Listen to Blackwill

May his tribe increase too

This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.

Robert Blackwill may not serving in the Bush administration anymore, but he remains a powerful advocate of a pro-India foreign policy. Excerpts from his op-ed piece (linkthanks Niket) in the Wall Street Journal.

So what next for the U.S.-India relationship?

The U.S. should integrate India into the evolving global nonproliferation regime as a friendly nuclear weapons state. We should end constraints on assistance to and cooperation with India’s civil nuclear industry and high-tech trade, changing laws and policy when necessary. We should sell India civil nuclear reactors, both to reduce its demand for Persian Gulf energy and to ease the environmental impact of India’s vibrant economic growth.

We should enter into a vigorous long-term program of space cooperation with India . Such a joint effort would capture the imagination of ordinary citizens in both countries. It is now anachronistic or worse for Washington to limit its interaction with India’s civil space efforts because of concern that U.S. technology and know-how will seep into India’s military missile program. Why should the U.S. want to check India’s missile capability in ways that could lead to China’s permanent nuclear dominance over democratic India ?

We should sell advanced weaponry to India . The million-man Indian army actually fights, unlike the postmodern militaries of many of our European allies. Given the strategic challenges ahead, the U.S. should want the Indian armed forces to be equipped with the best weapons systems and that often means American. To make this happen, the U.S. has to become a reliable long-term supplier, including through co-production and licensed manufacture arrangements, and to end its previous inclination to interrupt defense supplies to India in a crisis.

We should announce that in the context of the basic reform of the U.N., the U.S. will support India as a permanent member of the Security Council. Although this would not happen for many years, nothing else would so convince the people of India that the U.S. had truly transformed its approach to their country. At the same time, we should promote the early entry of India (and China) into the G-8. Their economic punch and increasing geopolitical reach demands that they be at the head table.

Finally, we should initiate an intense and secret discussion with India regarding the future of Pakistan, including contingency planning.[WSJ]

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