27 March 2013, 12:21 PM IST
At large' is a term that fits Strobe Talbott rather well. Not so much because it has been part of his official designation on two occasions in the past — editor-at-large for Time and ambassador-at-large for the US government — as because of the free-ranging expansiveness it connotes.
His professional career has taken him places and continues to take him places, but more significantly, his mind ranges far and wide, not like a casual tourist eager to be awed but as a keen observer who logs insights and pieces them together later to build his own big picture.
India in the fold
He is in India in his capacity as president of the US's oldest think tank, the Brookings Institution, which traces its history back to 1916 and founder, Richard Brookings, a successful and energetic businessman who turned to public affairs as a Republican-leaning person but served in Democratic president Woodrow Wilson's war administration.
Brookings has opened an India chapter, after setting up a centre each in Doha and Beijing, with sponsorship from a Founders' Circle that comprises a cross-section of India's corporate elite.
So his mandate when he speaks to the press in the capital is to speak about Brookings India and how it reports directly to the parent organisation, unlike the Doha and Beijing centres that report to the Saban Cen tre on the Middle East and the John C Thornton Centre on China, respectively.
But being at large, Talbott talks about China, the Middle East and Pakistan while returning to Brookings every now and then. No, he hasn't met up with Jaswant Singh yet, but he can't come to Delhi and leave without meeting his old friend, Jaswant, he said.
As under secretary of state in the Clinton administration, Talbott talked long and hard and often with Ind ia's then-foreign minister, to find comm on ground, conceivable only at a distance from both India's 1998 nuclear tests and attendant US sanctions.
Talbott is a South Asia expert, and understands the dynamics of the region's politics and politicking. He paved the way for what proved to be a bipartisan consensus in Washington on building a strong relationship with India.
Eye on South Asia
The Talbott-Singh talks paved the way for normalisation of ties between the two nations; president Clinton's 2000 visit to India and his subs equent speech in Islamabad, in which he called on Pakistan to stop dreaming of redrawing its borders in blood, to redefine its nationhood in ter ms other than hostility towards India.
The understanding established between New Delhi and Washington then served as the basis for the Bush administration's leap of faith that resulted in India's release, via the Indo-US nuclear deal, from a crippling technology-denial regime. Which makes the BJP's opposition to the nuclear deal all the more hypocritical and unprincipled.
If the US, China and India would find a balance in their strategic positions, the world would be a much better place, said Talbott. This, for him, is the centrepiece of a stable world order in the future.
How would such an arrangement have an impact on something like terror in the name of jihad? If China had behaved more responsibly on nuclear non-proliferation, the country at the centre of terror in the name of jihad, Pakistan, would not have had a nuclear weapon to bargain with.
Pakistan and peace
He understands that the project of building Pakistan as a homeland of Muslims and also a secular state was unviable at the outset. The only way forward for Pakistan, in danger of being devoured by the very forces it had unleashed, is to rebuild itself as a secular state and it is in India's interest to see this happen rather than its alternative: for the state to collapse and an entire nation turn into a collection of non-state actors, with radioactive ammunition to boot.
The palestine problem
But what of another communal state, founded for and constituted by one religious community, which denies its subaltern groups democratic rights? What is the US doing about Israel? Read President Obama's speech in Jerusalem, said Talbott. You remember what Clinton said in Pakistan, he said, Obama did something similar in Jerusalem on March 21.
Well, so he did. He called for ending settler activity, spoke of a twostate solution that offers well-defined borders and security to both Israelis and Palestinians, of the need for young people of Israel to accept that what they see as a fundamental rig ht for the Jews, of being able to live in a state of their own in a land of their own, is a legitimate fundamental right for Palestinians as well Talbott does not share the view, strongly held in Tel Aviv, that the biggest threat to Israel is a nuclear Iran. It is demographics, he said.
Israel cannot be a Jewish state and democratic, so long as the current state of affairs continues. The Palestinian population is growing, and unless you enable them to live in a democratic state of their own, you will end up creating an undemocratic state for yourself. The logic of this is irrefutable, and one can only hope it will unfold in the days to come.
Interpreting the world
Talbott sees Indians as a little too quick to dismiss Western Europe as a strategic player. He would like to see the European Union as an ongoing experiment in creating transnational governance, something Saarc can draw on in the years to come.
So will Brookings India focus on such problems? That is entirely up to Brookings India, he said. We are not going to decide in Washington what Brookings India will focus on. It is up to the very competent people here to decide what projects they undertake, what lines of inquiry they pursue.
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