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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Henry Kissinger

The Footballer

16 Sat Jan 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on The Footballer

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84th Infantry Division, Ahlem, Andrew Roberts, bildungsroman, Bronze Star, Carl Friedrich, Charles de Gaulle, China, CIC, Counter Intelligence Corps, Fürth, Fritz Krämer, Harvard University, Henry Kissinger, idealism, Immanuel Kant, John F. Kennedy, Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, Konrad Adenauer, Krefeld, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Leopold von Ranke, Lord Castlereagh, Lyndon Johnson, MAD, McGeorge Bundy, MLF, Multi Lateral Force, mutual assured destruction, Nazi, Nelson Rockefeller, Neuengamme, Niall Ferguson, Niccolò Machiavelli, nuclear, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Ostpolitik, realism, Robert Stewart, Salzwedel, Soviet Union, transzendentale Einheit der Apperzeption, United States Information Agency, USIA, Vietnam, wie es eigentlich gewesen, William Yandel Elliott III

Kissinger - The IdealistFerguson, Niall. Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. 1008 pp.

Le uova non hanno ballare affari con pietre (Eggs have no business dancing with stones) – Sicilian proverb

There are three things going for Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (henceforth The Idealist). The first is that the author, Niall Ferguson, has a felicity with words that is rare among academics. As anyone who has read the two-volume The House of Rothschild or The Cash Nexus can attest, Ferguson survived the systematic excoriation in graduate school that transforms the Queen’s English into dense, jargon-laden, and self-absorbed prose. The Idealist, for all its impressive archival and primary source research, remains a book for the general public and is not an impenetrable tract that only a few specialists will relish.

This leads to the second thing, that it is a biography – that too an authorised one – of “the most revered and reviled man” in international politics since Napoleon Bonaparte, Henry Kissinger. It is bound to attract more than the average Kissingerologist, be he an academic, journalist, activist, or quack. The third reason is, of course, the highly provocative assertion in the subtitle that Kissinger, universally seen as a ruthless and amoral arch-realist, the 20th century incarnation of Niccolò Machiavelli, is an idealist. This clever bait-and-switch, either by the publisher or the author, is, however, explicitly confessed in the introduction itself – what Ferguson actually means to argue is that his subject is an idealist of the Kantian variety, not the more commonly understood Wilsonian mould.

What is a Kantian idealist? Fundamentally, this is an epistemological inquiry that lays out a framework of what one can and cannot know, and the relationship between the subject and the object of inquiry. In Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Immanuel Kant argued that the world appears to us as we see it without implying any sort of truth claim about objects in it as they truly are, or ding-an-sich as the German philosopher put it. Kant was certainly not the first to postulate this – strands of this kind of thinking goes back to the pre-Socratics and can also be found in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. How this affected Kissinger, which is what is important to our story, is in his rejection of materialist theories of capitalist – or socialist – superiority. For the young Kissinger, the Cold War was not a competition over who had more nuclear warheads, missiles, or submarines; those were, without doubt, the tools but the struggle was over something far greater – the idea of freedom. It was this positive message that would win the world over to the West better than any short-term inducement of economic or military aid, Kissinger believed.

There are two points of clarification here. The first is that Kantian or transcendental idealism can lead to empirical realism: though we may not know the true nature of objects, we may still know them as they appear to us. This is not the beginning of some radical subjectivity as Kant argues that all rational beings share an objective knowledge of the rational world that is derived from logical inferences about basic categories. There is, to use Kant’s words, a transzendentale Einheit der Apperzeption, or a transcendental unity of apperception without which it would be difficult to postulate a categorical imperative. Simply put, the young Kissinger could well have been a functional realist even as he was moved by Kantian idealism. This is the line between Kissinger the thinker and Kissinger the actor, a discontinuity that will only grow in the second volume of the biography as the German-Jewish émigré moves office into the most political square footage in the world.

The second point is that the overwhelming use of realism in opposition to (Wilsonian) idealism creates a situation ripe for misunderstanding, something the author himself teeters on at certain points in his tome. Ferguson contrasts the high-minded Kissinger with the technocratic and pragmatic administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson who sought to win the Cold War not by championing the West’s ethical values but by pushing the utilitarian benefits of modern American industrial modernity. This mistakes the tools with which the Cold War was fought for the reasons it was fought; Kennedy and Johnson may not have had a greater moral mission – the Anglo Saxon fetish for empiricism ran particularly strong in that era – but this hypothesis is merely stated and not proven.

Ferguson has a nuanced treatment of idealism but he is less clear on what he means by realism. He mentions it only in passing, and that too in opposition to Wilsonian idealism. This is a facile treatment of realism, a school of thought that has become ever more refined since the end of the Second World War. Despite its several offshoots – classical realism, liberal realism, neorealism, offensive realism, defensive realism, and more – its core assumptions remain the same: that states are the most important actors on the world stage, they are rational, unitary, competitive, and driven by self-interest. Raisons d’état may be pursued by a variety of means, not excluding propaganda and other means of what is today called soft power. These non-military and non-economic methods of winning allies and influencing neutrals, in essence, propagate a moral framework which undergirds the greater struggle of the Cold War. Given the enormous efforts of the United States Information Agency in France, Italy, Scandinavia, India, and other countries, Ferguson’s binary of Kissinger as the moral Cold Warrior and the US leadership as amoral politicians is uncharitable. Realism need not be amoral – the lack of faith in other people, to view one’s fellow man as moved – if not driven – by self-interest is not amoral. In other words, Ferguson might consider if it is perfectly possible for Kissinger to have moral considerations and yet be a realist.

Despite an interesting yet eventually unconvincing central theme, the beauty of The Idealist is in the vast amount of information it provides on its subject. Ferguson keeps his word – he promises a bildungsroman wie es eigentlich gewesen (as it actually was – Leopold von Ranke’s conception of how history should be written) at the outset and does not disappoint. In keeping with Ranke’s advice, Ferguson allows the data to speak for itself as much as possible without lending his own voice at every turn. When writing a biography, it is important that the author not get too close to his subject; rather than judge, he must present the world the subject inhabited with all its choices and limitations. Ferguson does this admirably well – the wealth of archives, obscure collections of private papers, and interviews that went into producing this book – 111 archives worldwide and 37,645 pages of documents, we are told – itself makes it a worthwhile addition to one’s bookshelf.

Born Heinz Kissinger on May 27, 1923, to an Orthodox Jewish schoolteacher in Fürth, a small town barely seven kilometres northwest of Nürnberg in the German province of Bavaria, the future American secretary of state was an average student who loved football. Forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1938, the Kissingers were fortunate to have family already in the United States that was willing to sponsor them. Kissinger was barely 15, old enough to feel the persecution and hatred but not yet mature enough to understand why. In several interviews, the nonagenarian has rejected being a child of Weimar, downplaying the psychological impact of persecution and flight.

Kissinger returned to his hometown barely six years later in an American military uniform, and though the Kissinger clan had been culled by at least 30 members, he showed surprising equanimity, especially considering his age, and bore no ill will against the Germans. This is after his unit in the 84th Infantry Division had been part of the liberation of two satellite concentration camps of Neuengamme at Ahlem and Salzwedel and he understood full well just how his family might have perished. As he wrote to his father, “You, dear father, say: be tough to the Germans… I say be tough, yes. But show them also why you are tough. Prove to them that you are here in Germany because you are better, not that you are better because you are here. Be fair in your decision, be ruthless in your execution. Lose no opportunity to prove by word and deed the virility of our ideals.”

Kissinger has never made much of his military service though records show that he earned a Bronze Star; after the war, he was put in charge of de-Nazification efforts in Krefeld owing to his fluent German and passable French. Contrary to common belief, he did not reinstate former Nazis to their positions in the interest of efficient administration; in fact, it was US policy to gradually slow down and abandon de-Nazification. He was excellent at his job, earning promotions all the way to sergeant in the Counter Intelligence Corps before he returned to the United States.

One of the greatest influences on Kissinger in his formative years had been Fritz Krämer, the Mephistopheles to Kissinger’s Faust, as Ferguson describes. Krämer was also a German-Jewish refugee like Kissinger but 15 years his senior, and the two met at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, where Kissinger had been stationed for training. He met the second great influence in his graduate advisor, William Yandel Elliott III, at Harvard University, which Kissinger attended on the GI Bill and wrote that famed 388-page senior thesis that his undergraduate advisor, Carl Friedrich, refused to read past page 150. Kissinger’s dissertation, published as A World Restored, has been misunderstood, Ferguson argues, as in praise of Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich when in fact the real hero of the work was British foreign secretary Robert Stewart, more popularly known as Lord Castlereagh. On this, Ferguson’s case is compelling and it is worth revisiting A World Restored.

The Idealist takes us through Kissinger’s career until 1968. His frustration at the difficulty in being heard in the corridors of power, his failure to secure a tenure-track position – the Holy Grail of academia – at Harvard, and the stupendous success of his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957 that at once made him a known figure. In it, Kissinger proposed the radical idea that nuclear wars could be fought, that they could remain small and localised for surely the Soviets would have the sense to distinguish between a strike on an armoured division in an open field from the annihilation of Moscow. In a world ensconced in MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction – Kissinger’s proposal was indeed radical. Nonetheless, MAD seemed a bluff to the young assistant professor from Harvard, and a particularly bad one at that. The biographer disagrees with the biographee on limited nuclear war and it is also clear that Kissinger was out of his depth then on nuclear strategy, considering a 500-kT nuclear device a small, tactical weapon!

Kissinger would advise the Kennedy and Johnson administrations but never get close to power himself. Partly, this was because he was seen as the Republican Nelson Rockefeller’s man, having supported his presidential bid in 1960, 1964, and 1968. It was also because the National Security Adviser and his one-time mentor from Harvard, McGeorge Bundy, repeatedly blocked him from access to the president. Kissinger’s perseverance is obvious, and he would remain close to government circles despite his unworthiness among “the best and the brightest.” Ferguson describes Kissinger’s positions on some of the key issues that occupied the United States in the 1960s – Berlin, the Multi Lateral Force, the Vietnam War, German reunification, Ostpolitik, China – all the while arguing for Kissinger’s idealism. It is only with his experience in the negotiations on bringing peace to Indochina that realism first posed a serious challenge to Kissinger’s idealism, setting the stage for the sequel to The Idealist to be called, The Realist.

Ironic in hindsight, when news got out that Nixon had appointed Kissinger as his National Security Advisor despite the latter’s campaign on behalf of the former’s rival, there was general satisfaction that the right man had been chosen for the job. The American public would soon change its mind though his popularity – his high-flying social life and his dark humour – would keep them enchanted for at least another five years.

It is intriguing why Kissinger, were he so Machiavellian a realist, would back a losing horse thrice for the Republican nomination for president. Was he that clueless about American politics, or was it that he simply supported whom he believed to be the best man for the job? Although Ferguson holds this up as another indication of Kissinger’s idealism, the biography has no satisfying answer to offer either way.

Kissinger’s unyielding position on compromise over Berlin, in contrast with his willingness to abandon Vietnam, may also give an insight into the professor’s world view. Kissinger has always been the oddball in US politics, fitting in none of their four broad schools of thought – Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, or Wilsonian. At his core, despite the external trappings of an American education, Kissinger was still European in outlook. His countenance of an independent European nuclear deterrent – anathema to the White House – and hostility to Ostpolitik also lends weight to this suspicion. In fact, it might even be worth exploring if Kissinger was not a European realist rather than a Kantian idealist. His ease in relating to Europe’s pre-eminent realpolitikers like Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer over the state of Berlin, the future of China, and nuclear strategy is worth noting. In a 1963 article in Foreign Affairs, the future secretary of state described their thinking as: “their reality is their concept of the future or of the structure of the world they wish to bring about.”

Some might fault Ferguson for not covering in greater detail some of the events of the Cold War that transpired between 1951 when Kissinger set up the Harvard International Seminar and 1968 when he accepted Richard Nixon’s offer to become the NSA. However, The Idealist is ultimately a biography of Henry Kissinger and not a textbook of Cold War history – at 1,008 pages, perhaps Ferguson can be let off the hook for not being sufficiently thorough.

There are a couple of other burrs – putting the blame on India’s Forward Policy for the Chinese invasion of 1962, for example, or holding North Vietnam solely responsible for the failure of talks in 1967/68 – that will irritate the specialist but as Ferguson confesses, he is no Cold War historian and it would be a particularly persnickety reviewer who holds that alone against a generally excellent work.

Ferguson’s cursory dismissal of most of Kissinger’s critics might also be found unconvincing. However, the author makes a powerful case that by the ethical standards even middle-of-the-road critics of Kissinger want to impose, several senior US officials who have served before and after Kissinger ought to be in the docks right alongside him. Yet it is only Kissinger who is at the brunt of all the ire.

Kissinger’s own point about blame is also interesting – historians study what happened but it is equally important to understand what did not happen or what could have happened to obtain a full picture of the choices and limitations of office bearers. Yet that which did not happen does not leave a trail as rich as that which did; in mining only the latter, scholars sometimes completely miss the zeitgeist.

This biography has evinced interest for one other reason: Kissinger sought out this author. Admittedly, the offer had first gone to another British historian, Andrew Roberts, but he turned it down for personal reasons and Ferguson was seduced by the promise of new documents – at least 145 boxes of them. As is the question with any authorised biography, how independent was the author? And as is the answer each time, completely! In this case, it might even be true. Ferguson’s portrait of Kissinger in the first half of his life is neither flattering nor admiring; the subject was a man of substantial achievement and that would be hard to hide. Furthermore, it is equally dishonest to be harsher to your subject in the hope of appearing impartial before your peers and readers.

Kissinger has been called many things, even if we stick to the polite epithets. Jussi Hanhimäki called him a flawed architect in his 2004 publication, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy. It was soon after this that a friend of mine went to visit Kissinger and in the course of the conversation, the topic came to Hanhimäki’s work. “You know,” my friend said, “perhaps a more useful way to look at you is as a footballer.”

“How so?” Henry wanted to know.

“Well,” continued my friend, “in football, you have a clear goal…but the situation is very dynamic. And in heading towards that goal, you may pass, dribble, foul, get fouled, fall back, surge… But none of it changes the goal.”

In his deep German-accented voice, Henry said, “I like that.”

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The Prickly Indian

09 Tue Jul 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

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Alden Pyle, arrogance, Chen Yi, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, diplomacy, foreign policy, Graham Greene, Henry Kissinger, India, Indira Gandhi, Jaswant Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, KPS Menon, Loy Henderson, Morarji Desai, Richard Nixon, Stephen Cohen, The Prickly Indian, The Quiet American, Thomas Fowler, TN Kaul, VK Krishna Menon

Had Graham Greene written his 1955 bestseller on India instead of the United States, it would have been titled, The Prickly Indian. Made into a film twice, once in 1958 (Audie Murphy, Michael Redgrave) and again in 2002 (Brendan Fraser, Michael Caine), Greene’s The Quiet American tells the story of a British journalist, Thomas Fowler, and an American undercover CIA agent, Alden Pyle, in Vietnam. Pyle, the quiet American, has little “real world” experience and has learned everything he knows about Southeast Asia from books. While Pyle’s story is about a young and idealistic American brimming with superpower hubris and itching to introduce a strange and ancient culture to a better way of life, the American dream, the Indian version of the saga would be of a middle-aged man with a veneer of warmth but aloof, arrogant, and quick to take offence. As one journalist wrote, Oscar Wilde’s observation about the United States, that it went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening stage of civilisation, can be adapted to India thus, that the Indian went from abject humility to outright arrogance without the usual interval of healthy self-esteem.

India’s founding fathers made up in idealism what they lacked in ambition in matters of foreign policy. The continuity of this trend has been amply reflected by their successors in their slavish loyalty to moribund ideology and doctrine, and the lack of strategic vision has provided abundant cover for deeper failings of Indian diplomats. Even after 65 years of independence, India has neither developed close and strategic relations with any country (US-UK, US-Israel) nor has it fostered a coterie of like-minded states (EU, GCC) in furtherance of its national interests.

Most analysts of India’s foreign relations assume the cool and formal tone South Block oozes to be a combination of the cultural importance Indians give to protocol and the failure of strategic thinking. There is some truth to this, but a third and often-overlooked ingredient to Delhi’s aloofness, apparent more to practitioners of diplomacy rather than its scholars, is prickliness or arrogance. This personal shortcoming in many of India’s top politicians and bureaucrats has done irredeemable damage to the country’s interests over the years.

Among the more famous and early examples of Indian arrogance is recorded by the US ambassador to India (1948-1951), Loy Henderson, who wrote of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister,

“Nehru has had an anti-American bias since his school days in England. There he obtained the idea that the United Sates was an overgrown, blundering, uncultured, and somewhat crass nation, and that Americans in general were an ill-mannered and immature people, more interested in such toys as could be produced by modern technique and in satisfaction of their creature comforts than in endeavouring to understanding great moral and social trends of this age.”

Even if one dismisses Washington’s perspective on Nehru because of its disagreement over India’s non-alignment, Nepali Prime Minister Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala’s similar assessment is harder to ignore. In a conversation with an American diplomat, Koirala said that Nehru’s impatience often alienated him, and that Chinese diplomats were more refined than their Indian counterparts. Koirala’s words are still echoed in Nepal to this day.

Were the sentiment reserved to just one Indian official, even the prime minister, international exasperation with India might have been less. Yet this was not to be so. Vengalil Krishnan Krishna Menon, arguably India’s most controversial defence minister, has been described as vitriolic, intolerant, arrogant, and abrasive by British as well as American officials. Another Menon, this time India’s ambassador to China, Kumara Padmanabha Sivasankara Menon, was also described by the PRC foreign minister, Chen Yi, as arrogant during discussions on the border issue on the eve of the Sino-Indian War of 1962.

Moving on to the next decade, it should come as no surprise that India’s ambassador to the United States, Triloki Nath Kaul, a man hand-picked by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, found it difficult to get along with officials from his host state. In a cable written by Washington’s man in Delhi, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US State Department was warned not to accept Kaul as India’s ambassador. The telegramme relates the opinion of several western diplomats about Kaul – sly, opportunistic, arrogant, and with a propensity for misconstruing cleverness for sophistication. Moynihan himself wrote, “Kaul, like [the] Nehru family, is a Kashmiri Brahmin, self-assured to point of arrogance by birth.”

The more popular story from the 1970s is of Indira Gandhi’s interaction with US president Richard Nixon and his famous National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger on the eve of the South Asia Crisis of 1971. The Americans found Indira Gandhi intolerable, and declassified US documents reveal the colourful language Nixon and Kissinger used to describe the Indian prime minister. However, unlike Kaul, Indira Gandhi did not earn the ire of almost everyone she met – while cool and aloof to the White House, she charmed other leaders in her whirlwind tour of major international capitals, drumming up support for India’s position on the flood of Bengali refugees from the east and the West Pakistan’s campaign of genocide against their  hapless, ethnically different countrymen.

Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, reiterates this image of the prickly Indian in India as a World Power but is far more understanding than others in the foreign service community. Finding the excessive moral hectoring and arrogance of Indian diplomats and politicians as off-putting as his international colleagues do, he nevertheless asks that we understand the “defensive arrogance and acute sensitivity to real and perceived slights” in the context of India’s history and experience with the outside world.

Despite the urge to be defensive, there have been a few – very few – in Delhi who have lamented the poor standard of Indian officials and understood its multiplier effect on all aspects of international relations. In his autobiography, A Call to Honour: In Service of an Emerging India, former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh acknowledges the problem: “In diplomatic discourse and conduct, India has tended to carry many chips on its shoulder, almost always moralistic, needlessly arrogant, argumentative, mistaking such attitude as being an assertion of national pride.” Echoing Cohen, Singh writes that the “weight of so many centuries of servitude” has created in Indians “such an acute sense of hearing that quite often it hears insults where none exist or are even implied.”

It is not that India is the only country plagued with an arrogant foreign service corps; the United States is notorious for its share of Alden Pyles too. However, US arrogance comes backed by military and economic power, while India is yet to embrace machtpolitik. However, for most smaller states, it is easier to put up with arrogance that also promises aid than with paupered prickliness.

In a study that interviewed many US and Indian officials, one US military officer said, “Indians can be accused of having many cockeyed views,” but “they always have a substantive knowledge of the historical interactions, which makes it difficult to counter their arguments. They always raise the history of events during meetings.” This view was echoed by many others., that while the United States had an arrogance of power, the Indians had an intellectual arrogance. The study concluded,

“The Indian elites are quintessential intellectuals. They thrive on fine-tuned arguments and logic. But US military officers and businessmen are not interested in intellectual arguments—they are interested in practical issues. Consequently, they find India’s intellectual arrogance off-putting and counter-productive.”

As one US official framed it, it was American Calvinist arrogance versus Indian Brahminical arrogance, and as Thucydides reminds us, men’s indignation is more excited by a legal or intellectual wrong than by a violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.

Unfortunately, many Indian scholars have imbibed their diplomats’ prickliness. India has failed to produce sufficient numbers of qualified foreign policy analysts on its own, and the government’s paranoia regarding declassification of state records has forced scholars to work from foreign sources and cultivate privileged access, not all of which is kosher. Usually due to widely varying sources (for example, the British Archives versus an interview with a former Indian bureaucrat), Indian foreign policy wonks have reacted harshly to “outsiders” like William Dalrymple, Bruce Riedel, Francine Frankel, and George Perkovich, oftentimes unfairly or for perceived intentions rather than their scholarly output. This attitude does not further understanding of Delhi’s thinking and only creates polarised minefields where there ought to be research.

To be clear, an arrogant disposition does not lower the merit of one’s case but merely the likelihood of it being heard favourably. Nixon’s relations with the subcontinent serve as the best example of the power of personal charm in diplomacy. The US president could never warm up to the Nehru-Gandhi family or other top Indian officials such as Morarji Desai (when he was Vice President), but got along famously with Pakistan’s military dictators even when President Dwight Eisenhower had already begun to express doubts about the wisdom of CENTO. Even if foreign officials perceive an arrogance that is not there, the impact on India’s national interests can be costly.

Diplomacy is a human activity, dictated as much by personality and psychology as by the hard-headed realism of rational actors. Arrogance might be a tool in the diplomat’s arsenal whose skilled use might goad one’s interlocutor towards a desired behaviour. However, Delhi has been too liberal with its dispensation, approaching international partners as a precocious teenage debating champion than as a seducer par excellence. Little wonder, then, that the Pakistan lobby has a stronger presence in Washington and other Great Power capitals than India’s idiot savants do despite the latter’s greater economic and military potential. Perhaps it is time these learned men of Hindustan applied that ancient counsel from the Manu Smriti: सत्यं ब्रूयात्प्रियं ब्रूयान्न ब्रूयात्सत्यमप्रियम् । (satyam bruyat priyam bruyat, na bruyat satyam apriyam)

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A Lack of Capital

02 Tue Oct 2012

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

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governance, government, Henry Kissinger, India, intellectual capital, research, think tank

High office teaches decision-making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Henry Kissinger’s famous observation about the circle of power unnerves most people – how can politicians respond to an ever-changing world if they are incapable of innovative thinking to address increasingly difficult international crises? After all, as Kissinger also remarked of the international system, “each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.”

Upon closer examination, Kissinger’s point well-taken. Running a country is no easy task, and the sheer volume of files one has to read, speeches one has to give, and meetings one has to attend would leave little time for pontificating on abstruse philosophies of statehood and government or the Aristotelian influences on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Yet one cannot hope that all aspirants to high office will have advanced degrees in the humanities or sciences, nor is this necessarily desirable. Politicians have attempted to address this gap in two ways – the first is a staff that is competent in putting relevant ideas in front of a minister in an abridged format, and the second is relying upon the research done by think tanks and in universities. To facilitate this, advanced democracies ensure access to well-maintained archives of national records, periodic declassification, and access to government officials by researchers and journalists.

If it has not already, this should ring alarm bells for Indians. Not only does the country lack in erudite statesmen, but it also has no concept of an open society. The National Archives in India are a poor shadow of their sister institutions in Europe and the United States, holding a collection that is of only passing interest to scholars of diplomacy. Furthermore, India’s perverse social hierarchy restricts access to officials, few of whom are willing to or capable of divulging the practices of power in India. As a result, think tanks in India produce little of interest on New Delhi’s policies, let alone serve as a source for analysis of the policies of foreign governments.

Due to poor funding and frustrating regulations in India’s educations sector, there is not a single Indian university that stands out for an exceptional humanities programme. The average Indian’s aversion to the humanities has also hurt recruitment to the arts, but with poor faculty, atrocious library collections, a pervasive Marxist bias, and non-existent little opportunity in government or business, there is little to motivate young students to opt for the humanities over professional schools which will in all likelihood result in better-paying jobs.

India lacks not only a talent pool of young and budding humanities scholars but also the mindset to develop such a workforce. Recent articles that have suggested that the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) hire laterally to make up for the acute shortage of manpower they face sound like a major reform in the ossified bureaucracy of the Indian civil service. Indeed it is, but it is a little like buying a saddle for an imaginary horse – there are precious few scholars of policy being churned out in India and there is nothing to attract Indians in premier graduate programmes in the UK, US, and elsewhere to the IFS. Given the bleak scenario, it is not sure where the IFS is supposed to recruit laterally from, or if new lateral hires, probably not of the quality desired, would actually improve the functioning of the IFS or add to the already bloated state apparatus.

Another nugget of wisdom from Kissinger’s playbook suggests, “No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.” Without several think tanks, academic programmes, scholarly journals, and a transparent government, it is impossible to have a vibrant public sphere. This means that the Indian public is always left in the dark, limiting discussion to a handful of policy elites. To paraphrase from US political commentator James Carville, India’s newspaper headlines tell us everyday how the country is going to hell, and the editorial page sings paeans of failing government policies or dismisses every idea suggested to fix affairs; there is certainly little by way of interrogating government propaganda. This suits New Delhi very well, accustomed to working without outside scrutiny and little accountability. There is no need to re-state, however, how well that has worked for India.

Finally, there is the matter of the end user – the people. Too busy dealing with hostile tax regimes under welfarist governments, burdened poor educational, health, and transport infrastructure, pollution, corruption, and the failure of the police and judiciary, citizens find it difficult to inform themselves and question their political masters. Yet many find time to protest, or at least pontificate, on violence in Burma or the supposed insult to one of the many available icons of Indian society while showing no dissatisfaction over power cuts lasting for up to 12 hours in their cities. As Carter Eskew wrote, “The lack of innovation in politics and government is not just a supply problem; it’s a demand problem. We routinely settle for too little.”

All this is to reiterate that management of the country in the past 65 years has been so dismal that some things are beyond reforms alone. Government policies have created strange vectors in the nation-building project and state-building – beyond a labyrinthine bureaucracy – has not happened either (in fact, what little had occurred was systematically destroyed from the late 1960s onwards). In India, at least when it comes to policy-making, it is not only reforms that is needed but intellectual capital, and that is a decades-long project. As the 20th century’s iconic realpolitiker warned, “If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.”

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