The Democrats & National Security

By Samantha Power

Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security
by J. Peter Scoblic
Viking, 350 pp., $25.95

Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats
by Matthew Yglesias
Wiley, 251 pp., $25.95

1.

Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership."

Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower initiated US involvement in Vietnam, and President Nixon escalated the war in 1969 and kept US troops on the ground in a manifestly unwinnable mission until 1975. But John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were tagged as the primary culprits. President Carter was widely seen as having bungled the Iran hostage rescue mission and having responded ineffectually to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he substantially increased US military spending, he was never forgiven for his claim that Americans had "an inordinate fear of communism."

One of the most insidious things about the India nuclear deal (which The New Republic has opposed for these reasons) is that its value derives from us breaking the principles of the nonproliferation regime.

That's because so much of the deal's value is psychological. Its architects have sold it as a paradigm-shifting gateway to a new strategic relationship, in which India will finally join the family of Westernized, Democratic great powers and ally with the United States.

But how, one might ask, is a simple technology-sharing deal supposed to accomplish all this? Unless there's a fundamental change in their own interests, India's strategic goals will remain largely the same: They will not start containing China simply because they're using GE reactor parts; nor will they suddenly halt cooperation with Iran. And the development benefits of nuclear power are small, hype notwithstanding--they can't possibly reorient India on their own.

No, the only paradigm-shifting aspect of the deal is related to India's belief that the Nonproliferation Treaty is a form of "nuclear apartheid," which has kept India a second-class citizen in a world of nuclear great powers. In that view, the United States is breaking the chains of bondage that have held India down for decades. As a Council on Foreign Relations primer puts it, the deal would "gut" the NPT--dismantling a system that India finds fundamentally unfair and granting it recognition it has always felt it deserves.

Any U.S.-India "alliance" would be built on this interaction--and, as such, undoing America's commitment to the nonproliferation regime is the essence of the India deal, rather than an incidental result of it.

Update: See more bad things about the India deal here.

--Barron YoungSmith

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