(C. Uday Bhaskar is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst. The views expressed in this column are his own and do not represent those of Reuters).
In the run-up to Christmas, U.S. President Barack Obama has notched up two significant legislative victories and has donned the metaphoric Santa Claus coat as he brings long-awaited gifts to two groups within and beyond the United States.
The first is the gay constituency in the U.S. military who will no longer have to live in a twilight legal zone and the second is the global arms control fraternity that will welcome the ratification by the U.S. Senate of the New START treaty.
On Dec 22, President Obama signed a path-breaking law that would end the ostracism and related legal ambiguity that surrounded the gay community in the U.S. military.
While the Clinton administration had introduced an uneasy modus vivendi -- the "don't ask, don't tell" policy -- gay personnel in the U.S. military were still in violation of the law and the courageous Obama legislation will be welcomed by the liberal spectrum.
Sexual preferences and orientation are matters of personal choice and as long as this does not impinge on the professionalism that military service demands, being gay should not be seen as a negative attribute. Thousands of gay personnel -- many who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan -- will be elated with this Obama initiative.
Yes, the implementation will be slow and some opposition will be encountered -- the outburst of the U.S. Marine Commandant being case in point. But on balance, this is a significant victory for the Obama administration and the nature of the debate on this issue offers instructive insights into the prevailing conservative-liberal divide in the U.S. polity and the manner in which a determined executive can forge reasonable bipartisan support.
India is still very reticent about homosexuality and the issue is rarely brought into the public domain. Laws on the subject go back to 1860 and although this sexual orientation was decriminalised in 2009, gay rights have little or no traction within the Indian military.
The current lame-duck U.S. legislature was able to notch up another major vote on Dec 22 when the Senate approved the New START nuclear arms control treaty by a vote of 71 to 26.
As many as 13 Republican Senators supported the Democrats and this vote will be a much needed shot-in-the-arm for a beleaguered Obama administration, even as the global community will welcome this U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control breakthrough.
Despite President Reagan's historic agreement with Soviet President Gorbachev over intermediate range missiles (the INF Treaty of 1987) which paved the way for the end of the Cold War and the first START (strategic arms reduction treaty), the Republican Party has been reluctant to support any further cuts to the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
It was the same compulsion that saw a major shift in U.S. nuclear policy in the Clinton-Bush transition when the U.S. went slow over the CTBT and nuclear disarmament receded even further into the background.
To President Obama's credit, he invigorated the moribund arms control-disarmament policies that he had inherited and over the last two years has made slow but commendable progress. The Dec 22 U.S. Senate vote will inject much needed legislative endorsement to the Obama policies and hopefully the major powers led by this latest U.S.-Russia initiative will be able to revive the stalled arms control disarmament deliberations in a meaningful manner.
New START, which now pegs the long-range strategic warheads to 1,550 in the U.S. and Russian arsenals, was preceded by the Moscow Treaty (2002) that had a 2,200 warhead benchmark, which in turn was derived from the original 1991 START that had set the ceiling at 6,000 warheads. Thus in two decades, the major nuclear arsenals are mandated to shrink to a quarter of their post Cold War levels but the verification process is still opaque. There is little veracity about the actual number of nuclear weapons in the world and a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy is at play here.
An element of 'Alice in Wonderland' is embedded here a la the cat and the smile. In that multi-layered story, at a certain point, the cat begins to smile and the smile gets bigger and bigger till a point is reached when the cat disappears and the smile remains.
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