With the signing of the United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act this week, two vital democracies strengthened the strategic partnership which, now and for generations to come, will define and defend our nations’ mutual prosperity and security.
Throughout the 21st Century three nations are expected to economically and strategically lead the world: America, China, and India. Of course, the nations of China and India have commonalities: each have over a billion citizens, a prospective middle class larger than the entire population of the United States, and large militaries with nuclear weapons. Importantly, to the United States, however – and despite the cackling “end of history” crowd – a fundamental and critical distinction exists: China is communist; and India is democratic. Ergo, to the United States, China is an adversary; and India is an ally.
Viewed, then, in its proper policy prism, the strategic precedent of yesterday’s United States-India agreement is both clearly recognized and soundly emulated. During the 20th Century’s Cold War, when many world “leaders” and policy “experts” declared Marxist-Leninism would bury the West economically and strategically, America necessarily engaged communist China to weaken the communist Soviet Union. Thus did the U.S. and the West triumph in the Cold War’s European Theater. Now in the 21st Century, our evolving alliance with our fellow democracy, India, will help curtail the rise of communist China as a strategic and economic adversary of democratic-capitalism; and, ultimately, due to the power of free peoples, free markets, and God’s guidance, this alliance will help free the people still oppressed by the communist menace in the Cold War’s Eastern Theater.
What a fitting endeavor for two former colonies of the defunct British Empire!