India and world peace

India's nuclear tests show how international risks have risen under foreign-policy lapses by the world's dominant military power.

Apparently uneasy with the force at its disposal, the U.S. government increasingly tries to manage a complex world with economic sanctions. When sanctions fail, allies looking to the U.S. for security lose confidence and resort to their own intrigues. Then the U.S. imposes more sanctions.

It makes for a difficult world in which to do business.

Automatic sanctions

The cycle is running its course with India. Acting under a 1994 law, the U.S. automatically imposed official-level sanctions after India detonated five atomic weapons in underground tests (see Watching Government, p. 19). A grim U.S. President Bill Clinton denounced this setback to nuclear nonproliferation as "a fundamental mistake." Indians rejoiced.

Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee made his government's motives explicit. It wants security and a fair hearing from world leaders inclined to give special treatment to the country India considers its gravest military threat-China.

Indian officials were duly alarmed by recent transfers of U.S. missile technology to the nuclear-capable people's republic. Reports of Chinese contributions to Clinton's reelection campaign cannot have escaped their notice. And they have watched the U.S. stumble over sanctions against Iraq and Iran, both at least suspected of harboring nuclear ambitions and both with religious ties, however tentative, to Pakistan, a perennial foe. For these and other reasons, the Indian decision to act unilaterally on national security hardly seems surprising.

A question worth asking is whether India would have followed this course if the U.S. security umbrella had fewer leaks. As a superpower, the U.S. assumes extra responsibility for global stability. Yet it increasingly discharges that responsibility by beating up on its own companies. The pattern erodes economic interests at home and confidence abroad.

Because sanctions do more harm than good, they should be shoved out of their central role in U.S. foreign policy. It won't be easy. Sanctions have perverse appeal in domestic politics. They feel like sacrifice undertaken for high purpose. They feel tough. So they now emerge from nearly every level of government.

Outside the U.S., sanctions come across as tactics undertaken to avoid effective-which can mean forceful-response to aggression. The perception hurts international stability. But it is valid.

Sanctions look weak. They are weak. If the imposition of sanctions comes generally to be viewed as the limit to which the U.S. will go to enforce global order, other countries with threats close by will, like India, strike out on their own. And there will be other gate-crashers at the nuclear club.

To India's nuclear initiative, world leaders have two ways to respond. They can keep nuclear nonproliferation as the organizing principle of international relations and heap tokens of scorn-sanctions-on India and others that stray from righteousness. As India reminded the world this month, however, sanctions are never a match for determined political action, popularly supported.

Otherwise, world leaders can acknowledge the reality of India's move. Then they can advise the nuclear newcomer in unmistakable terms what happens to regimes that so much as hint at recklessness.

Balance of terror

This would, of course, reassert the nuclear balance of terror, which, contrary to popular fantasy, didn't end with the Cold War. There would be outpourings of anxious regret. Whatever its psychological drawbacks, though, the nuclear balance does encourage restraint.

Neither option is perfect. As a producer of beneficial outcomes, though, harmonization of incentives beats wishful thinking every time. The beneficial outcome at play here, and one in which global businesses have as great an stake as anyone else, is nothing less than world peace.

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