A new government report lists 22 nations that maintain significant business relationships with Iran, despite new United Nations sanctions and even more restrictive laws enacted in Europe and the United States.

Among the 22 states are the usual bad actors, including China and Russia -- even Belarus. But one state dominates the list; one state allows more companies to do business with Iran than any other. India, the state that reacts to every new foreign-policy development with just one question:

What about me?

Shortly after the United States enacted its new sanctions last month, India's foreign minister complained that the American law would "have a direct and adverse impact on Indian companies and more importantly, on our energy security." Petroleum secretary S. Sundareshan added: "You would appreciate that there are immense opportunities in the oil and gas sector in Iran," and "we would certainly like to utilize these opportunities without sanctions."

Right away, India reopened negotiations with Iran to build a $7.4 billion natural-gas pipeline between the two states. Indian newspaper editorials cheered the decision and grumbled about foreign interference.

United Nations sanctions are not law, and all of the states openly doing business with Iran are developing oil fields or buying oil, natural gas and other petroleum derivatives, which do not necessarily violate the new sanctions. Still, energy companies in Italy, Norway and Spain, among others, immediately canceled oil and natural-gas development projects worth tens of billions of dollars.

The federal report, by the Government Accounting Office, said one Indian company, Ashok Leyland Project Services, wrote to Washington last month saying it had "had not made binding agreements" with Iran and would strive to comply with U.S. law. Last December, however, Ashok Leyland and another Indian company announced that they had signed "broad enabling agreements with the Iranian authorities concerning development of gas fields and liquefaction facilities in Iran," a press release said.

India is certainly not the only state that acts, more often than not, in a totally self-interested manner, with little regard for the consequences in other nations. But India is the world's largest democracy, an important player in the high-technology world and is generally viewed, like China and Brazil, as one of the world's rising powers.

What's more, India is campaigning hard to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. So wouldn't you expect India to behave as if it cared about the rest of the world?

Well, India has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and secretly developed nuclear weapons, prompting Pakistan to do the same -- Pakistan, one of the world's least stable nations, as its flaccid response to the flooding crisis amply demonstrates.

Even before U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen began in December 2009, India flatly declared that it would not accept any limits on its greenhouse-gas emissions. China at least pretended to show concern and commitment.

But perhaps the most outrageous example came in 2007, when the military junta in Burma crushed the Buddhist monks' pro-democracy demonstrations. The government arrested, or shot, hundreds of them.

On clandestine radio and Internet broadcasts, Burmese democracy advocates pleaded with the world for help. Next door in New Delhi just then, while soldiers were still torturing and killing monks, the Indian government proclaimed that Burma remained "a close and friendly neighbor" and dispatched its petroleum minister to the Burmese capital to make a deal. He signed a three year, energy-exploration agreement that fed cash to the junta.

Then, avoiding the shootings and demonstrations in the street, the minister drove to the airport and flew home.

The new American sanctions law requires the president to open an investigation if he is given "credible evidence that a person is engaged in certain prohibited activities, such as investment in the development of Iran's energy sector," the government report noted. That's what prompted the Italian, Norwegian and Spanish companies to cancel their projects. Companies from 10 other states sent Washington letters that attempt to explain their activities.

In truth, the U.S. has seldom enforced its Iran sanctions on other, friendly states. An earlier law, enacted in 1996, imposed sanctions on any company that invested more than $20 million in Iran's energy business in any given year. Dozens of companies violate that, but the U.S. has not sanctioned anyone for the last 12 years.

India is certainly not the only nation flouting U.S. sanction laws. The point is that its performance here fits into a longstanding pattern of behavior that seems to say: The world's rules don't apply to us.

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

 

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(C) 2010 Joel Brinkley