World Order

by Henry Kissinger

  The manner in which India achieved its independence and charted its world role reflected these diverse legacies. India had survived through the centuries by combining cultural imperviousness with extraordinary psychological skill in dealing with occupiers. Mohandas Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule was made possible in the first instance by the spiritual uplift of the Mahatma, but it also proved to be the most effective way to fight the imperial power because of its appeal to the core values of freedom of liberal British society. Like Americans two centuries earlier, Indians vindicated their independence by invoking against their colonial rulers concepts of liberty they had studied in British schools (including at the London School of Economics, where India’s future leaders absorbed many of their quasi-socialist ideas).

  Modern India conceived of its independence as a triumph not only of a nation but of universal moral principles. And like America’s Founding Fathers, India’s early leaders equated the national interest with moral rectitude. But India’s leaders have acted on Westphalian principles with respect to spreading their domestic institutions, with little interest in promoting democracy and human rights practices internationally.

  As Prime Minister of a newly independent state, Jawaharlal Nehru argued that the basis of India’s foreign policy would be India’s national interests, not international amity per se or the cultivation of compatible domestic systems. In a speech in 1947, shortly after independence, he explained,

  Whatever policy you may lay down, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding out what is most advantageous to the country. We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs and no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage of that country.

  Kautilya (and Machiavelli) could not have said it better.

  Nehru and subsequent prime ministers, including his daughter, the formidable Indira Gandhi, proceeded to buttress India’s position as part of the global equilibrium by elevating their foreign policy into an expression of India’s superior moral authority. India presented the vindication of its own national interest as a uniquely enlightened enterprise—much as America had nearly two centuries earlier. And Nehru and later Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984, succeeded in establishing their fledgling nation as one of the principal elements of the post–World War II international order.

  The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a “balancer” in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side—as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests.

  Emerging into a world of established powers and the Cold War, independent India subtly elevated freedom of maneuver from a bargaining tactic into an ethical principle. Blending righteous moralism with a shrewd assessment of the balance of forces and the major powers’ psychologies, Nehru announced India to be a global power that would chart a course maneuvering between the major blocs. In 1947, he stated in a message to the New Republic,

  We propose to avoid entanglement in any blocs or groups of Powers realizing that only thus can we serve not only [the] cause of India but of world peace. This policy sometimes leads partisans of one group to imagine that we are supporting the other group. Every nation places its own interests first in developing foreign policy. Fortunately India’s interests coincide with peaceful foreign policy and co-operation with all progressive nations. Inevitably India will be drawn closer to those countries which are friendly and cooperative to her.

  In other words, India was neutral and above power politics, partly as a matter of principle in the interest of world peace, but equally on the grounds of national interest. During the Soviet ultimatums on Berlin between 1957 and 1962, two American administrations, especially John F. Kennedy’s, had sought Indian support on behalf of an isolated city seeking to maintain its free status. But India took the position that any attempt to impose on it the norms of a Cold War bloc would deprive it of its freedom of action and therefore of its bargaining position. Short-term moral neutrality would be the means toward long-term moral influence. As Nehru told his aides,

  It would have been absurd and impolitic for the Indian delegation to avoid the Soviet bloc for fear of irritating the Americans. A time may come when we may say clearly and definitely to the Americans or others that if their attitude continues to be unfriendly we shall necessarily seek friends elsewhere.

  The essence of this strategy was that it allowed India to draw support from both Cold War camps—securing the military aid and diplomatic cooperation of the Soviet bloc, even while courting American development assistance and the moral support of the U.S. intellectual establishment. However irritating to Cold War America, it was a wise course for an emerging nation. With a then-nascent military establishment and underdeveloped economy, India would have been a respected but secondary ally. As a free agent, it could exercise a much-wider-reaching influence.

  In pursuit of such a role, India set out to build a bloc of like-minded states—in effect, an alignment of the nonaligned. As Nehru told the delegates of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,

  Are we, the countries of Asia and Africa, devoid of any positive position except being pro-communist or anti-communist? Has it come to this, that the leaders of thought who have given religions and all kinds of things to the world have to tag on to this kind of group or that and be hangers-on of this party or the other carrying out their wishes and occasionally giving an idea? It is most degrading and humiliating to any self-respecting people or nation. It is an intolerable thought to me that the great countries of Asia and Africa should come out of bondage into freedom only to degrade themselves or humiliate themselves in this way.

  The ultimate rationale for India’s rejection of what it described as the power politics of the Cold War was that it saw no national interest in the disputes at issue. For the sake of disputes along the dividing lines in Europe, India would not challenge the Soviet Union only a few hundred miles away, which it wished to give no incentive to join up with Pakistan. Nor would it risk Muslim hostility on behalf of Middle East controversies. India refrained from judgment of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and North Vietnam’s subversion of South Vietnam. India’s leaders were determined not to isolate themselves from what they identified as the progressive trends in the developing world or risk the hostility of the Soviet superpower.

  Nevertheless, India found itself involved in a war with China in 1962 and four wars with Pakistan (one of which, in 1971, was carried out under the protection of a freshly signed Soviet defense treaty and ended with the division of India’s principal adversary into two separate states, Pakistan and Bangladesh—greatly improving India’s overall strategic position).

  In quest of a leading role among the nonaligned, India was adhering to a concept of international order compatible with the inherited one on both the global and regional level. Its formal articulation was classically Westphalian and congruent with historical European analyses of the balance of power. Nehru defined India’s approach in terms of “five principles of peaceful coexistence.” Though given the name of an Indian philosophical concept, Pancha Shila (Five Principles of Coexistence), these were in effect a more high-minded recapitulation of the Westphalian model for a multipolar order of sovereign states:

  (1) mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty,

  (2) mutual non-aggression,

  (3) mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs,

  (4) equality and mutual benefit, and

  (5) peaceful co-existence.

  India’s advocacy of abstract principles of world order was accompanied by a doctrine for Indian
security on the regional level. Just as the early American leaders developed in the Monroe Doctrine a concept for America’s special role in the Western Hemisphere, so India has established in practice a special position in the Indian Ocean region between the East Indies and the Horn of Africa. Like Britain with respect to Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India strives to prevent the emergence of a dominant power in this vast portion of the globe. Just as early American leaders did not seek the approval of the countries of the Western Hemisphere with respect to the Monroe Doctrine, so India in the region of its special strategic interests conducts its policy on the basis of its own definition of a South Asian order. And while American and Indian views often clashed on the conduct of the Cold War, they have, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, been largely parallel for the Indian Ocean region and its peripheries.

  With the end of the Cold War, India was freed from many conflicting pressures and some of its socialist infatuations. It engaged in economic reform, triggered by a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 and assisted by an IMF program. Indian companies now lead some of the world’s major industries. This new direction is reflected in India’s diplomatic posture, with new partnerships globally and in particular throughout Africa and Asia and with a heightened regard around the world for India’s role in multilateral economic and financial institutions. In addition to its growing economic and diplomatic influence, India has considerably enhanced its military power, including its navy and stockpile of nuclear weapons. And in a few decades, it will surpass China as Asia’s most populous country.

  India’s role in world order is complicated by structural factors related to its founding. Among the most complex will be its relations with its closest neighbors, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and China. Their ambivalent ties and antagonisms reflect a legacy of a millennium of competing invasions and migrations into the subcontinent, of Britain’s forays on the fringes of its Indian realm, and of the rapid end of British colonial rule in the immediate aftermath of World War II. No successor state has accepted the boundaries of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent in full. Treated as provisional by one party or another, the disputed borders have ever since been the cause of sporadic communal violence, military clashes, and terrorist infiltration.

  The borders with Pakistan, which roughly traced the concentrations of Islam on the subcontinent, cut across ethnic boundaries. They brought into being a state based on the Muslim religion in two noncontiguous parts of what had been British India divided by thousands of miles of Indian territory, setting the stage for multiple subsequent wars. Borders with Afghanistan and China were proclaimed based on lines drawn by nineteenth-century British colonial administrators, later disclaimed by the opposite parties and to this day disputed. India and Pakistan have each invested heavily in a nuclear weapons arsenal and regional military postures. Pakistan also tolerates, when it does not abet, violent extremism, including terrorism in Afghanistan and in India itself.

  A particular complicating factor will be India’s relations with the larger Muslim world, of which it forms an integral part. India is often classified as an East Asian or South Asian country. But it has deeper historical links with the Middle East and a larger Muslim population than Pakistan itself, indeed than any Muslim country except Indonesia. India has thus far been able to wall itself off from the harshest currents of political turmoil and sectarian violence, partly through enlightened treatment of its minorities and a fostering of common Indian domestic principles—including democracy and nationalism—transcending communal differences. Yet this outcome is not foreordained, and maintaining it will require concerted efforts. A further radicalization of the Arab world or heightened civil conflict in Pakistan could expose India to significant internal pressures.

  Today India pursues a foreign policy in many ways similar to the quest of the former British Raj as it seeks to base a regional order on a balance of power in an arc stretching halfway across the world, from the Middle East to Singapore, and then north to Afghanistan. Its relations with China, Japan, and Southeast Asia follow a pattern akin to the nineteenth-century European equilibrium. Like China, it does not hesitate to use distant “barbarians” like the United States to help achieve its regional aims—though in describing their policies, both countries would use more elegant terms. In the administration of George W. Bush, a strategic coordination between India and America on a global scale was occasionally discussed. It remained confined to the South Asia region because India’s traditional nonalignment stood in the way of a global arrangement and because neither country was willing to adopt confrontation with China as a permanent principle of national policy.

  Like the nineteenth-century British who were driven to deepen their global involvement to protect strategic routes to India, over the course of the twenty-first century India has felt obliged to play a growing strategic role in Asia and the Muslim world to prevent these regions’ domination by countries or ideologies it considers hostile. In pursuing this course, India has had natural ties to the countries of the English-speaking “Anglosphere.” Yet it will likely continue to honor the legacy of Nehru by preserving freedom of maneuver in its Asian and Middle Eastern relations and in its policies toward key autocratic countries, access to whose resources India will require to maintain its expansive economic plans. These priorities will create their own imperatives transcending historical attitudes. With the reconfiguration of the American position in the Middle East, the various regional countries will seek new partners to buttress their positions and to develop some kind of regional order. And India’s own strategic analysis will not permit a vacuum in Afghanistan or the hegemony in Asia of another power.

  Under a Hindu nationalist-led government elected by decisive margins in May 2014 on a platform of reform and economic growth, India can be expected to pursue its traditional foreign policy goals with added vigor. With a firm mandate and charismatic leadership, the administration of Narendra Modi may consider itself in a position to chart new directions on historic issues like the conflict with Pakistan or the relationship with China. With India, Japan, and China all led by strong and strategically oriented administrations, the scope both for intensified rivalries and for potential bold resolutions will expand.

  In any of these evolutions, India will be a fulcrum of twenty-first-century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the regions and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.

  WHAT IS AN ASIAN REGIONAL ORDER?

  The historical European order had been self-contained. England was, until the early twentieth century, able to preserve the balance through its insular position and naval supremacy. Occasionally, European powers enlisted outside countries to strengthen their positions temporarily—for example, France courting the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century or Britain’s early-twentieth-century alliance with Japan—but non-Western powers, other than occasional surges from the Middle East or North Africa, had few interests in Europe and were not called on to intervene in European conflicts.

  By contrast, the contemporary Asian order includes outside powers as an integral feature: the United States, whose role as an Asia-Pacific power was explicitly affirmed in joint statements by U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao in January 2011, and Chinese President Xi Jinping in June 2013; and Russia, geographically an Asian power and participant in Asian groupings such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even if over three-quarters of its population lives in the European portion of Russian territory.

  The United States in modern times has occasionally been invited to act as a balancer of power. In the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, it mediated the war between Russia and Japan; in World War II, it defeated Japan’s quest for Asian hegemony. The United States played a comparable Asian role during the Cold War when it sought to balance the Soviet Union through a network of alliances stre
tching from Pakistan to the Philippines.

  The evolving Asian structure will have to take into account a plethora of states not dealt with in the preceding pages. Indonesia, anchoring Southeast Asia while affirming an Islamic orientation, plays an increasingly influential role and has thus far managed a delicate balancing act between China, the United States, and the Muslim world. With Japan, Russia, and China as neighbors, the Republic of Korea has achieved a vibrant democracy bolstered by a globally competitive economy, including leadership in strategic industries such as telecommunications and shipbuilding. Many Asian countries—including China—view North Korea’s policies as destabilizing but regard a collapse of North Korea as a greater danger. South Korea on its part will have to deal with increasing domestic pressures for unification.

  In the face of Asia’s vast scale and the scope of its diversity, its nations have fashioned a dazzling array of multilateral groupings and bilateral mechanisms. In contrast to the European Union, NATO, and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, these institutions deal with security and economic issues on a case-by-case basis, not as an expression of formal rules of regional order. Some of the key groupings include the United States, and some, including economic ones, are Asian only, of which the most elaborated and significant is ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The core principle is to welcome those nations most directly involved with the issues at hand.

  But does all this amount to an Asian system of order? In Europe’s equilibrium, the interests of the main parties were comparable, if not congruent. A balance of power could be developed not only in practice—as is inevitable in the absence of hegemony—but as a system of legitimacy that facilitated decisions and moderated policies. Such a congruence does not exist in Asia, as is shown by the priorities the major countries have assigned to themselves. While India appears mostly concerned with China as a peer competitor, in large measure a legacy of the 1962 border war, China sees its peer rivals in Japan and the United States. India has devoted fewer military resources to China than to Pakistan, which, if not a peer competitor, has been a strategic preoccupation for New Delhi.