Likening the existing barrier in nuclear cooperation with India to an “800-pound elephant”, the United States has said conclusion of the Indo-US nuclear deal will be a “milestone” in the bilateral relations which will be pushed to the “next level”.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the landmark deal will eliminate the nuclear cooperation barrier, which was like an “800-pound elephant”, and had existed as India is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) despite being a nuclear weapons state.
“The US-India civil nuclear deal would not be the end of moving the US-Indian relationship forward. We’ll do more work on that and so will the next Secretary of State,” she said in an interview to Forbes magazine, transcripts of which were released on Saturday.
Likening diplomacy to gardening, Rice said “you have to tend your relationships with countries … it is important to make certain that you are seeing your key allies on a regular
basis, even if there is no particular crisis or work to be finished in that particular business.”
“But if you can conclude something like that (the nuclear deal) … you’ve pushed it to the next level. And I’m always looking for the work that you can conclude to push something to the next level, push your relationship to the next level,” Rice said.
On the relationship with India, Rice said “We set out at the beginning to try and improve, extend, broaden and deepen the US-India relationship because very early on the President
(George W Bush) and I both saw it as an emerging, big democracy and the relationship’s never been very close.”
“And you can do all of the kind of small things, you know – not small things, but expected, new agricultural
cooperation, new cooperation between businesses,” Rice said.
“And so setting out to do that then puts the relationship on a completely different level,” she said.
The top US diplomat said that the negotiations with India on the nuclear deal did not start right away but indications came in 2001.
“We really started pursuing the India Civil Nuclear deal in 2005, so there was a period of getting to know the relationship and building on what had been there before,” she said.
“But I think we knew from 2001, 2002 that eventually that was going to have to be an issue. But we built to it slowly. It didn’t start with the big stepwise function,” Rice said.
Asked how did she articulate a shift in focus in the negotiating process, she said unless one has leverage in a strategic context “you’re not going to get anyplace in negotiating with an adversary.”
