Multi-polar order

In order to flourish in the new world order, our foreign policy-makers must not fall into the trap of naïve idealism

Zorawar Daulet Singh Delhi

Over the past two years, the Indo-US nuclear saga has consumed the foreign policy discourse in India. And while the final outcome of the deal itself is in a state of flux, the strategic community remains at sixes and sevens about the challenges and opportunities confronting the nation's foreign-policy decision makers.

Beneath the nuclear veneer, the ideological discord is principally over the relevance of non-alignment as the guiding doctrine for Indian foreign policy. Leading members of the US security establishment have disparaged India's reluctance to abandon this “outdated concept”. Recent critiques coming from Condoleeza Rice are reminiscent of an earlier era, when another former secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, found Indian neutrality “immoral” and “shortsighted”. American disdain for the ideational foundations of Indian foreign policy should hardly be a cause for concern. What is disturbing is that occasional domestic exhortations readily echo these external critiques. Such revisionists are often ill-informed about the very essence of non-alignment and of its abiding relevance in contemporary international life.

At the outset, the logic of non-alignment as envisaged by the founding fathers needs to be reiterated. Nehru's conception of non-alignment stemmed from the geopolitical situation — India as a newly independent state was in no position to participate in the tight bipolar contest. Rather, India chose to leverage the superpower rivalry to gain flexibility in foreign policy and augment her development goals. Indeed, during the 1950s and 1960s, India was one of the largest recipients of US and Soviet aid! K Subrahmanyam has been one of the eminent expositors to state it bluntly: non-alignment was always the practice of realpolitik cloaked in idealism. That the ideological veil got confused as an end in itself, manifesting in moral outbursts, was as much a reflection of India's relative material weakness in the international system as it was of strategic naiveté. 

Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991, New Delhi came to recognise that incremental engagement with the US was beneficial. This was a structural response to the new power reality, where US primacy was unchallenged. Yet, by the early 2000s international politics took another seminal turn. Ironically, as New Delhi was reconciling itself to a place in a US-led system, the very foundations of that order were being withered away.

By 2005, it had become clear in Washington that the fantasy of reshaping the security structure of the Middle East had reached an impasse. The US debacle in Iraq, however, coincided with equally dramatic developments in Eurasia. Russia, after more than a decade of internal upheavals, was displaying signs of breaking out of the shell that Washington's cold warriors had confined it to since 1991. It will also be recalled that China had gained from the strategic surprise of 9/11, which had diverted US strategic attention to the West Asian theatre, from President Bush's pre-9/11 national-security goal of expanding the scope of its East Asian containment strategy.

By 2006, with the US bogged down in West Asia, and Russia and China rapidly accelerating their geoeconomic profiles and influence, US triumphalism appeared all but over. Russia's geopolitical arbitration over the Iran issue has been the watershed event.