The Rediff Special

'Tanks, planes and even nuclear weapons do not provide a group of nations with true security'

US Ambassador to Pakistan Thomas W Simons, Jr discussed regional stability in South Asia at the prestigious United Service Institution, New Delhi, last week. This is what he had to say:

General Nambiar, members of the United Service Institution, I am honoured by this opportunity to address you and your assembled guests. I am aware of some of the speakers who have preceded me to this podium and hope that I will serve as well as they did to entertain your imaginations and stimulate your thoughts on the subject at hand.

I would like to take a few minutes to share two propositions with you. I believe that they are interrelated and that they have important implications for India and for the whole South Asia region.

1. The end of the Cold War is changing the ways in which the US and many other of India's partners in world affairs define national security needs.

2. It can often be productive to negotiate with rivals, and it is possible to do so without sacrificing either underlying principles or major national security goals.

In the process, I hope to convince you that a confident and stable Pakistan is good for India, just as I hope to convince you that a strong US relationship with Pakistan is good for India.

In making these assertions I draw upon my now-distant memories of living as a child on the subcontinent in areas that became both India and Pakistan, just before and just after Partition, and again during the summer of 1959, which I spent as a college student visiting with my parents in Madras and travelling around South India. My mother, at 85, is in the audience, and we have just returned from a brief but glorious return to Madras, hospitable as ever.

Ambassador Wisner is and will remain your authoritative interpreter of US policy views; with 35 years of service, he is my career senior by two years. But at least my South Asia experience antedates his: My family landed in Calcutta in December 1945, after a six-week steamer journey. Shortly thereafter I was sent off to school in Mussoorie, partly because my parents could sense the rising communal tensions which led in August 1946 to the Direct Action.

Since I am still new to the Subcontinent professionally, however, for these remarks I draw mainly upon more than three decades of diplomatic experience largely involved with the US- Soviet Cold War, which dominated the world of those decades and which has now ended. Of course, not everything I witnessed then applies here, but my observation and my assertions, which I offer for discussion, is that some things do.

An Evolving Definition of Security

During the Cold War the main features of the American approach to world affairs were remarkably consistent and even predictable. Granted, they evolved over time in important ways and had many complex facets. But the essentials were plain, straightforward, and widely accepted by the American people, and they were familiar to the rest of the world which, for good or ill, had to deal with the Americans.

Let me recall them for you briefly:

First, without ties of blood or ancient tradition to bind it together, the United States is, of necessity, a nation based on shared values. Two beliefs - in democracy and in the market - have been distilled from our history as the core public values which largely define what the country is for us. We believe, moreover, that these values are interrelated: democracy requires the marketplace, and a free market functions best with democratic politics.

Second, in our dealings with other nations we have been guided in this century by the perception that however large and resource-rich, however well-protected by oceans and peaceful land borders, we cannot sustain our independence and cannot preserve our values entirely on our own. We need allies and international partners, and we tend to seek them among nations which share elements of our own core values.

Third, very soon after World War II we came to see ourselves in a state of fundamental competition with the Soviet Union. It was also a large, resource-rich, and ideological state, bound together by values, but values which were very different from ours: democracy and the market as Americans understood them were seen instead by the Soviets as great evils for mankind. So we rather quickly came to identify each other as adversaries, each representing a severe threat to the other's core values and, potentially, to the other's existence.

This competition between two great ideological, continental powers permeated most aspects of international relations and divided the world into two opposing camps.

All this is familiar to you, of course. I would draw your attention, however, to one feature of the Cold War landscape which is less familiar, but which I feel is nonetheless crucial.

In the second decade of the Cold War -- about the time Ambassador Wisner and I entered our Service - the United States began to run up against the problem of how actually to accomplish anything in world affairs beyond mutual stalemate. Clearly, something new was necessary, a new way of engaging the Soviets, if nuclear war was to be avoided.

Negotiation was a strong candidate for this new approach to world affairs, despite equally strong drawbacks. Successful negotiation, you see, requires concessions of substance, and yet in value-based countries every concession can be attacked politically as betrayal of those values - the first step on the slippery slope to surrender, as it used to be described.

The question was: 'When you are locked in ideological combat with a mortal enemy, under what circumstances is it morally permissible on the one hand, and politically feasible on the other, to seek any agreement, no matter how minor or mutually advantageous, with that enemy?'

That both sides succeeded in finding ways to negotiate for limited ends without sacrificing their core values is perhaps the major accomplishment of the second half of the Cold War.

The accomplishment arose from the recognition in the government elites of both countries that nuclear war was a danger that threatened them both. Hence, negotiation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, in 1963 -- the year I entered our Service -- was its first major fruit. The habit of negotiation then spread to other issues, nuclear and non-nuclear. And, slowly, painfully, it gained political support - essential in a democracy -- and became a vital complement to military strength and secure alliances in advancing American national interest vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and the Cold War abruptly ended. In the post-Cold War world the American approach to defending and promoting national security is also changing.

To be sure, not everything will change. We will continue to be active in world affairs because we still recognise that we cannot defend and promote our interests successfully by ourselves. Absent the threat of the Soviet Union, we will tend, more than ever, to seek the partnership of nations which share our core values and are committed in practice to their own versions of market-based democracy. Military power will remain important to us; so will negotiation. Much will be familiar.

But much is also changing. We are in the midst of a process still underway, so nothing is fixed, but certain trends are emerging which, I believe, merit our attention.

First, we and most other nations of the world are coming to recognise that tanks, planes and even nuclear weapons do not in themselves provide a nation or a group of nations with true security. Military hardware will remain important; every nation has the right and duty to defend itself agianst attack. But military might alone will be ineffective outside a common framework of shared objectives and practices which permits each nation to pursue its interests at peace with itself and the rest of the world.

Second, those practices must include negotiations. Moreover, negotiation to contain and reduce the nuclear threat will continue to be a vital component of this emerging international framework. We and Russia are drastically reducing our nuclear arsenasl; Brazil, Argentina, and the Republic of South Africa have all renounced the nuclear option; so have Ukraine, Belarus, and, in your own neighbourhood, Kazakhstan - all in the belief that possessing nuclear weapons is more a burden than an aid in establishing profitable ties with the rest of the world, ties which are in fact the soundest defense of national security.

Third, the international community's new negotiating agenda will be broad. It will include respect for human rights and the rule of law, economic prosperity, sound environmental practices, and good neighbourly relations. Some see concern for these issues as threats to sovereignty. The reality is that insecurity and instability have become the true international threats.

When one country oppresses a minority group, or disregards basic human rights, or allows unemployment to skyrocket, the resulting tensions can dangerously affect its neighbours and even partners further afield. International terrorism and trafficking in illicit narcotic drugs, for example, are security threats which are transnational in nature: they can only be stopped if we tackle them together.

Finally, this international agenda for co-operation on global issues will increasingly determine the direction of US foreign policy. We will increasingly seek our international partnerships with other members of the emerging community of market democracies, and we will seek concrete co-operation across the range of these issues. Not all of them -- the control, reduction, and elimination of weapons of mass destruction, human rights, counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, good economic management, protecting the environment, the practice of good neighbourly relations -- are of equal interest or urgency to all our partners.

Still, we increasingly see our security interests best defended within a community of nations which seek the same objectives in deed as well as in word.