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The Footballer

16 Sat Jan 2016

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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.”

Missed Opportunities

09 Sat Jan 2016

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JFK's Forgotten Crisis

Riedel, Bruce. JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2015. 256 pp.

Occurring in the shadows of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Sino-Indian War of 1962 is a forgotten slice of history that is remembered vividly only in India. With it is buried an important episode of US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s diplomacy, an intriguing ‘what-if’ of Indo-US relations, and perhaps the most active chapter in the neglected history of Tibet’s resistance to China’s brutal occupation. The war, however, brought about significant geopolitical changes to South Asia that shape it to this day. Bruce Riedel’s JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War is a gripping account of the United States’ involvement in South Asia and Kennedy’s personal interest in India. In it, he dispels the commonly held belief that India was not a priority of US foreign policy in the early 1960s and that Kennedy was preoccupied with events in his own backyard to pay any attention to a “minor border skirmish” on the other side of the world.

Except perhaps among historians of the Cold War, it is not widely known that the United States cosied up to Pakistan during the Eisenhower administration not to buttress South and West Asia against communism but to secure permission to fly reconnaissance missions into the Soviet Union, China, and Tibet. Initiated in 1957, the US-Pakistan agreement allowed the Central Intelligence Agency to operate U-2 reconnaissance planes from Lahore, Peshawar, and other airbases in West Pakistan over Communist territory. Airfields in East Pakistan, such as at Kurmitola, were also made available to the United States. Some of the missions were flown by the Royal Air Force as well. These overflights provided a wealth of information about the Soviet and Chinese militaries, economies, terrain, and other aspects important to Western military planners. Particularly useful was the information on China, which was otherwise sealed off to Western eyes and ears. Ayub Khan, the Pakistani president, claimed his pound of flesh for the agreement – Washington and Karachi signed a bilateral security agreement supplementing the CENTO and SEATO security pacts that Pakistan was already a member of and American military aid expanded to include the most advanced US jet fighter of the time, the F-104.

In addition to intelligence gathering, the United States was also involved – with full Pakistani complicity – in supporting Tibetan rebels fight the Chinese army. The CIA flew out recruits identified by Tibetan resistance leaders, first to Saipan and then on to Camp Hale in Colorado or to the Farm – the CIA’s Virginia facility – to be trained in marksmanship, radio operations, and other crafts of insurgency. The newly-trained recruits were then flown back to Kurmitola, from where they would be parachuted back into Tibet to harass the Chinese military. No one in Washington had any illusion that these rebels stood any chance against any professionally trained and equipped force, especially one as large as the People’s Liberation Army, but US policymakers were content to harass Beijing in the hope of keeping it off balance.

Jawaharlal Nehru knew of US activities in Tibet, for his Intelligence Bureau chief, BN Mullick, had his own sources in Tibet. It is unlikely, however, that he knew of Pakistan’s role in the United States’ Tibet operations. In any case, Nehru did not believe that it was worth antagonising the Chinese when there was no hope of victory; India had to live in the same neighbourhood and hence be more cautious than the rambunctious Americans. Furthermore, it was the heyday of non-alignment and panchsheel and the Indian prime minister did not wish to upset that applecart if he could help it. In fact, Nehru urged US president Dwight Eisenhower during their 1956 retreat to the latter’s Gettysburg farmhouse to give the UN Security Council seat held by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China to Mao Zedong’s Communist China. As Nehru saw it, a nation of 600 million people could not be kept outside the world system for long, but Ike, as the US president was known, still had bitter memories of the Chinese from Korea fresh in his mind. Yet three years later, when Ike visited India and Chinese perfidy in Aksai Chin had been discovered, the Indian prime minister’s tone was a contrast.

To most, Cuba defines the Kennedy administration: JFK had got off to a disastrous start in his presidency with the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, an inheritance from his predecessor’s era. His iconic moment, indisputably, came two years later in the showdown with Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Less well known is the president’s interest in South Asia and India in particular. Riedel explains how, even before assuming the presidency, Kennedy had made a name for himself in the US senate with his powerful speeches on foreign policy. In essence, he criticised the Eisenhower government for its failure to recognise that the era of European power was over; Kennedy wanted to fight a smarter Cold War, embracing the newly liberated peoples of Asia and Africa and denying the Communists an opportunity to fan any residual anti-imperialism which usually manifested itself as anti-Westernism. Riedel points to a speech in May 1959 as a key indicator of the future president’s focus: in May 1959, JFK declared, “…no struggle in the world today deserves more of our time and attention than that which now grips the attention of all Asia. That is the struggle between India and China for leadership of the East…” China was growing three times as fast as India, Kennedy went on, because of Soviet assistance; to help India, the future president proposed, NATO and Japan should put together an aid package of $1 billion per year that would revitalise the Indian economy and set the country on a path to prosperity. The speech had been partially drafted by someone who would also play a major role in the United States’ India policy during Kennedy’s presidency: John Kenneth Galbraith.

Riedel shows how, despite his Cuban distraction, Kennedy put India on the top of his agenda. A 1960 National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the CIA for the new president predicted a souring of India-China relations; it further predicted that Delhi would probably turn to Moscow for help with Beijing. However, the border dispute with the Chinese had shaken Nehru’s dominance in foreign policy and made Indian leaders more sympathetic of the United States. The NIE also projected the military gap between India and China to increase to the disadvantage of the former. The PLA had also been doing exceedingly well against Tibetan rebels, picking them off within weeks of their infiltration. By late 1960, a Tibetan enclave had developed in Nepal; Mustang, the enclave was called, became the preferred site for the CIA to drop supplies to the rebels. Galbraith, the newly appointed ambassador to India, disapproved of the CIA’s Tibetan mission, which had delivered over 250 tonnes of arms, ammunition, medical supplies, communications gear, and other equipment by then. Like Nehru, he thought it reckless and provocative without any hope of achieving a favourable result. There were, however, occasional intelligence windfalls coming from Tibet and Kennedy overruled Galbraith for the moment.

JFK’s Forgotten Crisis shows how Galbraith was far more attuned to India than he is usually given credit for. He is most famously remembered – perhaps only among Cold War historians – for nixing a Department of Defence proposal in 1961 that proposed giving India nuclear weapons. Then, he predicted – most likely accurately – that Nehru would denounce such an offer and accuse the United States of trying to make India its atomic ally. Now, the Harvard professor pushed for Nehru and Kennedy to meet. This would give the Indian prime minister, Galbraith hoped, an opportunity to remove any lingering suspicions he may have had about US foreign policy in South Asia. The large aid package Washington had planned for India would only sweeten the meeting. This was not to be: Nehru remained most taciturn and almost monosyllabic during his visit to Jacqueline Kennedy’s home in Newport. However, he was quite enamoured by the First Lady, and Jackie Kennedy later said that she found the Indian leader to be quite charming; she, however, had much sharper things to say about the leader’s daughter!

Washington’s outreach to Delhi annoyed Karachi. Though ostensibly the US-Pakistan alliance was to fight communism, the reality was that Pakistan had always been preoccupied with India. Ayub Khan felt betrayed that the United States would give India, a non-aligned state, economic assistance that would only assist it in developing a stronger military to be deployed against Pakistan. Riedel’s account highlights the irresistible Kennedy charm – when Pakistan suspended the Dragon Lady’s flights from its soil, JFK was able to woo Khan back into the fold. However, the Pakistani dictator had a condition – that Washington would discuss all arms sales to India with him. This agreement would be utterly disregarded during the Sino-Indian War and Pakistan would start looking for more reliable allies against their larger Hindu neighbour. Riedel reveals how Pakistan had started drifting into the Chinese orbit as early as 1961, even before China’s invasion of India, an event commonly believed to have occurred after India’s Himalayan humiliation.

When India retook Goa from the Portuguese, a NATO country, it caused all sorts of difficulties for the United States. On the one hand, Kennedy agreed with the notion that colonial possessions should be granted independence or returned to their original owners but on the other, Nehru and his minister of defence, Krishna Menon, had not endeared themselves to anyone with their constant moralising; their critics would not, now, let this opportunity to call out India’s hypocrisy on the use of force in international affairs pass. The brief turbulence in relations was set right, oddly, by the First Lady again. On her visit to India, she again charmed the prime minister and he insisted that he stay with him instead of the US embassy and had the room Edwina Mountbatten had often used on her visits readied. The play of personalities, an often ignored facet of diplomacy, has been brought out well by Riedel.

Ironically, China believed that the Tibetan resistance movement was being fuelled by India with US help. India’s granting of asylum to the Dalai Lama did not help matters either, even though it was Nehru who had convinced the young Dalai Lama to return to Tibet in 1956 and have faith in Beijing’s promises of Tibetan autonomy. Although Indian actions did factor into the Chinese decision to invade India in October 1962, records from Eastern European archives indicate that the Sino-Soviet split was also partly to blame. Humiliating India served two purposes for Mao: first, it would secure Chinese access to Tibet via Aksai Chin, and second, it would expose India’s Western ties and humiliate a Soviet ally, thereby proclaiming China to be the true leader of the communist world.

Riedel’s treatment of the war and the several accounts makes for interesting reading, though his belief that there is rich literature on the Indian side about the war is a little puzzling. Most of what is known about the Sino-Indian War comes from foreign archives – primarily the United States, Britain, and Russia but also European archives as their diplomats recorded and relayed to their capitals opinions they had formed from listening to chatter on the embassy grapevine. There is, indeed, literature on the Indian side but much of it seeks to apportion blame rather than clarify the sequence of events. Records from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of External Affairs, or the Ministry of Defence are yet to be declassified, though the Henderson-Brooks-Bhagat Report was partially released to the public by Australian journalist Neville Maxwell. Chinese records, though not easily accessible, have trickled out via the most commendable Cold War International History Project. The Parallel History Project has also revealed somewhat the view from Eastern Europe.

Riedel dispels the notion of Nehru’s Forward Policy as the cassus belli. According to Brigadier John Dalvi, a prisoner of war from almost the outset, China had been amassing arms, ammunition, winter supplies, and other materiel at its forward bases since at least May 1962. This matches with an IB report Mullick had provided around the same time. Furthermore, the Indian forces were outnumbered at least three-to-one all along the border and five-to-one in some places. The troops were veterans of the Korean War and armed with modern automatic rifles as compared to Indian soldiers’ 1895 issue Lee Enfield. Though Riedel exonerates Nehru on his diplomacy, he does not allow the prime minister’s incompetence to pass: the political appointment of BM Kaul, the absolute ignorance of conditions on the ground, and the poor logistics and preparation of the troops on the border left them incapable of even holding a Chinese assault, let alone breaking it.

JFK’s Forgotten Crisis brings out a few lesser known aspects of the Sino-Indian War. For example, India’s resistance to the PLA included the recruitment of Tibetan exiles to harass the PLA from behind the lines. Nehru was approached by the two men most responsible for the debacle on the border – Menon and Kaul – with the proposal which Nehru promptly agreed. A team, commanded by Brigadier Sujan Singh Uban and under the IB, was formed. A long-continuing debate Riedel takes up in his work is the Indian failure to use air power during the conflict in the Himalayas. It has been suggested that had Nehru not been so timid and fearful of retaliation against Indian cities but deployed the Indian air force, India may have been able to repel or at least withstand the Chinese invasion. One wonders how effective the Indian Air Force really might have been given the unprepared state of the Army. In any case, Riedel points out that the Chinese air force was actually larger than the IAF – the PLAAF had over 2,000 jet fighters to India’s 315, and 460 bombers to India’s 320. Additionally, China had already proven its ability to conquer difficult terrain in Korea.

Throughout the South Asian conflict, the United States was also managing its relationship with Pakistan. Despite the Chinese invasion, the bulk of India’s armies were tied on the Western border with Pakistan and Ayub Khan was making noises about a decisive solution to the Kashmir imbroglio; it was all the United States could do to hold him back. However, Ayub Khan came to see the United States as a fair weather friend and realised he had to look elsewhere for support in his ambitions against India: China was the logical choice. Thus, the 1962 war resulted in the beginning of the Sino-Pakistani relationship that would blossom to the extent of Beijing providing Islamabad with nuclear weapon and missile designs in the 1980s.

The Chinese had halted after their explosive burst into India on October 20. For a full three weeks, Chinese forces sat still while the Indians regrouped and resupplied their positions. On November 17, they struck again and swept further south. The Siliguri corridor, or the chicken neck, was threatened , and India stood to lose the entire Northeast. In panic, Kaul asked Nehru to invite foreign armies to defend Indian soil. A broken Nehru wrote two letters to Washington on the same day, asking for a minimum of 12 squadrons of jet fighters, two B-47 bomber squadrons, and radar installations to defend against Chinese strikes on Indian cities. These would all be manned by American personnel until sufficient Indians could be trained. In essence, India wanted the United States to deploy over 10,000 men in an air war with China on its behalf.

There is some doubt as to what extent the United States would have gone to defend India. However, that November, the White House dispatched the USS Kitty Hawk to the Bay of Bengal (she was later turned around as the war ended). After the staggering blows of November 17, the US embassy, in anticipation of Indian requests for aid, had also started preparing a report to expedite the process through the Washington bureaucracy. On November 20, China declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew its troops to the Line of Actual Control. A cessation of hostilities had come on Beijing’s terms, who had shown restraint by not dismembering India. Riedel makes a convincing case that Kennedy would have defended India against a continued Chinese attack had one come in the spring of the following year, and that overt US support may have influenced Mao’s decision

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the United States sent Averell Harriman of Lend-Lease fame to India to assess the country’s needs. Washington had three items on its agenda with India – 1. Increase US economic and military aid to India; 2. Push India to negotiate with Pakistan on Kashmir as Kennedy had promised Ayub Khan; and 3. Secure Indian support for the CIA’s covert Tibetan operations. The first met with little objection, and though Nehru strongly objected to talks with Pakistan, he obliged. Predictably, they got to nowhere. On the third point, Riedel writes that India agreed to allow the CIA to operate U-2 missions from Charbatia. This has usually been denied on the Indian side though one senior bureaucrat recently claimed that Nehru had indeed agreed to such an arrangement but only two flights took off before permission was revoked. Nonetheless, the IB set up a Special Frontier Force of Tibetans in exile and the CIA supported them with equipment and air transport from bases in India. All  this, however, withered away as relations again turned sour after the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 and the election of Richard Nixon.

Most of the sources JFK’s Forgotten Crisis uses are memoirs and prominent secondary sources on South Asia and China. Riedel also uses some recently declassified material from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library that sheds new light on the president’s views on South Asia. Despite the academic tenor of the book, it is readily accessible to lay readers as well; personally, I would have preferred a significantly heavier mining of archival documents and other primary sources but that is exactly what would have killed sales and the publisher would not have liked! Overall, Riedel gives readers a new way to understand the Kennedy years; he also achieves a fine balance in portraying Nehru’s limitations and incompetence. The glaring lack of Indian primary sources also reminds us of the failure of the Indian government to declassify its records that would inform us even more about the crisis.

As Riedel notes, the Chinese invasion of India created what they feared most and had not existed earlier: the United States and India working together in Tibet. This was largely possible also because of the most India-friendly president in the White House until then. Yet Pakistan held great sway over American minds thanks to the small favours it did for the superpower. It was also the birth of the Sino-Pakistani camaraderie that is still going strong. The geopolitical alignment created by the Sino-Indian War affects South Asian politics to this day. Yet it was a missed opportunity for Indo-US relations, something that had to await the presidency of George W. Bush.

There are two things Indian officials would do well to consider. First, Pakistan’s consistent ability to extract favours from Washington is worth study: if small yet important favours can evince so much understanding from the White House, it would be in Indian interests to do the same. Second, Jaswant Singh’s comment to Strobe Talbott deserves reflection: “Our problem is China, we are not seeking parity with China. we don’t have the resources, and we don’t have the will.” It is time to develop that will.