Bush is probably wrong on this one. Do we really need to put geopolitics before nuclear non-proliferation? Are we building an alliance against the Chinese for the next 50 years? Why not build an alliance with the Chinese and use that to dominate the entire globe? The US would dominate Latin America, China would dominate Asia. Africa may not count for much for another century -- blame Europe! Meantime, Europe sits in the middle, prosperous but ineffective. India becomes an industrious non-entity.
India is prickly. Their reaction to many international issues is always reminiscent of some sort of national inferiority complex; reminds me a bit of the instinctive anti-Americanism of the Filipinos. For the subcontinent, of course, it's born of 200 years of domination by the British rather than centuries under the Spanish followed by five decades under the Almighty Dollar (the case of the Philippines).
So, by the terms of this new agreement, the international non-proliferation treaty is gutted but India opens up two-thirds of its reactors for inspection by the IAEA, imports US nuclear fuels, freeing up more of its own production to be diverted to mulitply its nuclear weapons production. This makes US conservatives happy because India's weapons then balance China's.
It gets ever more complicated. I don't want another nuclear power but India already is. So, this will just make them stronger? Does that make China relatively weaker? Do I worry more about China or India?
