Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb / Edition 2

by Strobe Talbott president, The Brookings

Overview

"In this revised edition of the highly praised Engaging India, Strobe Talbott updates his bestselling diplomatic account of America's parallel negotiations with India and Pakistan over nuclear proliferation in the late 1990s. The update looks at recent nuclear dealings between India and the United States, including Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's 2005 visit to America. Under the highly controversial agreement that emerged, the United States would give India access to U.S. nuclear technology and conventional weapons systems. In exchange, India would place its civilian nuclear program under international monitoring and continue the ban on nuclear testing. Praise for the hardback edition "A fascinating study of how diplomatic dialogue can slowly broaden to include subtle considerations of the domestic politics and foreign policies of both countries involved." Foreign Affairs "An important addition to the literature of modern diplomatic history."—Choice "Detailed and revealing... an honest behind-the-scenes look at how countries make and defend policies.... A must-read for any student of diplomacy."—Outlook (India) "A rapidly engrossing work and a welcome addition to modern world history shelves."—Reviewer's Bookwatch "A highly engaging book; lucid, informative and at times, amusing."—International Affairs

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815783015
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	03/06/2006
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.71(d)

About the Author

"Strobe Talbott is president of the Brookings Institution. He served as deputy secretary of state from 1994 to 2001. For twenty-one years prior to his service in government, he was correspondent and columnist for Time magazine. He has written nine books, including The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (Random House, 2002), a personal account of U.S. diplomacy toward Russia during the Clinton administration."

Read an Excerpt

Engaging India

Diplomacy, Democracy, and the Bomb

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By Strobe Talbott

Brookings Institution Press

Copyright © 2004 Brookings Institution Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8157-8300-0

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Chapter One

The Lost Half Century

When I arrived for work that damp, overcast morning of Monday, May 11, 1998, I was expecting a relatively normal week, at least by State Department standards. There was plenty to do at the office and plenty to worry about in the world, but nothing that quite qualified as a crisis.

Shortly after 8:00 a.m., I chaired the daily meeting of the department's senior staff. As deputy secretary, I was supposed to keep tabs on what was going on in the building and around the globe. Assembled at a mahogany table in the windowless conference room across from my office on the seventh floor were about twenty assistant secretaries. Their bureaus either covered various geographical regions or sought to advance such global objectives as the promotion of democracy and human rights, the protection of the environment, the struggle against terrorism, and the effort to stop the proliferation of lethal armaments, materials, designs and technologies.

Each official reported briefly on what had happened over the weekend and reviewed what lay ahead. The British government and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, were looking for help in bringing peace to Northern Ireland. A team of American diplomats was in the Balkans trying to avert war over Kosovo. Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was barnstorming through Europe, lobbying for an end to the U.S.-led campaign to isolate the Baghdad regime. The annual summit of the Group of Seven major industrial democracies, or G-7, was coming up later in the week in Birmingham, England. Boris Yeltsin, the president of Russia, would be attending for the first time as a full member of the group, making it the G-8. As the administration's point man on Russia, I planned to spend most of the coming days preparing for the private session that President Bill Clinton would have with Yeltsin in Birmingham.

When the senior staff meeting ended, I returned to my office and settled behind the desk to read the New York Times. I skimmed articles on the front page about the latest Arab-Israeli tensions and drug trafficking in the Caribbean but skipped a feature article about India. That country could hardly have been further from my mind. In government, it is often said, the urgent drives out the merely important. India-the world's second most populous country, its largest democracy, and the most powerful country in a region that is home to nearly a quarter of humanity-seemed permanently stuck in the latter category.

At that moment, Phyllis Oakley, the foreign service officer in charge of the department's bureau of intelligence and research, was returning to her own office from the senior staff meeting when her deputy intercepted her in the corridor with the news that India had set off a nuclear device several hours earlier. Phyllis was stunned. How had we learned? she asked. From CNN, she was told. She winced, then rushed back to my office to make sure I had gotten the word. I hadn't. After sitting motionless for a moment with my eyes closed, I swiveled around in my chair and picked up the handset of the "red switch" phone behind my desk. The buttons on this clunky device, each labeled with bureaucratic initials, connected me by encrypted lines with my counterparts in other departments and agencies of the government. I punched the button that put me through to John Gordon, a four-star Air Force general who was deputy director of central intelligence at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, nine miles up the Potomac River. I assumed John would be able to give me some details on what had happened overnight in India. We had been friends for about ten years, since the first Bush administration, when he had served on the staff of the National Security Council and I had been a Time magazine reporter covering foreign policy. John had just arrived at work, so instead of learning anything from him, I succeeded only in ruining his week just as it started. After hearing what I had to say, he, like me a few moments before, needed at first to absorb the magnitude of the news in silence. He then remarked that the only thing worse than being scooped by CNN was being scooped by the State Department.

Phyllis took some consolation from this exchange, since her bureau was microscopic compared with the CIA. "It looks like we're all having a bad government day," she said over her shoulder as she hurried back to her office for more information. I got on the phone again, this time to the secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who was at the White House in the office of Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. They had just heard what happened, also courtesy of CNN.

"When it rains, it pours," said Madeleine. She and Sandy had their hands full dealing with the latest setback in the Middle East peace process. The Israeli government had just rebuffed a U.S. proposal for a compromise with the Palestinians.

Also in the meeting was Bruce Riedel, a career intelligence officer on assignment to the National Security Council staff. He was in charge of the NSC office that covered South Asia as well as the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, which meant riding herd on U.S. diplomacy with the Arabs and Israelis and on U.S. military operations in Iraq. On learning of the Indian test, Bruce commented that he suddenly felt overemployed.

Phyllis Oakley soon returned to my office with a sheaf of printouts of classified cables and faxes that were by now pouring in from some extremely embarrassed offices around the U.S. government, especially in Langley. She had brought a map to show me where the explosion had occurred-in the northwestern Indian state of Rajasthan. Phyllis knew the political geography of South Asia, having lived and worked in Pakistan in the late 1980s and early 1990s when her husband, Bob, served as U.S. ambassador there. The test site, she noted, was just over ninety miles from the Pakistani border, so the subterranean explosion must have set off seismographs in Pakistan.

"Let's just hope that's all it sets off," she added.

The week was no longer normal, and India was no longer merely important.

What follows is the story of the negotiation-or, as we agreed to call it, the dialogue-that the Indian statesman Jaswant Singh and I conducted over the next two and a half years. We met fourteen times at ten locations in seven countries on three continents. Those encounters added up to the most intense and prolonged set of exchanges ever between American and Indian officials at a level higher than ambassadors.

I held a parallel series of meetings with various Pakistani officials. That exercise, too, was called a dialogue, but it barely qualified as such. Why that was the case is also a subject of this book.

In a successful dialogue, the two parties do more than just talk to each other. Each makes an effort to understand what the other has said and to incorporate that understanding into a reply. A dialogue does not, however, necessarily mean that the participants change each other's minds. Hence the other term that figured prominently in the way Jaswant Singh and I defined our task: engagement. That word can connote eye-to-eye contact, a firm handshake, a pledge, or a long-term commitment. But engagement can also refer to the crossing of swords, a clash of armies or warships or wills. Both elements, conciliation and contest, were present in what went on between Jaswant Singh and me.

India's decision to conduct nuclear tests was a manifestation of long-festering differences over the rules governing the international system and our countries' self-assigned positions in that system. Jaswant Singh and I began the dialogue hoping that before it ended-or, better yet, once it became permanent and institutionalized-the United States and India would be able to reach agreement on some of those fundamental questions and, where we could not resolve our disagreements, we would be better able to manage them. To that extent, he and I were dealing with each other on behalf of two governments that shared a desire to fix something that had been broken for a long time: the U.S.-Indian relationship.

But first we had to grapple with the issue at hand, which was India's acquisition of the bomb. That thoroughly unwelcome development had occurred not just in the face of American objections but also against the backdrop of the United States, Britain, China, France, and Russia having acquired bombs of their own many years before.

From the American perspective, what was at stake was the stability of the global nuclear order. If India felt it had to have a bomb, other counties would conclude that they must have one too, and the world would become a much more dangerous place.

For their part, the Indians saw the matter in terms of sovereignty, security, and equity: if those other five powers had an internationally recognized right to be nuclear armed, why did India not have the same prerogative?

My government attempted to finesse that question with what was essentially a compromise: the United States would limit the extent to which the Indian bomb was an obstacle to better relations if India would, by explicit agreement, limit the development and deployment of its nuclear arsenal.

But the Indian government was, from the outset, disinclined to compromise. Its short-term goal was to resist precisely the sort of abnegation the United States proposed. Its strategy was to play for the day when the United States would get over its huffing and puffing and, with a sigh of exhaustion or a shrug of resignation, accept a nuclear-armed India as a fully responsible and fully entitled member of the international community.

The Indians conducted their test knowing that it would provoke American castigation but also hoping it might have another consequence: perhaps it would force the United States to pay them serious, sustained, and respectful attention of a kind the Indians felt they had never received before. Engagement gave the Indians a chance to resist the Americans' pressure face-to-face. In that sense, the dialogue could be its own reward, as both a means and an end. By weathering the storm of U.S. disapproval -by outlasting and outtalking the Americans in the marathon of diplomacy spurred by the test, in short, by not compromising-the Indians would prove their resolve and their resilience, thereby giving a boost to their national self-esteem and self-confidence.

As one of the architects of the Indian strategy, Jaswant Singh came closer to achieving his objective in the dialogue than I did to achieving mine. Insofar as what follows is that story, it stands as an exception to Dean Acheson's maxim that the author of a memorandum of conversation never comes out second best.

However, there is more to the tale told here than that. This book can be read as a parable about a benign version of the law of unintended consequences. The annals of diplomacy are replete with examples of accords that backfired, apparent breakthroughs that led to disastrous breakdowns, signatures on peace treaties that lit fuses to war. But the opposite can also occur. Sometimes a negotiation that fails to resolve a specific dispute can have general and lasting benefits, especially if it is a dialogue in fact as well as name. Diplomacy that meets that standard can improve and even transform the overall quality of relations between states. It can make it possible for governments to cooperate in areas that had previously been out of bounds and, at moments of crisis, enable their leaders to avert catastrophe.

That, too, is a theme of this book: it is the story of the turning point in U.S.-Indian relations.

The bad news from Rajasthan that Monday morning in May of 1998 marked a new low between two countries that had seen very few highs. Jaswant Singh and I sat down across from each other for the first time a month later. Yet a little more than a year after that, his prime minister trusted my president enough to let him play a decisive role in defusing a conflict between India and Pakistan that could have escalated to nuclear war. Then, in March 2000, President Clinton's triumphal visit to India established that these two countries were finally engaged in the unambiguously positive sense of that word. They remain so today.

That is all to the good. The great shame is that it took so long to happen.

The opposite of engagement is estrangement. By 1993, when the Clinton administration came into office, that word, which has no positive connotation, had become standard in describing the United States's dealings with India.

Relations between states often take on the attributes, in the minds and language of their citizens and political leaders, of relations between individuals. Countries are described as friends or enemies, partners or rivals; they feel good will toward each other, or they regard each other with irritation and disappointment.

The U.S.-Indian relationship has had this personalized aspect for half a century, especially on the Indian side, where the political and intellectual elite has felt neglected, patronized, or bullied by the U.S. government. Why, it is often asked, did two countries with so many political values in common, not get off to a better start?

Part of the answer is to be found in a difference between their historical experiences. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, America was, like India, a British colony-but with a major difference: it was made up largely of people transplanted from Britain itself, while Indians were of a different race and culture. They were bearers of a great and ancient civilization who had been treated, in Rudyard Kipling's famous phrase, as a burden to be borne by the white man. A lingering sense of being objects of racism and condescension made many Indians all the more wary when, just as their own country was breaking free of the Raj in the late 1940s, America seemed to be inheriting from Britain the mantle of global empire.

On the U.S. side, too, the relationship was jinxed. For most of the next forty years, India was a target of American ideological and geopolitical antagonism. The affinity that might have otherwise existed was a victim of incompatible obsessions-India's with Pakistan and America's with the Soviet Union. One reason that the United States and India were so at odds for so long was that each was on such good terms with the other's principal enemy. The dissolution of the Soviet Union created an opening for the Clinton administration to free the United States's relations with South Asia from the strictures and distortions of the cold war.

But Pakistan was still on the map, and for many Indians, its very existence rankled. They resented what they saw as America's continuing patronage of their misbegotten neighbor.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Engaging India by Strobe Talbott Copyright © 2004 by Brookings Institution Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

ONE. The Lost Half Century
TWO. The Desert Rises
THREE. The Mountain Turns White
FOUR. Jaswant's Village
FIVE. Stuck on the Tarmac
SIX. Soft Stonewalling
SEVEN. The Avatar of Evil
EIGHT. From Kargil to Blair House
NINE. Sisyphus at India House
TEN. A Guest in the Parliament
ELEVEN. Unfinished Business
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Talbott's account of the frenetic diplomacy that ensued after India tested three nuclear weapons on May 11, 1998, serves to underline why the bomb holds such allure for many developing-world governments. Until that moment, India was, in Clinton's phrase, the Rodney Dangerfield of nations -- never getting enough respect. Almost overnight, India shot to the top of Washington's agenda. After its enemy Pakistan replied with its own nuclear test a few weeks later, Clinton concluded that "the world was closer even than during the Cuban missile crisis to a nuclear war."
— The Washington Post

Michael Dobbs

"Strobe Talbott's seminal dialogue with Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh laid the intellectual and policy foundation for a transformed U.S. relationship with a newly nuclear India. He conveys the drama of the time and the difficult policy choices both sides faced, but also the lighter moments that accompanied this two-way voyage of discovery. A 'must read' book for anyone interested in how the United States deals with one of the decades most important rising powers."
—Director for South Asia, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Teresita C. Schaffer

"The recent reconciliation and reengagement of America with India was not inevitable. Suspicions ran deep. The geopolitics were messy. But Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh reached out across the divide and, in a Herculean effort, pulled their two countries together and, in so doing, changed the chemistry of the globe. This triumph over history is now recorded in a compelling memoir. Strobe provides both engaging first-person accounts and deep reflections. As a foreign policy aficionado, I found it a gripping read."
—Author of Can Asians Think? and Beyond the Age of Innocence: A Worldly View of America (forthcoming)

Kishore Mahbubani

"Once again Strobe Talbott demonstrates not only a keen analytical mind but a writing style that is both insightful and easy on the readers mind as well as the eyes. From the time that Assistant Secretary of State Phyllis Oakley informs him of the Indian nuclear test to the completion of Talbotts marathon dialogues with his Indian counterpart, the reader feels he or she has shared the issue with Strobe and made inputs to the American position. The book not only enlightens the reader on the ebbs and flows in the Indian-American bilateral relationship through both bad and improving times. It is a primer on the "do's" and "dont's" of nuclear diplomacy."
—United States Senator

Richard G. Lugar

Strobe Talbott has written a gem of a diplomatic memoir. This ultimate insider account of American efforts to steer relations with and between India and Pakistan after their 1998 nuclear tests manages the hat trick of being candid, fair, and authoritative. The result is an ENGAGING INDIA that is truly engaging.
—President, Council on Foreign Relations

Richard Haass

"With humor, grace and insight, Strobe Talbott chronicles a fascinating journey of diplomacy to overcome decades of U.S.-Indian estrangement and achieve a foundation of trust on which to build a relationship in the 21st century. Talbotts story reveals that while India will be neither an adversary nor a tool of the United States, it can be a friend."
—Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

George Perkovich

On May 11, 1998, India detonated three nuclear devices without any warning, and two weeks later Pakistan followed suit. In response, Washington had to persuade the Indian government that it had done a foolish and dangerous thing, and it was Talbott, then deputy secretary of state, who was assigned the task of talking to Jaswant Singh, India's minister of external affairs. In this memoir of 14 meetings over two years in seven countries on three continents, Talbott recounts these difficult encounters, in which each side would repeat the same arguments over and over again while listening carefully to detect any hint of a change in the other's position. What might sound like a boring report on an exercise in stubborn diplomacy is in fact a fascinating study of how diplomatic dialogue can slowly broaden to include subtle considerations of the domestic politics and foreign policies of both countries involved. Talbott considers the complications presented by China and Pakistan and reveals that Washington played an important role in averting a war over Kashmir that could have gone nuclear. Although his story does not have a happy ending as far as counterproliferation is concerned, Talbott does end it on a positive note: the expansion of cordial relations between the United States and India.

Foreign Affairs

On May 11, 1998, India exploded three nuclear devices in the Thar Desert; in response, five days later Pakistan detonated five nuclear weapons. These acts by two bitter rivals threatened the progress and stability gained in much of the world's acceptance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its consideration of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). As deputy secretary of state, Talbot (The Russia Hand) received President Clinton's mandate to bring India to acceptance of the CTBT. His memoir records his 14 encounters with Jaswant Singh, Indian minister of external affairs. What thus would appear to be a lengthy yawn emerges as a serious, sometimes funny, often exasperating tale told very well. That Talbot failed to attain his goal is inconsequential in the face of the more important maturing vision of U.S. foreign policy that India should be engaged as a world power and not a neocolonial state. The energy behind the creation of this policy and the grace and vision of Colin Powell, the present secretary of state, to accept it offers promise for the control of nuclear proliferation. Highly recommended.-John F. Riddick, Central Michigan Univ. Lib., Mt. Pleasant Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Talbot gives diplomacy —and the manner in which it should be reported —a wholly new dimension." —M. V. Kamath, (ALSO PRINTED IN FREE PRESS JOURNAL, MUMBAI AND THE ORGANISER), The Sentinel (Guwahati), 10/30/2004

"[A] fascinating study of how diplomatic dialogue can slowly broaden to include subtle considerations of the domestic politics and foreign policies of the countries involved. Talbott considers the complications presented by China and Pakistan and reveals that Washington played an important role in averting a war over Kashmir that could have gone nuclear." —Lucian W. Pye, Foreign Affairs

"A true story with a positive message, ENGAGING INDIA is a raptly engrossing work and a welcome addition to modern world history shelves." —John Burroughs, Midwest Book Review

"... a fascinating first-hand story of the diplomacy conducted between the United States and India after the nuclear tests." — The Statesman, 9/19/2004

"... what comes through in this engrossing work is the author's intellectual honesty and his unerring understaning of the Indian psyche." —M.V. Kamath, Organiser, 10/17/2004

"[A] serious, sometimes funny, often exasperating tale told very well.... Highly recommended.
" —John F. Riddick, Central Michigan University Library, Mt. Pleasant, Library Journal, 10/15/2004

"ENGAGING INDIA is a rapidly engrossing work and a welcome addition to modern world history shelves." —John Buroughs, Reviewer's Bookwatch, 10/1/2004

"Besides simply explaining the arcana on strategy and nuclear policy, this slim two hundred-odd page book is also an enjoyable read.
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If it is true that we need more understanding and communication in this world, then this memoir is a valuable contribution to that cause." —Sudheer Apte, DesiJournal, 8/20/2004

"His clearly written account is an important addition to the literature of modern diplomatic history." —R. Marlay, Arkansas State University, Choice, 3/1/2005

"ENGAGING INDIA is a highly engaging book; lucid, informative and at times, amusing." —Gareth Price, Asia Programme, Chatham House, International Affairs, 3/15/2005

"Those interested in questions pertaining to American foreign policy, the dispersion of nuclear weapons, and diplomatic negotiations should all find this work to be of more than passing interest. Talbott, a former journalist of some repute, writes with clarity, verve, and a remarkable attention to vivid detail. His graceful and compelling prose, coupled with the insight that he provides in the complex negotiating process, should make Engaging India attractive to a much wider audience." — Parameters, 4/1/2006

"With humor, grace and insight, Strobe Talbott chronicles a fascinating journey of diplomacy to overcome decades of U.S.-Indian estrangement and achieve a foundation of trust on which to build a relationship in the 21st century." —George Perkovich, Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"The book not only enlightens the reader on the ebbs and flows in the Indian-American bilateral relationship through both bad and improving times. It is a primer on the do's and don'ts of nuclear diplomacy." —Richard G. Lugar, United States Senator

"Strobe Talbott has written a gem of a diplomatic memoir. This ultimate insider account of American efforts to steer relations with and between India and Pakistan after their 1998 nuclear tests manages the hat trick of being candid, fair, and authoritative. The result is an ENGAGING INDIA that is truly engaging." —Richard Haass, President, Council on Foreign Relations

"Strobe provides both engaging first-person accounts and deep reflections. As a foreign policy aficionado, I found it a gripping read." —Kishore Mahbubani, Author of CAN ASIANS THINK? and BEYOND THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (forthcoming)

"A 'must read' book for anyone interested in how the United States deals with one of the decade's most important rising powers." —Ambassador Teresita C. Schaffer, Director for South Asia, Center for Strategic and International Studies

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