to hand in an Indian counter-draft to the version submitted by the Americans in March 2006.

The DAE was genuinely concerned about India getting into a bureaucratic haggle over wording where semantic compromises are sought by negotiators to paper over real differences. The divergence on issues is such that, even if skirted, it would inexorably surface later, only to exact a heavy price. The DAE thus wanted to first clear the key differences and find mutually agreeable language codifying that understanding in the draft 123 accord.

The Saran-Menon duo, however, pressed for forward movement in the 123 process through the submission of the Indian counter-draft. The US State Department, for its part, contended that it was futile to continue discussions on the Hyde Act because it had given all the clarifications it could on the legislation. Both the MEA and the US became impatient with what they saw as stalling tactics by the DAE.

In the end, the MEA had its way, with the foreign secretary handing over last month in Washington the Indian counter-draft — to which the US has still to respond. Despite Dr. Singh’s assurance in Parliament last December that clarifications were necessary on areas of divergence, deep differences remain on several core issues.

Those differences have arisen because the US legislature spurned most of Dr. Singh’s benchmarks, as spelled out by him in Parliament last August 17. And despite the MEA’s meretricious faith in addressing India’s concerns through the 123 agreement, Boucher has just testified that it will be “a standard bilateral agreement” as required by US law.

● To strengthen its negotiating leverage, the government needs to concede a role for Parliament. It hardly redounds to the credit of the world’s largest democracy that its Parliament has yet to carefully scrutinize a deal that not only centres on the very future of the country’s nuclear programme, but also has divided India like no other issue in modern times. In contrast, the US Congress will have a second shot at scrutinizing and approving the deal in its final form.

The 123 agreement, when ready, will be signed by an Indian bureaucrat, like the last 123 accord in 1963. It will not be submitted to Parliament for vetting, let alone for approval, but the US legislature will examine it minutely and have the right to attach conditions to its entry-into-force. If Dr. Singh were to agree to place the 123 accord before Parliament for scrutiny and a no-vote debate, he would only strengthen his own hands.

More broadly, a smart Indian strategy would be to drag out the negotiations into the next decade. That way India will still enjoy the main benefit of the deal without having to meet grating conditions to earn a dubious right to import power reactors.

Like a blue chip in a soaring stock market, a rising India’s stock and influence are bound to soar internationally in the coming years, strongly positioning New Delhi to conclude a deal on terms that are fairer and more balanced than on offer today. Its interests also demand a deal encompassing not just civil nuclear export controls but the full range of dual-use technology controls in force against it.

Japan-China

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Chellaney

Nationalism on the rise

Brahma Chellaney

International Herald Tribune

TOKYO: With China and South Korea expressing anger after the visit Tuesday by Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, to the Yasukuni war shrine, it will be tempting for the rest of the world to draw a simplistic message. A halt to such pilgrimages, one might think, could put an end to strategic antagonisms in East Asia.

The reality is that revisionist history is being employed as a political tool not only by Japan but also by those who have turned Yasukuni, where 14 top war criminals are honored, into a potent symbol of friction between countries. In fact, resurgent nationalism has become the single biggest threat to Asia’s renaissance.

For more than half a century, both China and Japan have been dominated by a single party that now finds pandering to nationalistic sentiment attractive in the face of an eroding political base. The spats over history also represent a tussle for leadership in East Asia at a time when China’s dramatic rise has begun to influence geopolitics.

China uses the Nanjing massacre and Japan uses the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as national symbols of crimes by outsiders. Since China became Communist, it has employed purported history to gobble up Tibet, seize Indian territories, assert its claims in the East and South China Seas, and demand Taiwan’s "return."

Today, unassuaged historical grievances not only engender ugly nationalism but also help spread the virus of xenophobia to the homogenized societies of East Asia. Focusing on unsavory history amplifies mistrust and runs counter to the liberalizing elements of globalization.

Yasukuni, a private Shinto memorial to Japan’s war dead, is a symptom of the Asian malady, not the cause.

Koizumi’s annual visits as prime minister to Yasukuni, a legacy of pre-1945 Japanese militarism, have certainly been provocative, particularly his latest – his first on the highly symbolic Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender. Yet it would be naïve to assume that nationalism-mongering in East Asia will end if his successor were to avoid the shrine.

China’s use of the history card against Japan predates Koizumi’s Yasukuni visits. Even if Koizumi’s successor were to change course, Beijing would still be able to exploit the issue of controversial Japanese history textbooks and what it sees as Japan’s insufficient penitence for its 1931 occupation of Manchuria and 1937 invasion of Han China.

In fact, it was in the 1990s, when Japan was still China-friendly and the main aid provider to Beijing, that the Chinese Communists began a "political education" campaign demonizing Japan for its past atrocities. That campaign laid the groundwork for the upsurge of nationalism and the deterioration of China- Japan relations.

In seeking to address domestic political imperatives to replace the increasingly ineffectual Communist ideology with fervent nationalism, China’s rulers have helped whip up Japanese nationalism. That is the kind of political shortsightedness that could one day spell doom for the Communist hold on power.

Those who seek to turn Yasukuni into a bigger issue than it really is are not only taking sides but also playing into the hands of Japanese nationalists, gratuitously arming them with leverage and even encouraging them to raise the stakes.

It is thus little surprise that Foreign Minister Taro Aso last week called for turning Yasukuni into a state memorial, while Koizumi’s most likely successor, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, publicly questioned the legitimacy of the Allied tribunal that convicted as "Class A" war criminals – guilty of "crimes against peace" – 14 leading figures who in 1978 were added to Yasukuni’s rolls. For his part, Koizumi has used Yasukuni to stand up to China and fashion an extraordinary legacy pivoted on a nationalist shift in policy.

In his five years in office, Koizumi has not only built popular support for revision of the U.S.-imposed pacifist Constitution but also laid the foundation for the emergence of a more muscular Japan. To the nationalists, his Yasukuni visits epitomize Japan’s return to being a "normal" state.

Both Japan and China need to break free from history. Yet in April 2005, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China demanded that Japan "face up to history squarely," setting the stage for his country’s scripted anti-Japanese mob protests.

While railing against the risk of renewed Japanese militarism in Asia, Wen appeared oblivious to the fact that while Japan has fought no conflict in the past 60 years, China has waged wars on several flanks in the years since it came under Communist rule. Before asking Japan for yet another apology for its atrocities, China should face up to its more recent history of aggression by apologizing to the Tibetans, Indians and Vietnamese.

Disputes over Yasukuni, history textbooks, war museums and xenophobic cultural programming need to be resolved through quiet diplomacy, not an outpouring of inflammatory rhetoric that incites more forbidding nationalism.

Brahma Chellaney, author of the forthcoming "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan," is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

First published: IHT AUGUST 15, 2006

Chinese Foreign Policy

Posted on March 16, 2007 by Chellaney

Beijing’s historical fantasies

Brahma Chellaney

International Herald Tribune

NEW DELHI China has succeeded in putting the spotlight on Japan’s World War II history. But while harping on that distant war, Beijing refuses to face up to its own aggressions and employs revisionist history to rationalize its assertive claims and ambitions.

With fervent nationalism replacing Communist ideology, the scripted anti-Japanese mob protests earlier this year were one blatant case of the Chinese rulers’ open mixing of history with their politics. Another case in point occurred more recently at a seminar in Mumbai, after Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian defense minister, fleetingly cited the Chinese invasion of 1962 as a defining moment that set in motion India’s new thrust on defense production, and referred to the still-festering border problem with China, which he said had resolved its land-frontier disputes "with all its neighbors except India and Bhutan."

In contravention of diplomatic norms, which would have involved consulting the Chinese ambassador in New Delhi, China’s Mumbai-based consul general castigated Mukherjee on the spot for using the term "invasion" and claimed that "China did not invade India." Later, the ambassador, too, criticized Mukherjee’s reference to 1962, telling the Indian media, "Whatever happened in the past is history, and we want to put it back into history."

The incident revealed how China contradictorily deals in history vis-à-vis its neighbors to further its own foreign policy objectives: While it wants India to forget 1962, it misses no opportunity to bash Japan over the head with the history card. Its aim is not to extract more apologies from Tokyo for its World War II atrocities but to continually shame and tame Japan. (It is ironic that visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao used Indian soil last April to demand that Japan "face up to history squarely," setting the stage for his country’s orchestrated anti-Japanese protests.)

Another way China manipulates history is by reconstructing the past to prepare for the future. This was illustrated by the Chinese foreign ministry’s posting on its Web site last year a revised historical claim that the ancient kingdom of Koguryo, founded in northern Korea, was Chinese. This was seen as an attempt to hedge China’s options with a potentially unified Korea.

Then there is China’s continued use of what it presents as history to advance extravagant territorial or maritime claims. Its maps show an entire Indian state — Arunachal Pradesh — as well as other Indian areas as part of China.

While the Chinese-Japanese rivalry has deep roots, dating back to the 16th century, the Chinese and Indian military frontiers met for the first time in history only in 1950, when China annexed (or as its history books say, "liberated") Tibet, a buffer nearly the size of Western Europe. Within 12 years of becoming India’s neighbor, China invaded this country, with Mao Zedong cleverly timing the aggression with the Cuban missile crisis.

Beijing has yet to grasp that a muscular approach is counterproductive. Had it not set out to "teach India a lesson," in the words of then Premier Zhou Enlai, this country probably would not have become the significant military and nuclear power that it is today. The invasion helped lay the foundation of India’s political rise.

This has a reflection today. Just a decade ago, Beijing was content with a Japan that was pacifist, China-friendly and China’s main source of low-interest loans. Now, it is locked in a cold war with Tokyo, with its growing assertiveness and ambition spurring a politically resurgent Japan.

Even the Chinese consul general’s outburst has counterproductively returned the focus onto an invasion that Beijing wishes to eliminate from public discussion and about which it hides the truth from its own people. The impertinence only draws attention to the fact that China remains unapologetic for the major stab in the back that shattered India’s pacifism and hastened the death of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Japan certainly needs to come to terms with its brutal militaristic past. But just as Japanese textbooks and the museum attached to the Yasukuni Shrine glorify Japan’s past, Chinese textbooks and the military museum in Beijing distort and even falsify history. The key difference is that Chinese foreign policy seeks to make real the legend that drives official history — China’s centrality in the world.

(Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.)

First published

IHT DECEMBER 12, 2005

Nuclear Deal With India

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Chellaney

U.S. deal is a bad choice for power generation

Brahma Chellaney

International Herald Tribune

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2005

NEW DELHI India

A much-trumpeted deal between the United States and India seeks to employ the lure of assistance with commercial nuclear power to bring many Indian nuclear sites under international inspections. Even as tough negotiations are now under way to implement the deal, few have examined its premise – that the way for India to meet its rapidly expanding energy demands is to import nuclear power reactors.

The deal’s very rationale is fundamentally flawed because generating electricity from imported reactors makes little economic or strategic sense. Such imports will lead to energy insecurity and exorbitant costs.

India should not replicate in the energy sector the major mistake it has pursued on armaments. Now the world’s largest arms importer, India spends billions of dollars a year on weapons imports, some of questionable value, while it neglects to build its own armament-production base. India should not think of compounding that blunder by spending billions more to import overly expensive reactors when it can more profitably invest in the development of its own energy sources.

India should think instead of tapping its vast hydroelectric reserves and exploiting its coal reserves, which are among the largest in the world.

The global share of nuclear-generated electricity has remained constant at roughly 16 percent for a decade. Despite being free of carbon and greenhouse gases, nuclear power faces the continuing global challenge to become commercially competitive with thermal power, even when the costs of antipollution technology for the latter are included.

Studies comparing the costs of producing electricity from new nuclear, coal and natural gas plants have revealed that the baseline cost of new nuclear power remains significantly higher worldwide. In India, study after study has shown nuclear-generated electricity to be costlier than coal-generated electricity. And the price of nuclear-generated electricity in no nation includes the potential costs of spent-fuel disposal.

Still, indigenous nuclear reactors make sense to several nations, for whom nuclear power is part of a push for fuel diversity to help spread out potential long-term risks.

No country, however, has tried to build energy security by importing reactors of a type it has no intent to manufacture nationally and whose fuel requirements will keep it perpetually dependent on foreign suppliers. Yet this is the bizarre path India wishes to embark upon.

If the deal is implemented, it will allow India to import only the proliferation-resistant light-water reactor (LWR), fuelled by low-enriched uranium. LWRs, however, do not fit India’s three-phase nuclear power development program, which seeks to overcome the country’s natural-uranium shortage through a shift to fast-breeder technology. Fast-breeder reactors will employ plutonium (recycled from the spent fuel of existing plants) and thorium, of which India has 31 percent of the world’s reserves.

Yet India now wants to shortsightedly import reactors dependent on foreign fuel and spare parts to be part of what its prime minister farcically calls "a broad-based energy security policy." The government heeds no lesson from India’s bitter experiences over America’s abandonment, a quarter-century ago, of its legally binding commitment to supply fuel and parts to the first Indian nuclear plant, the General Electric-built Tarapur. Key issues relating to Tarapur remain outstanding.

Imported reactors, despite their bad economics, can make energy-security sense only if they are part of a country’s planned transition to autonomous capability. A good example is China, which is aggressively working to become self-sufficient in reactors and fuel despite entering the nuclear power field two decades after India.

As it is, India’s indigenous reactors are unable to supply electricity to consumers at rates offered by the Indian thermal power industry. The differential will become appreciably higher when electricity is produced from imported reactors.

Is it really necessary to showcase the U.S.-India strategic partnership through a deal that commits India to a wrong energy choice? Even with a tenfold increase in India’s nuclear generating capacity, nuclear power would still contribute a tiny share of this country’s total electricity.

The billions of dollars saved from not importing high-priced, uneconomical reactors could be invested domestically to generate many times more electricity from indigenous energy resources.

America can help India better by selling not its dubious nuclear reactors, but its clean-coal and renewable-energy technologies, even as it draws on the deal to end its export controls against New Delhi.

(Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.)

Nuclear Deal

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Chellaney

The best of intentions, the worst of results

Brahma Chellaney

International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, JUNE 26, 2006

NEW DELHI With its first anniversary approaching, the vaunted U.S.-India nuclear deal, far from adding momentum to the building of close ties between the world’s most powerful and most populous democracies, threatens to become a political albatross for both countries.

This week, Senate and House committees in the U.S. Congress are likely to take up their own versions of the bill that seek to attach tougher conditions. In New Delhi, the main opposition coalition, concerned over limits on India’s nuclear program, petitioned the president last week to stop the deal.

The nuclear deal has needlessly injected controversy and complications into a relationship whose direction already had been set toward closer engagement through a global strategic partnership. The bitter debate the deal has triggered in both countries could end up terminally poisoning the relationship.

Since the deal was signed last July, America’s image has slipped in India. The 2005 global opinion poll by the Pew Research Center disclosed that more respondents in India (71 percent) expressed a positive view of the United States than in any other nation surveyed. The 2006 Pew survey showed that America’s rating has plummeted 15 points in India.

The nuclear deal may have been founded on good intentions, and its goal is certainly bold – to eliminate a decades-long source of acrimony between the two countries by removing U.S.-fashioned multilateral controls on the export of commercial nuclear power reactors and fuel to India. At the practical level, however, the deal is rooted in several myths.

Myth: The deal will eliminate discrimination against India and end its nuclear isolation.

With or without the deal, India will stay in a third aberrant category – neither a formal nuclear power nor a nonnuclear nation, but a nonsignatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that possesses nuclear weapons. In fact, continued discrimination is built into the deal, with India agreeing to put 35 of its nuclear sites under international inspections of a type applicable only to nonnuclear states – permanent and legally irrevocable.

Far from seeking a blanket lifting of the nuclear embargo against India, the deal only calls for limited civilian nuclear commerce, tightly regulated by export-licensing requirements and subject to Indian "good behavior."

Myth: The way for India to meet its burgeoning energy demands is to import nuclear power reactors.

This argument is fundamentally flawed because generating electricity from imported reactors dependent on imported fuel makes little economic or strategic sense. Even if India spent tens of billions of dollars to import reactors, nuclear power would still make up a tiny share of its total electricity production, given that nuclear plants take exceptionally long to complete and the share of other energy sources is likely to rise faster.

A wiser approach for India would be to secure clean-coal and renewable energy technologies to exploit its huge coal and hydroelectric reserves, among the largest in the world.

Myth: Nuclear energy, according to President George W. Bush, will reduce India’s oil dependence and help stabilize world oil prices.

The truth is it won’t cut or slow down India’s fast- rising oil imports even marginally. India does not use oil to generate electricity.

In any case, India cannot correct its current oil reliance on the Gulf region by fashioning a new dependency on a tiny global nuclear-supply cartel made up of a few state-guided firms. While oil is freely purchasable on world markets, the global nuclear reactor and fuel business is the most politically regulated commerce in the world.

The Bush administration has a strong commercial motivation to press ahead with the deal. Having failed to use tax breaks and other incentives to revive the U.S. nuclear power industry, which has not received a single reactor order in more than 30 years, the administration is banking on India, which has agreed to import within the next six years eight reactors worth from $14.4 billion to $20 billion.

Yet the deal is already a drag on the U.S.-India relationship. It would be best to let it lapse to allow the relationship to develop without any encumbrance.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of "Nuclear Proliferation: The U.S.-India Conflict."

Nuclear

Posted on March 15, 2007 by Chellaney

India’s raw deal with the United States

By Brahma Chellaney

International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 2005

NEW DELHI When President George W. Bush last month announced his support for a deal allowing civilian nuclear technology sales to India, a storm of protests arose. Nonproliferation advocates around the globe were angered that Bush had implicitly legitimized New Delhi’s nuclear arsenal, but what has been less noted is that Indian voices were raised also. Why? Because the technology deal involves an unequal bargain in which India gains few benefits even as it agrees to many restrictions – including a limit on its ability to deter its nuclear-armed neighbor China.

India claims that under the deal it will assume the same duties and rights as the other nuclear powers, "no more and no less." The truth, however, is different. Indeed, China’s welcome and Pakistan’s lack of protest indicate their glee over a deal that employs the lure of commercial nuclear power assistance to help constrain the growth of India’s nuclear military capacity.

The deal has advantages for America. If approved by the U.S. Congress and the other nuclear powers, it would lift a sales ban that dates back to the first Indian nuclear explosion in 1974. The ban has been a major stumbling block to the forging of a true U.S.-Indian strategic partnership. Another advantage for Washington is that the deal opens the way to tens of billions of dollars worth of contracts for U.S. technology.

What India gets out of it is less clear. One benefit is that the deal would allow the country to import nuclear reactors and fuel for generating electricity. But the protesters in India are focusing on the deal’s implications for the country’s nascent nuclear military program. China has always been the primary focus of its nuclear drive; India still lacks missiles that can strike deep into the Chinese heartland.

And while Bush has made only a promise that he may not be able to fulfill, the deal lists a lot of requirements for India. This includes bringing civil nuclear plants and materials under international monitoring, allowing foreign inspectors unhindered access, and refraining from further testing.

By agreeing to separate its civilian and military nuclear programs, India will raise the costs of its declared policy to build a "credible minimum deterrent." The deal strikes the weak spot of India’s nuclear military capacity – its umbilical ties with the civilian program. India’s weapons program flows out of the civilian nuclear program.

Bush, meanwhile, rejected New Delhi’s request that the deal classify India as a nuclear-weapons state. India, however, has agreed to take on obligations that the recognized nuclear powers have not accepted.

First, India is to begin "identifying and separating civilian and military nuclear facilities and programs in a phased manner" and then declare the civilian part in full to the International Atomic Energy Agency. (In contrast, China will remain free from any obligation to carry out civil-military segregation.)

Second, India has agreed to "voluntarily" allow all its civil nuclear sites to be inspected by the energy agency. The other nuclear powers have not done that in practice, because in a majority of cases there is not even the pretense of civil-military separation. The five recognized nuclear powers, under voluntary accords, offer nuclear materials and plants for agency inspections in name only. The agency, in return, carries out token inspections or, often, no inspections. India, however, will have to accept, on its civilian program, rigorous inspections. The atomic energy agency will treat it like a non-nuclear state.

Third, India has pledged "adherence," to the rules of the very nuclear technology cartels that continue to exclude it – the American-led Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and Missile Technology Control Regime.

For Bush, the deal is an astute move that can result in lucrative business contracts, secure a firm U.S. strategic foothold in India, and bring a large part of the Indian nuclear program under international monitoring. However, is it in the United States’s interest to limit India’s ability to deter China?

Bush faces an uphill task persuading both Congress and America’s partners in the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (including China) to exempt India from export controls. New Delhi should wait until Bush has delivered his part of the bargain and then meet its obligations to the extent honored by the other nuclear powers, and with the same rights as them – "no more and no less."

(Brahma Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. )

India-U.S. Nuclear Deal

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Chellaney

Long-Maul Exercise

The deal’s main benefit for India remains the symbolically important message of July 18, 2005 that the United States, reversing a three-decade punitive approach toward India, has embraced it as a “responsible” nuclear state. The actual incentive proffered by the United States — the lifting of civil nuclear sanctions — is of less significance because high-priced imported commercial power reactors can play only a marginal role in meeting India’s energy needs. In other words, India is already savouring the main gain from the deal.

Brahma Chellaney

A Missile and Space Rider

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Chellaney

Missile Trap In A Nuclear Plot

(c) Asian Age, January 27, 2007

The nuclear deal-related U.S. law aims to deny India space-related dual-use technology and items even as it demands New Delhi unilaterally but formally adhere to MTCR. What has this to do with nuclear energy?

Brahma Chellaney

The United States, oddly, still maintains greater technology controls against the world’s largest democracy than against communist China, whose January 11 satellite-killing weapon test has underscored for India a pressing imperative: to accelerate the development of its space and missile capabilities. Space-based assets today are critical for civil and military communications, intelligence, navigation and missile guidance. Yet, not only is America loath to undertake strictly civilian space cooperation with India of the kind Russia is proud to do, but also its legislature has used the nuclear deal to decree that India not be let off the hook on dual-use space technology controls.

As the implications of the new U.S. legislation on the nuclear deal sink deeper, an undertow of concern is prompting the Indian government to brace itself for a long, precarious course. Speciously billed as the “enabling legislation,” the law doesn’t enable the deal: it only sets the India-specific preconditions that need to be fully met before Congress grants approval at a future date, subject to the already-legislated post-implementation conditions.

Despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s hosannas for the deal, he and the external affairs minister acknowledge that several provisions of this legislation are either “prescriptive” in ways incompatible with the July 18, 2005, agreement-in-principle, or “extraneous” and incongruous to engagement “between friends.” Yet, other than telling Parliament that it “has taken note of certain extraneous and prescriptive provisions in the legislation,” the government has chosen not to publicly identify a single such rider in the so-called Hyde Act.

Dr. Singh indeed told the Lok Sabha last month that “there are areas which continue to be a cause for concern, and we will need to discuss them with the U.S. administration before the bilateral cooperation agreement can be finalized.” How can India’s bona fide concerns about the new law, with its series of congressionally enforceable conditions, be addressed through discussions with the U.S. executive branch, whose own hands the legislation ties? Also, if India is to shield itself from the U.S. law’s “extraneous and prescriptive provisions,” shouldn’t New Delhi at least put on record its specific objections? To be sure, nuclear chief Anil Kakodkar has done well to speak out on same aspects.

One “extraneous and prescriptive” provision mandates the continued applicability of U.S. missile sanctions law to India — a barely disguised attempt to deny space-related dual-use technology and items. At the same time, the legislation makes any Indian infraction of the Missile Technology Control Regime guidelines a cause for re-imposition of civil nuclear sanctions.

First, as is obvious, this has no connection at all with a civil nuclear energy deal. Second, by bringing this issue within its purview through a nuclear cooperation-related legislation, Congress is making it tougher for India to access sensitive technologies. Until the enactment of the Hyde Act, the lifting of the space-related technology controls against India had been an executive-branch prerogative. And third, by mandating that the deal be terminated if India were to violate MTCR guidelines, Congress has laid bare that the deal has less to do with energy and more with the full range of U.S. non-proliferation interests.

This provision, in fact, exemplifies how the new U.S. law, in seeking to conditionally allow India to import commercial power reactors and fuel, aims to hold this country perpetually to a series of good-behaviour stipulations extraneous to the deal’s stated raison d’être. The provision also goes against the rationale of the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership between the U.S. and India — an initiative that supposedly paved the way for the nuclear deal.

The NSSP was founded to help substantially ease U.S. controls on the export of high-technology goods to India, and to permit civilian nuclear and space cooperation. These three issues came to be known as the “trinity,” which later became a “quartet” with the U.S. addition of missile defence. The fourth issue, however, didn’t remain a priority for too long because the Americans realized that missile-defence cooperation with India could chip away at the credibility of the nuclear-deterrent posture of their strategic ally, Pakistan.

Without significant progress in opening U.S. high-technology and space trade with India, the State Department, curiously, announced the “successful completion” of the NSSP process on the eve of the nuclear deal’s unveiling. In the commercial space area, for instance, NSSP had yielded only two Indo-U.S. conferences and modest modification of U.S. export-licensing requirements, along with the Indian Space Research Organization’s removal from the U.S. blacklist, innocuously named the “Entity List.” Post-NSSP, six ISRO subsidiaries were also removed, but four others still remain blackballed.

The NSSP’s forced conclusion — after Washington had shifted ground in the negotiations on some promises — appeared designed to leverage U.S. parleys with India by compartmentalizing each of the “trinity” subjects and bringing into greater play U.S. strategic and commercial interests over a wider range of issues. As the State Department “fact-sheet” of July 18, 2005, put it: “Completion of NSSP … paves the way for greater cooperation on strategic, energy security, and economic matters.”

Indeed, when the nuclear deal was made public, it constituted just four paragraphs in a long joint statement that roped in India as a collaborator on several fronts — from a “Global Democracy Initiative” to a military-to-military “Disaster Response Initiative” for operations in “the Indian Ocean region and beyond.” The statement announced a far-reaching “Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture” embracing both research and outreach in India, as well as new bilateral dialogues on commerce, finance and energy. The security issues had been dealt with in a new defence-framework accord three weeks earlier, with New Delhi agreeing not only to “conclude defence transactions” and share intelligence with the U.S., but also to participate in U.S.-directed “multinational operations” and join the U.S.-led non-proliferation regime.

Actually, the most onerous technology sanctions India has endured for long are not in the nuclear-energy realm but centre on advanced and dual-use technologies. Where export controls against India can be relaxed through executive action, such as in high technology or civilian space, the U.S. has dragged its feet. But where complex action was needed, including congressional waivers from existing U.S. legal provisions and a special exemption by a 45-nation cartel, it concluded a nuclear deal after wringing a heavy price out of India.

Today, the U.S. employs every export control in force as a bargaining chip. In each of the “trinity” areas, the U.S. has sought to impose conditions or extract commitments that go beyond its stated reasoning for maintaining stringent technology controls — concerns that the transfers might be diverted to military applications or leaked to a third party. In the space area, India has tightly segregated its satellite-launch and missile programmes and put in place strict export controls.

Yet the U.S. is still reluctant, despite lengthy negotiations that began much before the nuclear deal, to build broad commercial space cooperation with India by lifting its export controls on U.S.-made components and entering into equitable launch-services and technology-safeguards accords. Washington still draws back from the much-promised launch-services agreement despite securing Indian guarantees against misuse or re-export of technology. Similarly, the U.S.-India High-Technology Cooperation Group, meeting since 2003, has still to create conditions for hassle-free high-technology commerce.

Now, in a new twist, the U.S. Congress has cross-linked its action in one “trinity” area with continual U.S. controls against India in another. The Hyde Act stipulates that U.S. missile sanctions law, with its prohibition of dual-use space exports, will still apply to India even after it meets the required standard of “unilateral adherence” to the U.S.-fashioned MTCR. It is as if Congress is intent on keeping some aspects of the bilateral relationship trapped in the past. How can a strategic partnership be built with one side seeking to sustain penal measures against the other?

The Act draws a creative distinction between an “MTCR adherent” and a “unilateral adherent” to expressly keep India within the sanctions purview of Section 73 of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act. That section decrees wide-ranging trade and other sanctions in case MTCR-controlled items are transferred. But in keeping with MTCR’s status as a cartel that regulates transfers outside the league but not within, Section 73 is not applicable to any export “that is authorized by the laws of an MTCR adherent” or is for “an end user in a country that is an MTCR adherent.”

The Hyde Act’s Section 107 flatly holds: “Congress finds that India is not an MTCR adherent for the purposes of Section 73 of the Arms Export Control Act.” To purge any ambiguity, the Act places on record, through its accompanying Explanatory Statement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assurance that because India has “committed to unilaterally adhere” to MTCR, it “would not be considered an ‘MTCR Adherent’ as defined under Section 73.”

Israel, too, is a unilateral adherent to MTCR, but — as underlined by U.S. technology transfers, among others, to the Israeli Arrow anti-ballistic missile programme — neither the U.S. executive branch nor legislature has sought to draw such a contrived distinction in its case. In fact, if America were to apply to India the same standards it does to Israel, it will throw open not only commercial space cooperation but also high-technology commerce with New Delhi.

In singling out India, the Hyde Act goes beyond the Arms Export Control Act, which defines an “MTCR adherent” as either “a country that participates in MTCR or that, pursuant to an international understanding to which the United States is a party, controls MTCR equipment or technology in accordance with the criteria and standards set forth in MTCR.” India cannot “participate” in MTCR as long as the cartel — like the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group — declines to admit it as a full member. But given its deal-related commitments, India will certainly fit the second criterion as an MTCR adherent. Yet the Hyde Act peremptorily dismisses that, even as it peddles the hope that India one day could “enjoy the benefits” of MTCR membership.

Equally brassily, the legislation aims to strip India’s July 18, 2005, commitment to abide by MTCR and NSG guidelines of its voluntary quality and turn it into a formal adherence involving the implementation of “specific procedures.” If India were to meet the Act’s condition to unilaterally adhere to these cartels through formal procedures rather than a voluntary public declaration, it will not only undermine its leverage to gain membership, but also become bound by all future cartel decisions, however adverse.

China, denied entry to MTCR thus far, stays a voluntary adherent, spurning formal procedures. Moreover, it spurns the revised, more-stringent MTCR guidelines, recognizing only the original guidelines and annex framed in 1987 when the cartel was secretly formed by America, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and West Germany. But as underscored by its continuing covert missile assistance to Pakistan, China’s observance of even the original guidelines is more in the breach.

In contrast, the Hyde Act demands through its Section 104(b)(6)(B) that India harmonize its export laws and regulations with MTCR’s current guidelines and “practices,” with its Explanatory Statement amplifying that a “unilateral adherent” is also required to abide by “any subsequent changes to the MTCR guidelines and annex.” The perils of an open-ended Indian commitment have been underlined by the move of some MTCR states to institute what they call the International Code of Conduct Against Ballistic Missile Proliferation — a sort of mini-NPT to cover missile development.

In mandating the continued applicability of missile sanctions law to India, the U.S. Congress has sought to underpin the American goal to constrain the Indian development of long-range missiles. Without building longer-range ballistic missiles, India’s nuclear deterrent will remain largely of subcontinental relevance. Hobbling the growth of Indian delivery capability thus holds the key to the U.S. objective of preventing the emergence of India as a full-fledged nuclear-weapons state.

That objective is mirrored, as Dr. Kakodkar has put it, in the Hyde Act’s “fairly large number of sections which essentially seek to, sort of, contain or cap the Indian strategic programme.” Earlier, that objective had found expression in Dr. Rice’s accent on Indo-Pakistan “nuclear balance” and the public demand on Indian soil of her assistant secretary, Richard Boucher, that India “absolutely” define its deterrent in the sole context of Pakistan, now the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. As shown by America’s ongoing multibillion-dollar lethal arms transfers to Islamabad, with a huge sale of 500 Amraam and 200 Sidewinder missiles being announced just last week, Washington still uses Pakistan to countervail India, even as it seeks to frame an option to leverage its India ties against China.

The Hyde Act also seeks to hold India to an exceptional standard by linking civil nuclear cooperation to its ensuring inter alia that no “equipment or technology not consistent with MTCR guidelines” is exported “by an Indian person.” The nuclear deal’s continuation thus hinges on India’s good conduct on the missile front! But even with exemplary behaviour, India is to be denied access to space launch vehicle and unmanned aerial vehicle technologies, propulsion and propellant components, launch and ground support equipment, and other MTCR-controlled, space-related items.

To the U.S., strategically leveraging its India ties vis-à-vis Beijing does not mean helping India to militarily emerge as China’s peer. U.S. policy has no intent of compounding the ascent of China as a global military power by encouraging or acquiescing to India’s rise as another military giant with intercontinental-range weaponry. Indian romanticists have yet to grasp a simple fact that no great power in history has helped build another great power. In fact, great powers work to deter the rise of another great power.

While the nuclear deal will permit the U.S. to have its cake and eat it too, India is being called upon to open itself to action from both ends of the MTCR stick — to formally adhere to the regime from outside, yet remain one of its principal targets. This is just one example of how the vaunted deal squarely puts India on the debit side of the ledger. What was intended to herald a new era in U.S.-India relations is being appropriated into a win-win deal for one side and a loss-loss proposition for the other. In this situation, India’s strategic interests have to prevail over its diplomatic interests.

Don’t Nuke the Facts

Posted on March 10, 2007 by Chellaney

Don’t Nuke The Facts

Important to sift the truth from the spin

Brahma Chellaney

The Times of India January 9, 2007

The future of the U.S.-India nuclear deal remains uncertain despite President Bush signing into law the enabling bill. The conditions-loaded legislation, in fact, has increased the odds that implementing the deal will be a long, challenging process.

Some have wondered how a president mauled in the recent congressional elections, politically damaged by the growing costs of the Iraq debacle and increasingly seen at home as a lame duck, managed to get Congress to enact a law related to a highly contentious deal. The fact is that it was U.S. big business that got Congress to pass the so-called Hyde Act.

In yielding to big-business interests, Congress, however, tagged on tough conditions that can only cloud the deal’s future. A three-and-a-half-page official bill wound up as 41-page legislation, with the legal intent behind each of its provisions clarified by Congress through a detailed accompanying Explanatory Statement.

The deal has divided India like no other issue in modern times. After all, it centres on the very future of the country’s nuclear programme. With only the first phase of its five-part process complete, the deal is bound to intensify passions in India. That makes it all the more important that spin should not be allowed to obfuscate facts.

It has been contended that the Hyde Act is binding only on the U.S. True, but doesn’t the Act list the various conditions India has to meet before it becomes eligible for civil nuclear cooperation with the US? And doesn’t it overtly apply the principle of extraterritorial jurisdiction to regulate India’s conduct thereafter by perpetually hanging the Damocles’ sword of exports cut-off over its head?

Rarely before in U.S. history has a law been enacted imposing such numerous and onerous conditions on an avowed strategic partner to permit cooperation in just one area as the Hyde Act. What stands out is that several of its conditions have little to do with the deal’s raison d’être — civil nuclear energy. And by mandating the continued applicability of U.S. missile sanctions law to India, the Act seeks to deny it space-related dual-use items.

One commentator writing in these columns (“Don’t Press Panic Button”, Dec. 27) heaped ridicule on a statement by leading nuclear scientists that the Act seeks the return of all U.S.-origin items and materials if India were to conduct a nuclear test. He went on to conclude that it imposes “no additional burdens” on India in the event of a test.

First, the Act explicitly goes beyond the existing provisions of U.S. law that empower the president to continue exports on strategic grounds despite a test. The Act itself admits it goes “beyond Section 129 of the Atomic Energy Act” by decreeing that the waiver for India will necessarily terminate with any Indian test.

Second, as the Explanatory Statement makes clear, Congress expects the president to “make full and immediate use of U.S. rights to demand the return of all nuclear-related items, materials, and sensitive nuclear technology that have been exported or re-exported to India if India were to test…”

Third, the Act goes beyond even the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by specifying in technical terms what is prohibited for India. In the CTBT negotiations, the US had successfully opposed an Article I definition of a “nuclear explosion” to leave open loopholes for what it calls “permissible activities”. Today, through domestic law, the U.S. aims to impose CTBT-plus obligations on India while refusing to accede to the CTBT itself.

Once India has invested billions of dollars in importing power reactors, the Hyde Act, with its congressionally enforced conditions, will effectively bear it down. Even when the U.S. walked out midway from a binding 30-year bilateral pact over just one plant, Tarapur, New Delhi continued to honour the accord’s terms till the end — and even beyond to this day.

It is important to sift the truth from the spin. Playing to the Indian weakness for cosmetically attractive facets, Congress retained the tough elements from the Senate and House bills but gave softer labels to some. For his part, Bush not only scheduled his signature ceremony to coincide with the important Indian Parliament debate, but also issued a statement geared towards public relations in India.

For example, Bush said he would construe as “advisory” the Act’s Section 103 policy statements, without revealing that these statements had largely been made operative through Section 104. He voiced concern about the potential delegation of “legislative power to an international body” — the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group — but revealingly kept mum over the Act’s precondition: that the NSG first carve out by consensus an exemption for India with the same conditions.

India needs an informed debate on an increasingly complex deal, with the prime minister acknowledging he “still has some concerns” over the Hyde Act. It is thus imperative that facts are understood and respected.

The writer is a strategic affairs analyst.

Future Asia

Posted on March 6, 2007 by Chellaney

Forestalling Strategic Conflict in Asia

Forestalling Strategic Conflict in Asia
(c) Far Eastern Economic Review November 2006

By Brahma Chellaney

A fundamental and qualitative reordering of power in Asia is already challenging strategic stability and affecting equations between the continent’s major powers. As they maneuver for strategic advantage, China, India and Japan are transforming relations between and among themselves in a way that portends closer strategic engagement between New Delhi and Tokyo, and sharper competition between China on one side, and Japan and India on the other.

Yet, given the fact that India and China point across the mighty Himalayas in very different geopolitical directions and that Japan and China are separated by sea, they need not pose a threat to each other. The interests of the three powers are becoming intertwined to the extent that the pursuit of unilateral solutions by any one of them will disturb the peaceful diplomatic environment on which their continued economic growth and security depend.

Ensuring that Japan-China and China-India competition does not slide into strategic conflict will nonetheless remain a key challenge in Asia. Never before in history have all three of these powers been strong at the same time.

The emergence of China as a global player is transforming the geopolitical landscape like no other development. Not since Japan rose to world-power status during the reign of the Meiji Emperor has another non-Western power emerged with such potential to alter the global order as China today. However, as history testifies, the rise of a new world power usually creates volatility in the international system, especially when the concerned power is not a democracy. Such has been the transformation of China that, while preserving communist rule and Confucian culture, it has gone in one generation from all ideology and token materialism, to all materialism and token ideology. China’s ascent, however, is dividing Asia, not bringing Asian states closer.

Economic powerhouse Japan is determined to shore up its security and, despite its concerns over the fraying ties with Beijing, wishes to ensure that China does not call the shots in East Asia. After its World War II ignominy, Japan turned a necessity into a virtue by defining an antiwar identity anchored in its U.S.-imposed constitution and a strategy emphasizing economic modernization and global peace. Now, it is starting to shed decades of pacifism and reassert itself in world affairs. India’s continued economic rise, coupled with its political realism and growing self-confidence, has made it a key factor in Asian geopolitics. It will be unwilling to cede its leadership role in southern Asia.

In the emerging Asia, the two major non-Western democracies, India and Japan, look like natural allies as China drives them closer together. An India-Japan strategic partnership, involving naval cooperation to protect vital sea lanes of communication, could help adjust balance-of-power equations in Asia and build long-term stability and equilibrium.

The deepening mistrust and nationalistic chauvinism in Asia could create conditions that seriously harm the interests of all the major players. Take the divisive issue of history. The emphasis on past grievances only engenders nationalistic hostility and, as seen from the trends in China, South Korea and Japan, creates congenial conditions for the virus of xenophobia to spread in such homogenized societies. In order not to jeopardize stability and peace across Asia, sustained efforts need to be made to overcome the harmful historical legacies and the negative stereotyping of a rival state. China’s communist leaders will have to refrain from using the history card against Japan, just as Japanese right-wing politicians, intent on reviving a spirit of militarism, need to stop peddling myths about the benevolence of Japan’s imperial past.

The international community cannot be a silent spectator to the motivated resurrection of unpleasant history today. Such revivalistic actions may be designed to bolster political legitimacy at home and whip up nationalism, but they harm regional growth and stability and challenge international norms on good-neighborly conduct. A sustained Asian renaissance demands a more hospitable political atmosphere to help Asia sharpen its competitive edge and innovative skills through greater intra-Asian cooperation and larger investments in the sciences. The setting aside of historical issues and inculcation of positive political values in education are essential to the building of genuine, enduring interstate partnerships in Asia.

Priority should also be given to a resolution of territorial and maritime disputes in Asia. The China-India-Japan strategic triangle cannot become stable without progress on that front. A first step to a settlement of any dispute is clarity on a line of control or appreciation of the “no go” areas in order to eschew provocative or unfriendly actions. China’s gunboat diplomacy in September 2005 across the median line in the East China Sea, for instance, only aided the reelection campaign of Japanese leader Junichiro Koizumi. In his five years in office, Mr. Koizumi not only built popular support for revision of the pacifist Japanese Constitution but also laid the foundation for the emergence of a more muscular Japan.

The best way for China and Japan to explore for hydrocarbons in the East China Sea is through the joint development of fields there, given the intricate, difficult-to-resolve claims and legal ambiguities. Emulating the example of bilateral cooperative agreements set by disputants in the North Sea, Japan and China could jointly develop hydrocarbon deposits around the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, which have become symbols of potent nationalism. As a first step, Beijing and Tokyo need to reach agreement not to change the status quo. Joint development of fields where the Sino-Japanese maritime-boundary claims overlap can help bridge the dispute between the two countries.

Through a joint-development agreement under which they agree to share costs and benefits, China and Japan can positively transform the security environment in East Asia and help establish regional cooperation and multilateral security mechanisms. With the East China Sea potentially holding up to 100 billion barrels of oil, Japan and China have a strong incentive to reach a compromise.

The two most populous nations on earth, China and India, have been scowling at each other across a 4,057-kilometer disputed frontier for more than half a century. Since 1981, India has been negotiating with China to settle the Indo-Tibetan frontier. These border talks are the longest between any two nations in modern world history. Yet, not only have the negotiations yielded no concrete progress on a settlement, but they also have failed so far to remove even the ambiguities plaguing the long line of control. Beijing has been so loath to clearly define the frontline that it suspended the exchange of maps with India several years ago. Consequently, India and China remain the only countries in the world not separated by a mutually defined frontline.

China’s reluctance to fully define its long frontier with India may be linked to its strategy to keep its neighbor under pressure by pinning down a large number of Indian troops along the inhospitable slopes and valleys of the Himalayas. But through such reluctance China only advertises itself as a problem state for India. It has, for example, accepted the colonial-era McMahon Line with Burma but not with India. It has also not defined its 470-kilometer frontier with Bhutan, with crossborder Chinese incursions occurring periodically.

The China-India frontline, without prejudice to rival territorial claims, can be clarified through a mutual exchange of maps showing each other’s military positions. A Chinese disinclination to trade such maps translates into a greater aversion to clinch an overall border settlement. Rather than present itself as a practitioner of classical balance-of-power politics, China can profit more by fostering genuine political cooperation with New Delhi so that India is not driven into the U.S. strategic camp.

A genuine China-India rapprochement fundamentally demands a resolution of the Tibet issue through a process of reconciliation and healing initiated by Beijing with its Tibetan minority. Such a process will aid China’s own internal security. Despite decades of ruthless repression, China has failed to win over the Tibetan people, whose struggle for self-rule remains a model movement. Such is the suppression in Tibet that even having a photograph of the Dalai Lama constitutes a criminal offence. Yet the Tibetans have not lost their sense of mission or the will to regain their rights.

It is an illusion that China and India can build enduring peace and cooperation without Beijing reaching out to Tibetans and solving the problem of Tibet. A problem that defines the origins of the China-India divide will stay at the center of that troubled relationship even if it were set aside indefinitely. China’s own journey towards great-power status would be aided if it helped preserve Tibet’s unique culture and religion, involved Tibetans in the development of their land, and reached a deal to bring the Dalai Lama back from his exile in Dharamsala, India. A placated Tibet could help bridge the China-India chasm.

Taiwan is another Asian dispute that is far larger than the size of that island’s population and area. Sitting astride vital sea lanes, Taiwan truly holds the key to whether China emerges as a stabilizing force or an arrogant power seeking unchallenged ascendancy in Asia. By staking its claim to a role in the security of Taiwan, Japan is signaling that it will not allow China to change East Asia’s strategic balance in Beijing’s favor. This signaling was best symbolized by the February 2005 U.S.-Japan security declaration that identified the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue as a shared strategic objective. Japan’s interest to play a role in Taiwan’s future is reflected in the growing view among Japanese politicians that Tokyo must come to the island’s aid in the event of a Chinese invasion. A takeover of Taiwan will not only allow China to absorb the island’s technology, weaponry and large foreign-exchange reserves, but it will also arm Beijing with the power to control shipping lanes to Japan and position missiles just 100 kilometers from the nearest Japanese territory.

Taiwan may be far from Indian shores but its political future also matters to India. In strategic terms, Taiwan can be to India what Pakistan is to China. Translated into policy that could entail close strategic collaboration between India and Taiwan, with the goal to aid each other’s security through shared objectives and means, and help build equilibrium in Asia. Economically, the new Taiwan-India Cooperation Council symbolizes the island’s effort to reduce its economic dependence on mainland China, which accounted for some 70% of Taiwan’s accumulated offshore investment and 38% of its total exports in 2005.

A new Indian strategic thrust towards Taiwan, however, may have to await a generational political change in India. In the near to medium term, strategic cooperation between Japan and Taiwan appears more conceivable, despite occasionally insensitive Japanese rhetoric, such as Foreign Minister Taro Aso’s reported remark in February 2006 that Taiwan owes its high educational standards to enlightened Japanese policies during the island’s 50-year occupation. Japan and India cannot be oblivious to the prospect that a Beijing-obedient Taiwan may presage movement towards a Beijing-oriented Asia.

Time clearly is on Taiwan’s side. For more than a century, Taiwan has been outside the control of mainland China. A continuation of the status quo for another quarter-century will only bolster Taiwan’s de facto independence, making it more difficult for Beijing to undo that.

Energy is another critical area where strategic friction can be forestalled through shared Asian interests to safeguard energy supplies and maximize resource conservation and efficiency in order to underpin economic growth and commercial competitiveness. Such common interests can be the basis of a cooperative approach in Asia that emphasizes the development of secure new energy assets and the adoption of energy-saving technologies and methods. Japan, a leader in energy efficiency, can offer valuable assistance to the rapidly growing Asian economies. According to Japan’s Natural Resources and Energy Agency, the Japanese industry’s energy use is so efficient that it uses one-ninth the amount of oil that China does to generate the same profit.

A cooperative energy approach, of course, cannot be built without taming the two main Asian monsters—resurgent nationalism and the recrudescence of fiery historical grievances. Such an approach also will not be possible if any power seeks to control an ever-larger percentage of the world’s energy resources. The present zero-sum game on energy impedes the development of new oil and gas fields in a high-potential resource area—the East China Sea. Furthermore, it obstructs cooperation on bringing Russian oil and gas to consumers in Northeast Asia in a major way so that the region’s reliance on the volatile Persian Gulf region could be reduced.

Interstate cooperation on energy can help stem escalating tensions in Asia while allowing the harvesting of new resources to aid prosperity. But energy cooperation cannot be institutionalized or sustained on a long-term basis without expanded political and security cooperation as well as increased transparency on military expenditures. The unremitting pace of China’s ambitious military modernization even as its diplomacy becomes increasingly sophisticated indicates its intent to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s dictum: “Speak softly, but carry a big stick.” With opacity in planning and continuous, double-digit spending increases since before 1990, China’s military buildup has advanced well beyond what most analysts envisaged just a decade ago. Beijing’s barely disguised ambition is to establish a blue-water navy ostensibly to secure its energy-supply lines. In that light, building interstate transparency on defense-spending levels in Asia has become necessary to help set up multilateral maritime-security and energy-cooperation arrangements.

The rise of strategic rivalries in Asia is also worrying because of the continent’s conflicting political and strategic cultures and weak regional institutions. China, India and Japan, in fact, epitomize three distinct strategic cultures. The evolving equations between and among them confirm that globalization, far from sweeping away national identities, is helping to reinforce them. As a consequence, replicating European-style integration in Asia appears more problematic than ever.

Yet there is a greater need in Asia for political pragmatism and judicious diplomacy to ensure that China, India and Japan emerge as positive forces in international politics. If these powers and the other Asian states eschew nationalism-mongering and develop long-term cooperation, Asia will truly prosper and become stronger as the global pivot.

The central challenge now is not so much to create an Asian Union as to find ways to stabilize major-power relationships in Asia and promote cooperative approaches that can tackle security, energy, territorial, environmental, developmental and history issues. Rather than become the scene of a new cold war, Asia can chart a more stable future for itself through shared security and prosperity among its states. An inability to resolve all the disputes and problems should not hold up cooperation on issues that can be addressed. Nor should competition discourage collaboration.

Mr. Chellaney is a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. This passage is excerpted from his book, Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan, published by HarperCollins in October 2006.

Stagecraft and Statecraft

Author Archives: Chellaney

About Chellaney

India-U.S. Nuclear Deal: Long-Maul Exercise

Japan-China

Chinese Foreign Policy

Nuclear Deal With India

Nuclear Deal

Nuclear

India-U.S. Nuclear Deal

A Missile and Space Rider

Don’t Nuke the Facts

Future Asia