LOS ANGELES -- While there was scarcely any American media coverage of the visit of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to India last month, the Bush administration's gesture, as well as the prior one made by Clinton, was intended to be profoundly significant. The Clinton state visit represented the inauguration of an American attempt to normalize relations with India after the diplomatic deep freeze that set in after New Delhi's May 1998 surprise nuclear test. India reciprocated with a return of visit by Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee six months later.
It's nothing new, of course, for diplomats to confer and wind up issuing meaningless communiques. But remember: Until these high-level exchanges, India was an official international pariah for having abandoned its Gandhi/Nehru tradition, conducting a nuclear test or two and thus officially entering the elite but high-stakes world of the nuclear-power club.
On one level, the Bush administration's instincts about India are sensibly similar to Clinton's. It scarcely serves the cause of regional stability to reject out of hand the claim of the world's second-most-populous nation to have the same right to nuclear protection as comparatively tiny Britain or France. Or the same right as neighboring nuclear powers China, a geopolitical giant, and politically shaky Pakistan.