Strobe Talbott

Making a strong case for deepening and broadening India-U.S. relations, Strobe Talbott, a well known South Asia scholar and president of the Brookings Institution, has said the two countries had enough “shared values” to play a far reaching global role jointly.

“Whatever the results on Nov. 2 (of U.S. presidential elections), there is going to be continuing deepening and broadening of relations with India,” Talbott, former Deputy Secretary of State under the Clinton administration and author of nine books, said at a lecture organized by Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the Harvard Club on Oct. 14. The theme of the annual lecture was ‘From Estrangement to Engagement: U.S.-India relations since May 1998.’ CASI is part of the University of Pennsylvania.

Talbott laid out specific geo-political regions where the U.S. and India could work together. He spoke of a “broad-gauged, multi-textured agenda” that the two countries can pursue together in Central Asia, Russia, Eurasia, China, Southeast Asia, Middle East (especially Iran and Iraq) and Europe.

According to Talbott, “the happy clichi” of cooperation between the world’s largest and oldest democracies would work now, particularly in the context of globalization and democratization.

In the specific context of Iran and Iraq, Talbott said there was a need for a “knowledge-based” partnership between India and the U.S. since Indian academics and businessmen know the two Middle Eastern countries well.

He argued that in many ways what happens in India in terms of economic growth, social equations and political shifts would be crucial for many other parts of the world.

On the question of the U.S. focus on bringing democracy around the world, Talbott said, “If we get this right, the U.S. and India will end up on the same side of a very controversial issue. The U.S. and India should put their shoulders together.”

Talbott said the new defining challenge was not the war on terror but globalization. “Fifty percent of the people feel like winners as a result of globalization, fifty percent feel like losers. I am concerned that ratio is shifting in the wrong direction,” he said.

India, in his judgment, was “absolutely the key” to the issue of globalization since the way it addresses the problem of disparity it can make an example to the rest of the world.

Talbott, who is credited among others with having helped India and Pakistan pull back from a likely nuclear conflict in 1998 after the Kargil incursion by the latter, said there was “a high degree of continuity” in India-U.S. relations despite change of political leadership in New Delhi.

His latest book ‘Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb’ is a detailed behind-the-scene account of the hectic diplomacy that he was involved with India’s former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh in the aftermath of the Kargil incursion by Pakistan and the tit-for-tat nuclear tests that New Delhi and Islamabad conducted.

The 58-year-old former journalist with Time magazine also spoke about the much reported ‘Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP)’ between India and America, saying while they were “talking the talk of the strategic partnership” they were not yet “walking the walk.”

Talbott said one of the problems with NSSP was that while his contacts in Washington said NSSP was an “incremental” exercise which was not such a big deal, India treated it as some sort of nirvana.

He said “Indians are hearing what they want to hear on the question of NSSP” and Americans were also telling them what they wanted to hear. The problem with this disconnect is that there was a real danger of “disappointment and disillusionment” later that could affect the momentum of bilateral relations.