The US-India relationship has continued to grow since 2005 but not in the way the agreement had intended

by Donald Camp

The visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington between July 17 and July 19, 2005, was heralded as a new beginning in the US-India partnership by both the countries. The highlight of the summit – an agreement to cooperate in civil nuclear power – was indeed path breaking as it upended the US (and international) focus on rolling back India’s nuclear weapons capabilities, and implicitly acknowledged India’s status as a nuclear weapons power.

Fifteen years later, has the agreement – and the partnership – lived up to the hype? The answer is mixed.

First, although the US-India partnership did not begin in 2005, it certainly found its breakthrough moment that year. The groundwork had been laid in the Clinton administration’s efforts to dig out of the low point of bilateral relations – the aftermath of the Indian nuclear tests in May 1998. President Bill Clinton visited India in March 2000 and gave India the respect it wanted after the tests, but he did not envision breaking with non-proliferation policy and accepting India’s new status.

That was left to President Bush’s national security advisor (and later secretary of state) Condoleezza Rice who came into office in 2001 – determined to cement a strong partnership with a rising India – and drove the administration with single-mindedness towards that goal. With the help of her foreign policy strategist, undersecretary of state Nick Burns, she fought off the non-proliferation purists at home and abroad who warned that cooperation with a country which had not signed – and did not intend to sign – the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty would encourage other countries to develop nuclear weapons.

Second, the US-India relationship has continued to grow since 2005 but not in the way the agreement had intended. There has been no great cooperation in civilian nuclear energy; in fact, no contract has been signed with a US company towards that end till today. Of the two American nuclear engineering giants, General Electric (builder of India’s Tarapur reactor in the 1960s) had left the business and Westinghouse was sold to Toshiba in 2006.

India itself has not committed to the great transition to nuclear power it once envisioned. Russia and France are the major nuclear suppliers to India, though Westinghouse was promised a contract for six reactors in 2016, before its bankruptcy in 2017. Today solar and other renewable energy sources are attracting more attention and investment.

Nevertheless, the hype over a new “strategic partnership” at the 2005 summit was justified. The Bush and Singh administrations both faced significant domestic opposition to the nuclear deal but showed their commitment and pushed the plan through obstacles at the Nuclear Suppliers Group and in their own legislatures. Today, in both countries, the idea of a partnership has become a bipartisan one; it turned out to be, as Prime Minister Vajpayee had said years earlier – a natural partnership.

The nuclear agreement – and the mutual trust that it engendered – opened the doors to a whole range of cooperation that had been closed or limited before. Technology transfer and space cooperation are two areas that have benefited. Military-to-military ties and defence procurement have boomed. And intelligence cooperation demonstrated its merit after the Mumbai terrorist attack in 2008.

There has not been a similar grand step forward in US-India relations since 2005. President Obama, though, took a big step in 2010 by adopting a policy that the Bush administration had explicitly rejected – support for India as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It was not quite a call to action – “in the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed United Nations Security Council that includes India as a permanent member,” but it responded to one of India’s highest foreign policy priorities. President Trump repeated the pledge when he travelled to India in 2020.

Finally, it’s impossible to ignore the role of China in US-India relations. The rise of China was part of the US administration’s rationale in 2005 for building a stronger relationship with India. At that time, India was happy to share intelligence and policy views but took the position that it did not care to be played as a card in some larger Asian strategic game focused on China.

Over fifteen years, China’s increasing global power as well as its territorial ambitions in both the Himalayas and the South China Sea have significantly worsened China’s relations with both India and the US. After border clashes in recent years in Doklam and now Aksai Chin, India seems less hesitant about a partnership explicitly aimed at containing China. In addition to new arms sales, there is a renewed commitment to the “Quad”, the informal mechanism for security discussions and more between Japan, the US, India and Australia. The current US administration would be delighted to have India buy in more completely to its Indo-Pacific strategy.

The Bush administration is often disparaged today for its problematic, and occasionally disastrous, foreign policies. But when it came to India, secretary Rice and President Bush knew exactly what they were doing in 2005. Then foreign secretary Shyam Saran quotes Bush telling Manmohan Singh that he did not care if India did not buy a single reactor; the deal was about the larger significance of the US-India relationship. The significance of the relationship has grown strategically and dramatically over the last fifteen years; that is in large part a dividend of the deal struck in 2005.