#
One of my bugbears about India is that if you stop someone on the street and ask for
#
directions, they will give you directions.
#
They may never have heard of the place you're trying to reach, but directions they will
#
Go straight, turn right at the banyan tree, turn left at the barbershop, then right again
#
at the podcasting studio, then straight until you hit a dead end, climb the wall in front
#
of you, jump into the cesspool on the other side, and as Lord Yama comes to take your
#
soul away, ask him, he will know.
#
Social media is a bit like that, except that no one asks for directions and still people
#
It's imperative on social media to have an opinion on everything.
#
On Monday, you're an expert on pandemics.
#
On Tuesday, you're an expert on foreign policy.
#
On Wednesday, you will lecture a rocket scientist on how a rocket should be designed.
#
Actually, the thing is, in the heart sciences, while you do have outlier cases of idiots
#
lecturing Nobel Prize winners, you don't see so much Gyan being given.
#
But in fields like economics and foreign policy, everyone is a pundit.
#
People who comment on economics make the same standard set of mistakes.
#
They care about intentions instead of outcomes.
#
They treat the world as a zero-sum game.
#
They think with a top-down engineering mindset because that is all their peanut brains can
#
And in foreign policy, we make the mistake of thinking in terms of principles instead
#
of interests and levers.
#
For the last couple of weeks, everyone on Twitter has been a foreign policy expert.
#
I'm kind of glad these recent elections happened as that diverted attention from Russia and
#
One random fellow started lecturing me and this is offline, not on Twitter.
#
One random fellow started lecturing me on Ukraine and I deftly diverted him by asking
#
for his opinion on vote distribution in Uttarakhand.
#
So much Gyan everywhere.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and
#
Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I was in Bangalore when Russia invaded Ukraine, recording seven episodes of the show in eight
#
You've already heard two of them with Ram Guha and Dhanyaraj Indran.
#
And while I bumped into my friends Pranay Kutasani and Nitin Pai over there, it didn't
#
strike me that maybe we should chat about Russia and Ukraine.
#
It was when I got back to Mumbai that I thought, hey, why not do an episode where we use Russia-Ukraine
#
conflict to illustrate basic principles of foreign policy.
#
Most of us, when we approach a new subject, we get confused by all the information around
#
It helps to understand it from first principles, to build a framework or a lens through which
#
we can view the problem.
#
My first instinct when Russia invaded Ukraine, and probably yours as well, was to condemn
#
Russia and Vladimir Putin for the needless violence.
#
Now the questions come up.
#
How should India react?
#
What caused the conflict?
#
What are the dynamics in play here?
#
What are Europe's pulls and pressures?
#
What mistakes has the US made in this conflict?
#
What will China take away from this?
#
And in general, how should we look at international relations?
#
I thought Pranay and Nitin would be the perfect people to talk about this.
#
And hey, they've been educating people on this for over a decade.
#
Nitin started the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore many, many years ago, and every
#
year these guys teach courses on public policy and foreign policy to over a thousand people
#
Their faculty is incredible, and if you are interested in the subject for this episode,
#
you might want to sign up for the May cohort of Takshashilal GCCP course in Defense and
#
Foreign Affairs, which introduces students to the role of military and economic power
#
I'll give the link for it in the show notes.
#
We recorded this episode remotely, and Nitin had to leave in a couple of hours, so he's
#
only there for the first half.
#
In this first half, we freewheel through a bunch of topics, and in the second half, Pranay
#
and I dig deeper in a more systematic way.
#
But don't think of this episode as an explainer.
#
It works much better in provoking thought, in showing you new pathways into the subject,
#
in opening up rabbit holes to you, which I hope you'll use the show notes to explore.
#
I'll also link all my past episodes on foreign policy and my delightful deep dive last year
#
Before we go to the conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
And as is often the case, I don't even have a commercial, but chalo, let's wing it.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite got in town to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've taught over 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing,
#
and an online community has sprung up of all my past students.
#
We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase the work of students, and vibrant community
#
Through the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction, and a lovely and lively community at the end
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST, or about $150, and is a monthly thing.
#
So if you're interested, head on over to register at IndiaUncut.com slash Clear Writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and
#
a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Pranay and Nitin, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
Thanks Amit, great to be here.
#
Hey Amit, I'm really happy to be here after such a long time.
#
It's fantastic to see the way the podcast has taken off.
#
Everybody tells me wonderful things about Amit, and I try to correct their perception.
#
I tell you that what you see and what you hear is not actually what you see.
#
The scene and the unseen.
#
The scene, the heard and the unheard.
#
The heard and the unheard.
#
I mean, you guys, other people just know me from the podcast, which I guess is The Scene,
#
but you guys have met me in person and have known me for many years, so you know The Unseen.
#
And by the way, Nitin, I want to do a seven-hour episode with you when I next come to Bangalore,
#
But today, because our subject is so weighty and also you're leaving us after two hours
#
and I'll continue with Pranay, we'll skip the personal stuff for now and we'll just
#
get on to the situation we're in.
#
And my first question is this, that, you know, there are long times in world history when
#
there is a sort of equilibrium, not just in terms of the way things are, but in terms
#
of the way we look at something.
#
We look at a subject, we build a certain framework and we think that, okay, that's our framework
#
and so on and so forth.
#
And it could be in the imagination of people of a particular world order.
#
This is the way the world is, this is the way power balances work, this is the way countries
#
do the things they do and so on and so forth.
#
But then there are moments where everything kind of changes, like World War II obviously
#
just reset everything and reconfigured everything.
#
And there are arguments that, you know, the attacks of 2001 also kind of did that, but
#
we weren't quick enough to sufficiently appreciate it.
#
And the point has been made by some that what's happening in Russia, Ukraine is either, you
#
know, a big turning point like that or sort of a reflection of how the world changed in
#
And there is a danger and I'm coming to this with a reference to other fields that we look
#
at the world in skeuomorphic ways.
#
Skeuomorphic is a design term that, you know, that a completely new technology will still
#
have design elements of an older technology, which may be redundant in the new technology,
#
but you kind of need it because you want people to feel comfortable.
#
Like when Apple first had, you know, their eBooks car thing, physically, if you went
#
on the computer, there was a physical bookshelf.
#
Many music editing softwares will show a knob on the screen, even though you're not actually
#
physically turning a knob just to make older people kind of comfortable.
#
So just looking at kind of what's been happening that do you feel that there might be a shift
#
happening like that and that traditional analysts who've kind of really understood the world
#
as it is so far might therefore, you know, miss out on things or need to watch out for
#
I mean, you know, I think our generation, when I say our generation, everybody who's
#
20 years older than me and 20 years younger than me, I guess it's my generation.
#
And we've been extremely lucky to have been living at a point in time where there was
#
extraordinary amount of peace, extraordinary amount of international cooperation, free
#
movement of people across borders, ideas, capital across borders, and we sort of took
#
And there were a lot of people like Tom Friedman, for example, who went to town about it and
#
saying this is the natural state, the world has arrived at a particular kind of setup.
#
And this is going to be the way it is.
#
Now, unfortunately, if you look through most of known history, there have been two kinds
#
One is a very popular version of the cycle called the cycle of war and peace.
#
So there is war, and then there's peace, there are long periods of war, there are long periods
#
And these, you know, how long war lasts, how long peace lasts is a matter of, you know,
#
context, history, and so on.
#
But everybody has sort of understood that there are, you know, coherent times of war
#
and coherent times of peace.
#
This is a very popular and sort of instinctive understanding of human history.
#
But there is another dimension in which you could look at this cycle, and that is cycles
#
There are periods where there is order in the international system.
#
When we say international system, it's about, you know, across countries, right?
#
I mean, you do have the same cycles happening within countries also, you know, countries
#
have periods of order and periods of disorder.
#
But similarly, across countries, the world itself, there are times when there tends to
#
be a lot more order, and there are times when there tends to be a lot more of disorder,
#
Now, the question is, why does this happen?
#
War and peace are easy to understand, right?
#
You know, war happens because there is some very peaceful person in Russia who really
#
is minding his own business, and then all these terrible Westerners come there and disturb
#
And he says, okay, I'm such a peace-loving person, I'm being threatened, and now I'm
#
going to declare war on Ukraine.
#
That's one way of looking at why there might be war.
#
War and peace are easier to understand.
#
But order and disorder are a little harder to understand.
#
Like, for example, why is it that since 1989 to roughly about 2010, we enjoyed a period
#
of relative calm, relative stable rules of the game, whether it's international politics,
#
economics, technology, there was always some kind of, generally, you knew what the rules
#
of the game were, and people generally followed those things.
#
Why does this order happen?
#
The most important determinant of order is power, right, and the distribution of power.
#
Now, if you're like the Roman emperor, you're the Roman Empire or the British Empire, or
#
in the last century, the American Empire, if you want to call it, you would impose your
#
order on the international system, you had Pax Romana, you had Pax Britannica, Pax Americana.
#
So although it's called Pax, it's actually order, you're imposing a certain order on
#
the international system, because you are the most powerful man, you're the most powerful
#
emperor, you're the most powerful state in that system.
#
And you can do whatever.
#
So you shape the order according to your interests.
#
So let's say you're a military, vegetarian Empire of Omit, and the military, vegetarian
#
Empire of Omit can design an international order where vegetarianism prevails.
#
And anybody who eats meat, or any country that decides to have chicken pulao, it becomes
#
a rogue state, and you declare war on them, and so on and so forth.
#
So it's entirely up to you, right, and what kind of a person you are, if you're an emperor,
#
and what kind of a state you are, you know, if the poor state, if you're an Ottoman Empire,
#
you have a certain worldview, if you're the British Empire, you have a certain worldview,
#
and you impose this on the rest of the world.
#
That's not the only way there is order.
#
There is another way where there is order, where it comes from the balance of power,
#
where you're not the only most powerful entity, there are half dozen or maybe 20 or 50 entities
#
who all are powerful enough to have their way, but not so powerful enough to upset the
#
So you have some kind of an equilibrium which comes from balance.
#
So if you now say, okay, these are the two ways there is order.
#
And then when you see disorder happening, then you have to question, right?
#
Is it that we lack powerful state, which we call a hegemon in academic parlance, right?
#
So is there a hegemon who's imposing order now?
#
Does that hegemon exist or not?
#
If there is no hegemon, maybe you'll go into disorder, or is there a lack of balance of
#
In the sense that there are not enough powerful actors who can cancel each other out and therefore
#
So I think we're in that phase now where there is disorder, and we're really asking ourselves
#
Why is it that Putin can walk into Ukraine?
#
Why is it that Xi Jinping can claim half the South China Sea as his personal freedom or
#
All sorts of actors around the world are pulling this off, right?
#
So is it because we lack a global hegemon or is it because we lack a global balance?
#
And that's the big debate, right?
#
I mean, you can probably argue for both cases.
#
But what is true is that in the absence of a stable order, powerful countries can do
#
whatever they want and get away with it.
#
This is where that famous Thucydides million dialogue comes in, because the Athenians invaded
#
the millions and they wanted to put the millions to the sword.
#
The millions said, why are you doing this to us?
#
Why are you killing us?
#
You shouldn't be killing us.
#
Because the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, right?
#
So in the wonderful words of ancient Indian philosophers, jiska randa uski panis, right?
#
So that's where we are now, jiska randa uski panis, right?
#
So Putin can do what he wants and get away with it because there is a sense that the
#
order which was established doesn't exist, that equilibrium which comes from order does
#
not exist, does not obtain.
#
And is there, you know, like you spoke about, you know, this understanding in those couple
#
of decades that everything was settled, that, you know, Fukuyama was misinterpreted in the
#
end of history as talking about how it's all over and now we are settled and that of course
#
was a misinterpretation and I mean his original essay, The End of History, had a question
#
mark after it and it's kind of meant to be more thought provoking, but a couple of things
#
One is that there is a danger when we look back at history, that we ascribe narratives
#
on it and we think of it almost in a teleological way, that this is a story and this is how
#
it would have proceeded regardless of whatever and that's easy to do in hindsight.
#
And similarly when we talk about cycles, you know, I think one, that, you know, nation
#
states haven't existed for that long, if you look through the long arc of history.
#
So we have a very small sample size from which to draw patterns and to make conclusions about
#
The very fact that you talk of cycles indicates that there is a sense of inevitability that
#
at some point this too will turn and it will go back, if you are in war it will go back
#
to peace, if you are in disorder it will go back to order.
#
And one, are there kind of reasons to sort of question that, because it could equally
#
be argued that any situation of order that comes about is inherently unstable at some
#
point it breaks down, whether you call it a cycle or not.
#
Secondly, you know, question that I often ask in another context is taking off from
#
Martin Luther King's quote about the long arc of history bending towards justice.
#
And my question is how the hell do you know, I mean, I appreciate the optimism, but does
#
it bend towards justice or does it, you know, are we just being fanciful and kind of imposing
#
the sort of imposing our hope on that?
#
So similarly, you know, there seems to be an assumption when we talk of cycles that
#
the long arc of geopolitics or whatever bends towards order and peace, is that necessarily
#
Yeah, see, let's do Fukuyama first and then we'll come to Martin Luther King, right?
#
Fukuyama was misinterpreted in many ways, right, when he talks about the end of history,
#
he's not talking about the end of history as in the end of the road, you know, he's
#
talking about end as in the purpose of history, right?
#
So what he's basically saying in that book, on that essay which became the book, is that
#
liberal democracy is a condition which everybody aspires towards, right, that you might have
#
all sorts of things which have happened through history, but the purpose of history, right,
#
the end of history, you know, the ultimate destination of history is liberal democracy,
#
that people prefer, you know, people who have tasted freedom don't want to give this up
#
and since your neighbor has freedom, your other neighbor has freedom, you too want to
#
I think there is something to it because I don't think people who are free would want
#
to go back to slavery, right, I mean, just the self-interest part of it seems to suggest
#
that freedom is an arrow which points in one direction and going back in the reverse direction
#
looks extremely hard unless it's done using overwhelming force, right, willingly, I don't
#
think people who want to go back, now that's just a hypothesis, right, I think there is
#
something to it but you can't conclusively prove this, now what Martin Luther King says,
#
I think is more an inspirational phrase to motivate people into action rather than an
#
analytically grounded hypothesis, right, and you don't expect leaders to be analytically
#
grounded people, right, I mean, Mahatma Gandhi can't say, you know, let's do marginal utility
#
of freedom versus marginal utility, he's not going to do, he's not going to talk in analytical
#
terms, you know, he's going to say, we are going to get the British out of the country
#
of freedom, right, so that's what, that's how I see Martin Luther King's statement,
#
I like it because it inspires people to do the right thing but if you say empirically
#
does it hold, I think it's a big question, Ma, and I would say going through what we've
#
seen in history, justice itself is defined by the hegemon, what do you mean by justice,
#
of course, arc of history bends towards justice but what do you mean by justice, if you look
#
at societies where, let's say, look at China, where there is a hierarchical system, justice
#
is the supporting and the establishment and the perpetuation of that hierarchy, so anything
#
that goes against that hierarchy is unjust and that's defined by the context in which
#
the Chinese mindset, the Chinese worldview works, so of course, the arc of history will
#
move towards that kind of justice, right, but doesn't mean that you and I agree that
#
that is actually justice, so I think from a international relations perspective or even
#
from a analytical person's perspective, it's good to keep your slate clean and say any
#
particular value system is arbitrary and it's, we've arrived at a particular value system
#
because of the course of history, there's particular path that we took, decisions that
#
we made, accidents that happened, choices that were exercised and we've arrived here
#
and this is our particular value system, we like it because, you know, it feels better
#
than the alternatives but there's nothing predetermined or there's nothing historic
#
or there's nothing automatic or you know, it's not a birthright and there might be other
#
people who have different world views and now if you want your worldview or your sense
#
of right and wrong to be established in the world as a value system, then you have to
#
support it with force, you have to have the power to be able to establish and that's exactly
#
what the United States is doing ultimately, you can criticize the United States for being
#
falling short of its prospectus and so on but when they say we are going to, you know,
#
we prefer liberal democracy in the world, that's a, there is a genuine sentiment that
#
that ought to be so and why?
#
Because it proves our point that if you are American, you feel that our system is the
#
best system, how do you prove that empirically is when you make the world like you and that's
#
probably what Xi Jinping is trying to do with China as well, he has his particular
#
worldview, the Chinese have their worldview and to establish the truth of it, you try
#
and use power to enforce that on everybody else and so that, you know, your system is
#
seen to be the best, I think that's the way I would read this business of putting some
#
level of morality in international relations or in politics in itself, I would come from
#
the point that everything is arbitrary, you know, there is nothing in liberal democracy
#
that was predestined, there is nothing in liberal democracy that it is the state of
#
the, it ought to be the state of the world, there is a course of events which happen,
#
they could have gone any other way and we might have all been today, maybe in the Chinese
#
system where we worship the emperor as you know, the son of heaven, if history had gone
#
the other way and we would have really believed that to be the case, we would have believed
#
that to be the national order of things.
#
Yeah, if I may come in here, Amit, one point on the nation states thing, see nation states
#
as themselves are new, but states are not new, right, so this idea of power and contestation
#
balance of power that predates nation states, the overlapping of the mental construct and
#
the political construct, right, that is nation state, but so those these ideas of states
#
power, what does it mean to be more powerful are there even in Arthashastra, for example,
#
right, so we have more sort of data points, so to say, on judging whether power matters
#
or not, and it's not just last 200 or 300 years, so that's just one point I wanted to
#
make, the other thing which Nitin mentioned about the ultimate aim of a global hegemon
#
to also convert the other countries to themselves, right, like themselves, is I think, the way
#
I want to frame it is that the aim for a global superpower is not just to gain maximum power,
#
but to gain authority, and authority is a combination of power plus legitimacy, right,
#
so in the sense, you make your own value so powerful that all others want to have and
#
aspire for that, right, so that's what superpowers aspire to do, and I think that's what the
#
US situation also has been, and coming to the first question which both of you are discussing,
#
I was thinking as a question for both of you, that how much of this world disorder is because
#
of the changing changes in narrative that have happened over the last 15-20 years, right,
#
so until 1990, the overwhelming stories from the West or the US, which was the most powerful
#
nation state, were largely stories of hope, stories of improvement, stories where things
#
are getting better, but if you see stories over the last 10 years, whether it's because
#
of the internet or whatever, largely the stories that we see from the West as well, are negative
#
stories that seem to suggest that things are not well there itself, right, so how much
#
does that have an impact on order, disorder, how others see you, right, if ultimately you
#
want others to think like you, and you are yourself thinking largely negatively, how
#
does that impact power and order and disorder, right, so what do you folks think?
#
I'll actually attempt a two-part answer which in a sense by itself is a question because
#
then I'll ask for your thoughts on that, and the first of those is that I think that I
#
look at, you know, it's tempting to look back at history and see a story, and see a linear
#
story, this happened, that happened, everything seems inevitable in hindsight, but you know,
#
I look back at history and just see a bunch of, you know, accidental happenings that change
#
the course in big ways, like one of the questions I often ask the historians who come on my
#
show is about Carlisle's great man theory of history, right, where there is of course
#
Carlisle's theory is that there are great men, and unfortunately in the past all men,
#
but you can say great people theory of history in the 21st century, but there are these great
#
people and they change the course of history, and the counter view to that is that there
#
are historical trends, you know, which are moving, which are flowing on their own, and
#
you know, which person happens to kind of be on top at a particular point in time is
#
happenstance and the trends are what they are and people don't make so much of a difference,
#
and I'm inclined to agree with Carlisle and think that great men in that sense, quote
#
unquote, do make a difference, and I think Putin is a classic example, because if you,
#
you know, if you look at his individual pathologies, his yearning for sort of a past greatness,
#
you know, Neil Ferguson speaks about how he sees himself as a successor to Peter the Great,
#
Marvin Kalb writes about how he sees himself as a successor to Catherine the Great, you
#
know, and there are other theories about how for him in 91 when the Soviet Union breaks
#
apart, it is traumatic because, you know, he's a loyalist in that sense of what the
#
Soviet Union was, and especially he can't bear that Belarus and Ukraine are separate
#
because to him, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia are part of the same thing, so whatever he
#
is harking back to, he's got a different value system, he's harking back to stuff, he is
#
the arch authoritarian, and he, you know, and in a sense, there is no democracy in Russia,
#
of course, and the thing is, was it inevitable, if he was not there, would somebody else like
#
him be there, and I don't think that's necessarily the case, one doesn't know, like I hark back
#
to this article Keshava Guha wrote in an Indian context, where he speaks about, you know,
#
a bunch of deaths that happened over a five year period in the early 2000s, late 90s,
#
where he says that what would the BJP look like if Pramod Mahajan hadn't died, or what
#
would, you know, the Congress have looked like if Sindhiya Pilate and Prasad hadn't
#
died, and those are interesting questions, and it seems to me that happenstance really
#
comes in the way, and part of, you know, part of the cause for the disorder can also be
#
attributed to an unhappy series of accidents, like what if instead of Xi Jinping, you know,
#
there's an what if, it's not necessary that everyone who took over would necessarily have
#
had the same kind of view or the same idea of, you know, their destiny or whatever, so
#
that is part one of my answer as a possibility, and I'm just thinking aloud, and part two
#
is, and this is why I think that disorder may be natural to us, and order may be harder
#
to achieve, is partly because of the internet and social media, because what the internet
#
and social media do is that they push you into narrative battles where there is a natural
#
drive to extremes, like all of us know of the median voter theorem, right, whereas in
#
politics, wherein politics, both parties are kind of pushed towards the center, you know,
#
for example, in the US, you might have the Democrats and Republicans in the primaries
#
are at extreme ends, because they're appealing to true believers, but the moment they're
#
the general election, they come closer together, because you know, it's they can't leave that
#
space in the middle, but that has been upturned, I believe, by kind of social media where there
#
is an incentive to push towards the extremes, where once you're part of a tribe, the only
#
way to stand out in that tribe is to be more extreme than the next guy, and to crucify
#
the moderate in that tribe for not being pure enough. And I'm giving a simplistic example
#
of social media. And this is really, you know, more Twitter than anything else. But I think
#
that that's what tends to happen in these narrative battles that everyone just gets
#
more and more extreme. And the median voter theorem, as it were, no longer holds. And
#
therefore, and of course, you one could argue that you keep getting more and more extreme
#
till the center till it's not sustainable, it falls apart. And then again, you go back
#
to the old equilibrium entirely possible. But these are sort of my two thinking aloud
#
thoughts on this is since you are so what do you guys think of it?
#
You know, this is already shaping out to be a fantastic conversation. There are so many
#
directions in which I want to take this that I'm losing myself, right. But here's one thing
#
which you mentioned, which I think is interesting from an electrical engineer's point of view,
#
I think, I, you know, first and foremost, I am an electrical engineer, not a practicing
#
one, but at least a pretend one. But you know, one of the things we learn in engineering
#
and I think you learned that in high school physics is also this idea of this is idea
#
of entropy, right, entropy is disorder. And what you learn from a law of thermodynamics
#
is that entropy of the universe is increasing, that disorder increases, right. And if you
#
want to create order, you need to feed energy into the system. So you know, if you don't
#
do anything, and entropy takes over and starts, you know, things start falling apart, the
#
center cannot hold, right. So that's the natural order of things. So it's, I think it's the
#
same in human activity, in human society, that if you let things be, things start going
#
towards disorder, right, becomes disorderly. And to impose any kind of order, you need
#
to inject energy, which is resources, right. So, you know, putting, holding together a
#
nation state, having a police force that manages, you know, society or manages the traffic requires
#
you to inject energy into the system and inject resources into the system. So then the question
#
is who has the kind of resources, who has the incentives to be able to inject the resources
#
in order to keep that system together, right. So that's how I guess these cycles of order
#
and disorder come about. Because at some point disorder exceeds a certain level, where people
#
develop incentives to be wanting to inject resources, energy into the system to hold
#
things together, otherwise things start going, you know, anarchy. So that's also, for example,
#
the founding myth of Indian states in Mahabharata Shantiparva or in Arthashastra, right, where
#
disorder at some particular youth disorder sort of takes over. And then these people
#
go to the Prajapati or the God and say, you know, do something for us. And then God appoints
#
Manu as the first man and he is given the authority, he is given Nandanithi in order
#
to hold things together, right. So that's sort of a philosophical idea which comes together
#
many stories of the formation of the state. So I think that there is something to it that
#
disorder at a particular point goes against the self-interest of most people and then
#
you sort of come back to it. But the other question which Pranay asked, and what is the
#
other questions Pranay asked, I sort of forgot that. We were discussing about narratives
#
and how narratives are important. Yeah. See, here's the thing, about 25-30 years ago in
#
political science literature, there was this new idea called social constructivism, right.
#
So Alexander Wendt came up with this idea called social constructivism, which basically
#
says that national interest, anarchy, etc. is what the elites make of it. Anarchy is
#
basically what you make of it. So even the idea called national interest. Now, if you
#
come from a classical realist tradition, you will define national interest as a survival
#
and the security of the state. Or like Pranay and I would say, it's about the happiness,
#
well-being of the people, right. So this is what we define as national interest. What
#
Wendt says is that this definition of national interest is constructed by the elite, right.
#
So when Pranay and I say that India's national interest is happiness, well-being, prosperity
#
of the people, it is a construct which we, the elite of this country, have decided is
#
a national interest. There's nothing structural about it. There's nothing natural about it.
#
It is a human construct. And I think there's something to that idea that national interest
#
is a social construct, right. So international relations, how people act in international
#
relations is a social construct. This theory, which was a social science theory, I think
#
is getting increasingly validated by biology, right. Evolutionary biology, thanks to the
#
work of people like Edward Wilson and others, and evolutionary psychology especially, is
#
showing that a lot of the thing that we believe to be true in social life, the things that
#
we believe to be true, the things that we believe to be beautiful, the things that we
#
believe to be right, the things that we believe to be just, are all social constructs. These
#
are the stories that we've told ourselves, right. Stealing is wrong because we have told
#
ourselves stealing is wrong, right. In nature itself, I mean, look at the natural, I mean,
#
look at animals for example, right. I don't think they have a concept of theft. We do.
#
So that's a story that we told ourselves. And of course, now cultures and genes co-evolve
#
and all of that. But nevertheless, I think the story that narratives make a lot of our
#
society, this is something very strong. I think there is now biological evidence to
#
that effect. So I would agree with Pranay that in the sense that the stories that we
#
tell ourselves and the stories that we tell the world about ourselves shapes the reality
#
that we live in. So if we tell the world that we are a proud liberal democratic country
#
and these are our values, these become our values, you know. And if we now go back and
#
you know, if Putin tells himself that is the reincarnation of Peter the Great or Ivan the
#
Terrible or actually even somebody and that's the sort of worldview he shapes and because
#
of his power he shapes among the elite and gets buy-in among a significant amount of
#
people in Russia, then that becomes the reality that they live in, right. So there is narratives
#
definitely made. So I would double click on kind of one aspect of that where you speak
#
about constructivism saying that national interest is what the elites make it out to
#
be and you also speak about evolutionary psychology playing into what those narratives are. Now
#
it would seem to me that therefore India's definition of national interest would therefore
#
have changed in the last few years because earlier when you had sort of the Nehruvian
#
idea of India dominating our politics or at least you know, dominating elite discourse,
#
it was a different matter. Now you could say that there is a new elite in town and I'm
#
not making value judgments on either elites or whatever, but there's a new elite in town
#
and what the Prime Minister and his people and you know, what the whole Hindutva sort
#
of philosophy which has kind of taken over our politics, that would define national interest
#
differently and that would also for example have elements like pride and civilization
#
and traditional values and all that as playing a more important part than they would have
#
in the earlier idea of India and similarly things that might have sort of upheld like
#
greater tolerance and secularism and whatever are sort of on the down swing here. So one,
#
your national interest would kind of change and two, evolutionary psychology would also
#
play into modern politics because you know, one of the fundamental insights of Evo Sai
#
which I think speaks to you know, the modern leaders that you see around the world is that
#
we have evolved to prefer strong leaders because when you are kind of living in a tribe of
#
100, I mean all our instincts of course evolved in prehistoric times, you're in a tribe of
#
50 people, 100 people, you've got to fight the next tribe, you know, higher values don't
#
really play a part, you want the leader of your tribe to be the strongest morpho around,
#
right, and therefore this sort of instinctive attraction which so many people have for strong
#
leaders like Putin and Modi and Orban and so on and so forth, down the line. You know,
#
some of them are just authoritarians and some of them like Modi keeps winning election after
#
election because he doesn't need to you know, not have elections because of the appeal
#
of that. So you know, so there is sort of a changing in the national interest and what
#
is perhaps bizarre is that then India's image of itself or how it would like to be seen
#
by the world is not congruous with how strong it actually is because if anything I would
#
imagine with our economy being on a downswing for a decade now, you know, we have even lost
#
some of the levers that we might have had over there and that kind of puts us in a pretty
#
sort of pathetic situation. So I've rambled a bit but since you mentioned, you know, how
#
national interest can be defined by the elites and so on, this thought just struck me.
#
Yeah, I'll just say some things and bring Pranay who knows about these things better
#
than I do to come in. Now, I think the thing about insights from evolutionary psychology
#
is that the most interesting insight is that things are mutable, right, in the sense that
#
humans might have had a preference for strong leaders in the past because of the evolutionary
#
paths that we took but this does not mean that it has to be the same in the future,
#
right. So that's the most interesting insight from evolutionary psychology, the mutability
#
of. So, you know, determinism in terms of that is not really true, you know, you can
#
change things. Back to this idea of defining the national interest, you know, in a country
#
of a hundred people, let's say it's a liberal democracy or some amount of freedom or even
#
if there's no freedom, each of the hundred can define the interest of the collective
#
in his or her own way, right. It's not that they all have to agree. So in a country like
#
India, which has, you know, so much of diversity in terms of ethnicity, language, historic
#
evolution and so on, what is the common idea of a national interest, right. So you could
#
all go in different directions and say, hey, this is our national interest, which is and
#
I think that's a great idea. I mean, we should all be able to go our own way and say this
#
is our national interest. Now, what happens is in such situations that there is some kind
#
of an anchoring effect which the constitution gives you because the constitution is the
#
most accepted, you know, least common denominator in terms of the most accepted set of rules
#
and, you know, norms in which we want to organize our society. So if you look at our constitution
#
from the preamble, just look at the preamble, it tells you what the national interest is.
#
You know, you're talking about, you know, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity of
#
various ways. And it's basically saying that individual freedom, liberty and India as a
#
united political structure are the national interest, right. And now I think you need
#
to be extremely radical to want to differ from this and depart from this and say, no,
#
no, no, this is, no, we don't want liberty or we don't want national unity or any such.
#
So I think that the constitution of India gives us a starting point and an anchoring
#
point for conversations and debates on what the national interest is or ought to be, right.
#
And I use the word ought to be because it should be in the power of every individual
#
and every generation to interpret the national interest according to the times. It can't
#
be that, you know, Ambedkar and his colleagues wonderfully put this document in 1950 and
#
we're all supposed to follow it as if it's, you know, it's hard-poded in our times. So
#
in this, there are commonalities between, let's say, what the Nehruvian liberal secular
#
state sees it and the Hindutva idea of a nation state sees it. There are commonalities, right.
#
What are the commonalities? The commonalities is of unity of the nation that you see India
#
as a political unit, right, which includes as much of the subcontinent as possible. Now,
#
even in the early days, people thought they could reverse partition, right. I think that
#
would have been a terrible idea. But, you know, even the early days the Nehruvians thought
#
they could reverse partition, you know, in 10, 15, 20 years will be back into the old
#
undivided India in any way, which is also the vision of an Akhand Bharat, which sees
#
itself as occupying territory, which is historically its own, right. Of course, we'll accept compromises
#
because of power and reality and so on. But you imagine that this big territorial state
#
is ours and that is the political unit. The second thing both the Nehruvians and the Hindutva
#
guys would agree on is that this state has to be powerful, right. It needs to have power
#
in order to defend itself from external adversaries, especially from imperialism. And it should
#
have enough power as a matter of practice such that the foreign policy or the policy
#
choices of your country are determined by yourself, right. So you're not economically
#
weak such that the powerful can dictate things to you. You're not militarily weak so that,
#
you know, you can be kicked around, right. And you don't have, let's say, even structurally
#
in the system weak where you don't have seats in the most important places which allow you
#
to make rules. So everybody agrees on this. The difference comes in the definition of
#
what this political unity means internally, right. So the Indian nation which I would
#
subscribe to is the Indian nation exists. It includes people of the subcontinent which
#
is a Hindu, you know, largely Hindu influenced society. There is no denying the fact. In
#
fact, the whole debate on who is a Hindu is in a way now it's politically sourced fraud.
#
But technically it's a matter of saying everybody thought that the people who live in the subcontinent
#
are Hindus, right. People are, you know, Hindus and the Hindu. So, of course, now you have
#
a denominational definition to the word Hindu which means that, you know, you've created
#
a ring fence around it that said this is a Hindu and this is not a Hindu and therefore
#
it has a different meaning. But broadly speaking, the definition of Hindu-ness could include
#
people from all religious faiths, ethnic groups, traditions, ways of life and so on. So that's
#
one definition of Indian nation. Then there is a more exclusive definition of Hindu nation
#
hood which comes from, which let's say the Hindutva, modern interpretation of Hindutva
#
goes in for, right. Not the original conceptualization of Hindutva. I mean, a lot of people who read
#
Savarkar might today, the Hindutva guys who read Savarkar today might be shocked to find
#
that Savarkar sounds a lot like a modernist liberal whom they criticize than what they
#
expect him to be, right. So, there is a very strong sectarian version of nationhood and
#
then there is a broad, you know, Catholic liberal way of looking at what nationhood
#
is and these would be the differences. But there's an overlap, right, because the overlap
#
is that you believe that there are people here who are connected in some way, right.
#
It's not only language because people speak different languages. It's not only religion
#
because even if you accept the sectarian view of Hinduism, there are so many sects there
#
who don't necessarily agree that, you know, the sectarian definition of Hinduism also
#
is pretty weak, right. Then it's not color of skin, it's not geography, it's not historical
#
path, it's not even, you know, your genetic makeup. But there's still something which
#
connects us all together, right. Whether you're a sectarian Hindu or whether you believe that
#
Indianness is a non-sectarian idea, there is still a belief that these are connected,
#
right. So, this sense of nationhood, I think, connects both the Nehru liberal definition
#
of the state or the nation state and the Hindutva definition of, modern Hindutva definition
#
of the nation state. Of course, the divergences then are what you do with people who are not
#
like us, right. It's easier in the liberal, constitutional liberal setup because even,
#
for example, one of the first few decisions of the Supreme Court of India is that when
#
they define a person, it's not necessarily a citizen. So, a person in India has the same
#
rights as a citizen. Right to freedom, right to liberty, etc. Right, a person doesn't have
#
to be an Indian national, right. It could be a refugee, it could be a visitor, it could
#
be a traveler, it could be a guest. Maybe it could even be an intruder who intruded
#
into a territory, is entitled to the fundamental rights which are there in the constitution.
#
So, it's easier in that framework to answer the question, what about people who are not
#
like us? But in the sectarian Hindu definition of faith, it's not easy to define that thing.
#
What about people who are not like us? What do we do with them? Do they deserve to be
#
here? Do they have a right to be here? If we do not accept the fact that they have a
#
right, then what do we do with them? Right. How do we relate ourselves into? It creates
#
a whole can of worms which I don't think anyone has thought through. So, you have very simplistic
#
ideas that go to Pakistan or go to Sri Lanka or whatever they tell you. So, they have not
#
thought this through and I don't think there are easy answers there.
#
So I'll, you know, before Pranay he comes in, I just want to kind of, I don't know
#
if the word for it is pushback, but I want to react to a couple of the things you said
#
where I am not in complete agreement with the phrasing of them and finally I'll end
#
by agreeing with you because one should end on a nice note. But, you know, as far as when
#
you talk about the two different kinds of Hindutva, you know, and you talk about the
#
more benign one as simply saying everyone is a Hindu. I mean, I have a deep problem
#
with that phrase because I think it's a phrase that's convenient for elites like us to say.
#
But will the Muslims of India really say that? I think the phrase therefore seems fundamentally
#
exclusionary. And when you point to, you know, Hindutva as it once was and Savarkar
#
and all that, yeah, I think many Hindutva warriors of today would be aghast to find
#
that Savarkar was an atheist and so on and so forth. But the point is that the fundamental
#
point of Savarkar's odious book Hindutva was the fact that he said Muslims don't belong
#
in India. That point that if you to qualify as a true Indian, both your place of birth
#
and your place of worship has to be in India. And because Muslims worship and look to Mecca,
#
according to him, to this thing, they cannot ever be called Indian. So that's a fundamentally
#
exclusionary view. And that also brings me to my other point of disagreement where you
#
speak about how the anchoring effect of the constitution, which is fascinating, but I
#
think that anchoring effect is really in a sense for the elites. Like, I think, you know,
#
one of the themes I keep harking back on during the show is that the constitution was always
#
out of sync with the way society was, you know, and that became and it kind of became
#
meaning meaningless once it became more of a periodical than a book, as a famous cartoon
#
once put it. And Ambedkar himself said in the mid fifties that, you know, he'd like
#
to burn the constitution now if he can, because it had lost all meaning. So nor was it as
#
liberal as some of us would have liked, but it was way more liberal than society itself.
#
And society has in a sense today caught up with politics. And to me, you know, in the
#
larger mass of people, it's not the constitution that matters as much as, you know, this deeper
#
civilizational narrative, which as Akshay Mukul's book on the Gita Press shows, has
#
been ever present and running through Indian society and so on and so forth. In fact, even
#
I did an episode with the excellent data journalist Rukmini S recently. And that talks about how,
#
you know, contrary to what you might expect, the young in India are deeply illiberal according
#
to the data. Right. So it is not as if older people are more conservative and the young
#
are all liberal and tolerant and all that. If anything, it's the opposite. And that was,
#
you know, one of the big TILs of her excellent book for me. But leaving that aside, I mean,
#
these are not connected to foreign policy. What I do agree with is that, you know, our
#
genes are, we are hardwired to go in different directions and often contradictory directions.
#
We might prefer strongman leaders, but we also want peace and prosperity and all of
#
that. And to me, in fact, the great battle of civilization, especially since the Enlightenment
#
is to mitigate the sort of the negative impulses that we might have been hardwired with to
#
mitigate them with culture, in which I think we have been largely successful. But that
#
battle is, of course, never won because, you know, our hardwiring can be so strong. So
#
sorry, I thought I should kind of make these sort of points. Would you like to say anything
#
to them? Let me just quickly respond to that. I think it is entirely possible to use the
#
word Hindu and without necessarily becoming exclusionary or sectarian about it. Gandhi
#
did it and Gandhi proved that it could be done. Of course, people like Jinnah and others
#
were extremely worried about the religiosity of it and the populist nature of that metaphor
#
which Gandhi used. But I don't think anybody would go and question Gandhi's religiosity,
#
piety. I mean, I find it way too religious, way too pious for my taste, but nobody can
#
question his religiosity and piety within the metaphors of Hinduism. And he could construct
#
this very wonderfully without necessarily being threatening or antagonistic to anybody
#
else. I mean, at the margins, yes, you would have problems with, you know, do you eat this
#
kind of food or not? Do you sit with me or not? Fine. I mean, you can work those things
#
out. They are not showstoppers. So I don't think and I think Shashi Tarur has been doing
#
quite a good job in trying to bring that idea of Hindu-ness into our national discourse.
#
It is entirely possible to be a Hindu and not be sectarian. It is entirely possible
#
to be a Hindu, do your Hindu stuff and not be a bigot and without being hating anybody.
#
I don't think, you know, you have a wonderful history where hate probably is an exception
#
than the rule, right? Now, the other thing about elite is I think we should accept the
#
fact that statecraft is an elite enterprise. The Constitution was an elite enterprise and
#
thank goodness it was an elite enterprise. Because if it had reflected the popular norms
#
and social norms of the day, you know, you wouldn't have had universal
#
adults suffrage. You wouldn't have been able to ban untouchability at the drop of a hat.
#
You wouldn't even have been able to do something called social justice. However, imperfectly
#
that we're talking about, because the very idea of social justice is an elite enterprise.
#
I don't think there was any, you know, popular sort of a move to say that you need to have
#
something called social revolution, social justice, etc. So it's fine. I think elite
#
enterprises are fine as long as they are very conscious of the fact that the elite don't
#
get to make norms which are self, you know, which suit themselves and not the others.
#
The wonderful thing about our constituent assembly is the fact that every single person
#
there was a person, member of the elite of that period. And every single person was extremely
#
conscious of the fact that as a member of the elite, he or she has all the more responsibility
#
towards the people who are not in the room and then the masses. And whichever persuasion
#
they came from, you know, and that was a common thread. Randall Austin makes that point very
#
nicely in his book. And we don't sort of realize that. And I don't think elite is a bad word,
#
you know. It's very easy to say, Amit, shut up, you're an elite. Pranay, you shut up,
#
you're an elite. I mean, how does that even make sense? A person who is an elite should
#
be quiet. Like your vote doesn't count, your voice doesn't count. Or if you're an elite,
#
let's say, who was studying economics, right, and tells you that, you know, in order to
#
control inflation, you should do A, B and C. Well, you tell that person, you shut up,
#
you have a PhD in economics, you're so elite, so shut up. Let's, hundreds of us who don't
#
understand anything about economics, we'll make policy now. And it makes no sense. I
#
mean, it's a popular thing to point at somebody and say, this is an elite person, an armchair
#
liberal, this, that and the other, without understanding the fact that you judge the
#
elite as you judge anyone else by his or her actions and the consequences of those actions,
#
not by the fact that the person has a particular identity.
#
Yeah, just to on this point, because it's very interesting. So elite project in the
#
making is different from elite project in practice, you know. So if you look at the
#
constitution project itself, in the making, it could be an elite project. But if you look
#
at books like Rohit Des, People's Constitution, etc., there is a lot of evidence also that
#
there were people, ordinary people who use the new language that the constitution provided
#
about fundamental rights, property rights, etc., and questioned authorities there, right?
#
So it was also a project which was used by the common people to question authority over
#
the years, right? So that has stood. And second on that periodical versus thing, I think it's
#
a feature, not a bug in the sense that, yeah, even Ambedkar accepted it, that you don't
#
need what we have decided to be the norm 100 years from now, right? So it's fine if it
#
changes as long as we are and by and large, the constitution's core has stood, right?
#
So you can question that, you know, there are a lot of things which are now being executed
#
probably against it, but the core of the constitution still stands. So I think that's not necessarily
#
a problem. I should just kind of add before we move on that my point is not about the
#
desirability of the constitution. I find a liberal constitution to be incredibly desirable,
#
even though I think we haven't quite got it. I mean, the constitution for all practical
#
purposes doesn't actually protect free speech and so on. What I was instead doing was that
#
I was lamenting that the values that our liberal elites wanted to push in a top-down way through
#
the constitution, which was laudable in terms of intention, didn't actually go through.
#
We are not a liberal society today. So it was more of a lament than anything else. I
#
don't have options for what the founders could have done differently. And certainly it's
#
easy to speak from hindsight, but you know, in their circumstances, who knows? You know,
#
I was actually thinking of a different order as it were, a different order for this episode
#
and we have lapsed into disorder, but even disorder is a good thing and beautiful things
#
can emerge from entropy. So let's put some energy into that, as Nitin might say, and
#
let's go to one of the subjects that I actually care for later, but which I find really interesting
#
is India's foreign policy impulses. And Nitin, you were pointing out one, how some of our
#
foreign policy impulses kind of emerge from the constitution itself. What I'd like from
#
you is kind of a brief potted journey of how our foreign policy has evolved in terms of
#
priorities and how we look at it, quick potted journey through the decades as it were. And
#
also with, you know, before that, perhaps an additional question that what strikes me
#
when we look at foreign policy is that it is a one element of our governance that does
#
not really depend upon the party and power. My impression is that our foreign policy establishment
#
is what it is and it will function across, you know, different governments and different
#
parties in power and it will do what it will do. So I find it, you know, sometimes a little
#
short sighted that we'll do something on the international stage and people will say, Modi
#
this or Modi that or whatever. When really, from my limited point of view, our foreign
#
policy has been fairly realist and fairly sort of going along the same tracks for a
#
long time. So what are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
Yeah, you know, I think we've got to start with 1947 as a breakpoint in foreign policy,
#
right? What did you have in 1947? You have a country emerging out of massive communal
#
riots, which has come out of Second World War, not on really good terms with the United
#
States and you've written because of the choices with the freedom movement made, right, to
#
not back them during the Second World War. So the both Americans and the British, although
#
they are fond of you for being a democracy, they have misgivings about you because you
#
really didn't help them out in the most biggest, you know, biggest war that they ever fought.
#
You're a dirt poor country. You have massive amount of social challenges in your society.
#
It's not very clear whether you will be able to sustain yourself as a democracy or not,
#
right? And then you're thrown into this world where there's the United Nations and, you
#
know, the Cold War starts and big powers are fighting nuclear, you know, nuclear, there's
#
a nuclear face off between the big powers. Then what do you do? Right. And I think the
#
most interesting part of that era is Nehru's decision to be non-aligned, right? Well, he
#
was very sympathetic to the West. There was no doubt that he was sympathetic to the West
#
in terms of some ways. He did like the Americans. Maybe he had a upper British, upper class
#
British dislike for the Americans. He was fond of some of the experiments which the
#
Soviets had done because he found that, you know, big industry, etc. modernization, right?
#
Socialization, modernization, which the Soviets managed to do very quickly. He was very impressed
#
by that. But he was still very, you know, if you have to place him, he was on the West
#
side of, ideologically, he was on the West side as a liberal. But India lacked power
#
because India lacked resources. We didn't have an army of any kind. I mean, we had a
#
big army, but it was not a powerful army. It was a post-colonial army. We had a massive
#
challenges fighting wars with the Pakistanis. We needed support of the United Nations. Per
#
capita income was, I don't know, I can't even, I don't even dare to imagine what it
#
is, what it was at that time. What do you do if you want to have power in the international
#
system? Nehru tunes up the moral dimension of it. Starts talking about, you know, world
#
civilization. He really believed it. That's another story. So we were lucky to have a
#
guy who believed that stuff which he was dishing out to the others, right? And he talks about,
#
you know, United Nations, world peace, non-alignment, and so on and so forth, right? And that moral
#
arguments that he made as a leader of a post-colonial society which won independence through non-violent
#
struggle, he flexed it to the maximum, right? So India got disproportionate amount of leverage
#
in international relations in the fifties because of this moral dimension. But towards
#
the end of the fifties, it became clear that these guys talk a lot. They make moral judgments,
#
but they don't actually back this up with tangible policy. The Soviets invade Hungary
#
and India just sort of says, okay, what do you do? We are non-aligned, you know, instead
#
of taking a forceful position in terms of liberty and so on. So you are afraid to criticize,
#
but your moralism starts falling apart when you are afraid to criticize or speak up when
#
you need to speak up. But by the time Nehru leaves the scene, non-alignment becomes more
#
of a dogma which is worshipped in the corridors of power in New Delhi, right? So the thing
#
about India is that sooner or later, you invite, you know, put something on a pedestal and
#
you start worshipping it, whether it's people or ideas. And everybody started worshipping
#
on the order of non-alignment, right? And you became part of the non-alignment movement
#
and I don't know what they did, right? So non-alignment died in 1971 when India signed
#
the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation of the Soviet Union on August 8th, 1971, right,
#
before the war. So officially, formally, it was dead. You signed a treaty with one of
#
the sides, right, which of course, entitled you to some benefits in the United Nations
#
ahead of the war. And from that period onwards, you were in this, literally in the Soviet
#
camp. No wonder the Americans saw you that way. Nixon especially was a, you know, Nixon
#
and Kissinger were extremely bipolar in their thinking. And you ended up being on the other
#
side of the West, right? And then you read the nuclear explosions, sanctions on you and
#
so on. Up to somewhere around Rajiv Gandhi in the mid 80s, you try and make an overture
#
towards the West, right? It's a beginning of a sort of a new age. And then the Berlin
#
Wall falls, Soviet Union disintegrates and you're out of the streets. You know, your
#
superpower should get ID or your superpower protector, the one who gave you clout in the
#
UN is gone. And what do you do now, right? So mercifully, there was economic liberalization.
#
At the same time, an attempt to reach out to the East Asian guys, as well as an attempt
#
to reach out to the US. But that, you know, that was still a lot of work in progress up
#
to the nuclear explosions in 1998, when there was a sort of a step function change, right?
#
The immediate short-term consequences were negative, because sanctions came on you, etc.
#
And it was part of a overall change in the world where, you know, the US didn't see you
#
as they saw you in the 70s and the 60s. There was no Soviet Union. The Chinese were growing
#
and there were elements in the US, even at that time, saw the India as a counterweight
#
to China. So the big period of India being part of this globalized mainstream starts
#
somewhere in the early 2000s, right? The Jaswant Albert talks. Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh have
#
a lot to do with this, right? They built India's relationship with the US and Mahmood Singh
#
and company actually solidified. So there was continuity there. That period continues
#
more or less to this day, largely because India's economic growth per capita income
#
of about $1,800 puts you in a category where you are a significant player, which the West
#
cannot ignore, right? Especially when the West which sees itself in confrontation with China
#
cannot ignore. So you are now in a position where you are a sort of a middle power with
#
great usefulness to the West. And you also see your interests with the West, both in
#
terms of values, in terms of business. I mean, here in Bangalore, the entire industry depends
#
on our relations with the West. 8% of India's GDP, right? That's the IT industry. 8% of
#
India's GDP really. And this is the 8% that is growing. This is the 8% of the future.
#
Depends on good relations with the West. So our relations with the West have solidified
#
in the last 25 years. We do have this mantra of strategic autonomy, which sometimes confuses
#
me because what do you need strategic autonomy for? If you ask people who talk about strategic
#
autonomy, you ask what is strategic autonomy? Oh, strategic autonomy is the ability to make
#
our own decisions in foreign policy. Fine. Why do you need strategic autonomy? Oh, because
#
we can have strategic autonomy. So strategic autonomy is both the beats and the end, right?
#
We need strategic autonomy because we are going to use it to get strategic autonomy.
#
You know, that argument is circular, but it's popular because I think there's still a lot
#
of people in the country who are unwilling for various reasons to say that look, we have
#
a lot in common in the West, our values and interests are increasingly converging with
#
the West. So there's still that sort of resistance to accepting that for various reasons. I mean,
#
if your trade is with them, your values are with them, your second cousin and your first
#
cousin and your brother are living in the United States, you know, there's so much of
#
limited, there's so much of travel, movies, songs in every sense of the word, we are part
#
of the overall Western sphere, right? But we don't accept it. So that's where we are.
#
So we are in a situation where we are now, you know, it's almost like, thanks to Putin,
#
at this point where, you know, it's crunch time. Are you going to continue to say that
#
I have strategic autonomy, I want to be this, I want to be that, or do you want to take
#
sides in a way that isn't consistent with your interests? And there are many question
#
parts then. There are pros and cons of various positions. But nevertheless, this is a crunch
#
time. It is like 1989 and the Berlin Wall falling down, right? You have two, you have
#
very big questions in front of you, and you have to make choices.
#
And I have a question for Pranay on strategic autonomy, because it seems to me that we can
#
kind of get to strategic autonomy in two ways. One is that we are powerful enough that no
#
one is really messing with us. It's not in anyone's interest to do so. And therefore,
#
we can afford to be, you know, to have strategic autonomy. The other is we are so freaking
#
helpless that any choice is a bad choice and pushes us into a corner. So we don't make
#
a choice at all. And we call it strategic autonomy. And in one of your recent newsletters
#
you wrote, quote, India would come under significant pressure from both the US and Russia to show
#
support for either side. Given its military over-dependence on Russia, on one hand, and
#
the overwhelming agreement with the West on countering China on the other, India's choices
#
have become more constrained. It will be a serious test of India's diplomacy to keep
#
both sides happy. It seems to be pushed to strategic autonomy by compulsion, not by choice.
#
So can you, you know, sort of elaborate on this a little bit? Like, therefore, it seems
#
that we are putting the veneer of high principle and saying strategic autonomy as, you know,
#
a principled position that we are taking. But we don't actually have a choice, you know,
#
and principles don't matter anyway in this game.
#
Absolutely, Amit, agree there. So the way we think of it is that, you know, when people
#
use strategic autonomy currently, they are actually using it in a very tactical sense.
#
So there's nothing strategic about it. The current way of saying strategic autonomy is
#
that you can't be on either side. You probably have to make distance, keep equidistant from
#
both sides, etc., and all that, right? That is not strategic autonomy, right? That is
#
about tactically, do you want to say on this issue, you will go with one side or the other,
#
whatever, right? But the what is your strategy game, the ultimate aim of strategic autonomy
#
would be that you should, you will gain that only when you have enough strength. And once
#
you have enough strength, then you can take the decision that you want, right? That that
#
would be strategic autonomy in my mind. So currently, I think we are still we made it
#
a virtue, like Nitin was mentioning, first, there was a virtue about non alignment. And
#
I think non alignments new format is strategic autonomy, which is used in a very tactical
#
sense to mean that just don't work with any of the sides and we will decide on our own.
#
And like I was saying, it is a function of our power, right? The lesser the power you
#
have, you can't actually be strategically autonomous, you will have to just take decisions
#
based on the exigencies that other countries and the world determines for you. So that's
#
where my view was. In in what I say, I've been trying to make a list of terms which
#
should fall into disuse. And one of them is strategic autonomy.
#
See, I think the idea of strategic autonomy is interesting. Because see, what does strategic
#
autonomy mean to me, I would like to have strategic autonomy. What does it mean to me,
#
I should be able to tell Putin that look, you invaded the country and that's wrong.
#
That shows that I have strategic autonomy. But if you say that I can't say that, so that
#
I can enjoy strategic autonomy, sort of misses the cart and the horse, right? I mean, what's
#
more important? I mean, to you are willing to not do something in order to have something
#
which you don't have. I can't express the logic of it. But the logic of it has a big
#
role. Yeah, and that too something as small as taking a stance on whether this is an invasion
#
or not in the UN, you know, like, there is no concrete thing that can happen because
#
Russia is on a veto anyways. So there are things in which India can say that this is
#
an invasion and yet you know, there you can move ahead on other things. But just to say
#
that we can't do that, in order to say that we are proving ourselves to be strategically
#
autonomous is perhaps not the right way of thinking. And I also want to sort of ask a
#
larger question about, you know, the role of rhetoric and this whole people keep bringing
#
up principles and we stand for this and we stand for that. And you mentioned Nehru did
#
a lot of that, though he was a true believer in his principles. So, you know, at least
#
that is there. And I'm reminded of this bit that I'll quote from your newsletter, Pranay,
#
but not written by you, but by your brilliant co-writer, RLJ, where first he writes quote,
#
There's so much talk about higher order morals in international relations that you can easily
#
be taken in by it. Well, my view is that most of that stuff is garbage. The naked truth
#
about international relations is grotesque. It needs a garb of pious intentions. And this
#
becomes clear as daylight when you have a war. As much as it is a humanitarian crisis
#
that saddens you, war is also a moment when all pretenses fall away and you see the truth.
#
Stop quote. And then right at the end of that piece, he says quote, What's happening in
#
Ukraine is a crystallization of the truths that were evident to all post 9 11, but difficult
#
to prove. That truth is in front of us. You can talk forever about common interests and
#
shared values. It means ilch. Stop quote. So, you know, is that something that you'd
#
like to kind of double click on or respond to? The way I would put it is that there is
#
value to the rhetoric in international relations. You know, so there is still narratives matter,
#
as we were discussing earlier, the rhetoric that you use has any real can have a real
#
life implication on how the world functions. Right. And that's why I was saying that the
#
last 10 years, the rhetoric that has come out is largely one which thinks of the world
#
in being disordered things allows some states to get away with things that they want to.
#
So there is a purpose for rhetoric in international relations. So I would probably disagree with
#
that statement that there is some function to it. That's why I was saying that, you
#
know, authority is what great powers aspire for. And one part of that authority is pretending
#
to be legitimate, legitimate, right? It can be a pretense that you put on, but there is
#
an importance to that pretense. That's what I was getting.
#
Yeah, see, I think there's no where the RSJ quote, I mean, that's classic realism. Well,
#
what really matters at the end of the day is how much power do you have? And as Athenian
#
said, you know, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. But, you
#
know, you could do a lot of things without necessarily having to use force. If you use
#
rhetoric, if you create a narrative environment where people's sense of right and wrong is
#
determined by what you have done, people will feel you don't even have to lift a finger.
#
People will feel that something wrong has happened. A lot of the other countries will
#
join you. Forming coalitions becomes easier. In a way, if you want to put it into very
#
stark terms, your own cost of action becomes much lower. Your cost benefit ratio becomes
#
much lower because you achieve the same outcome with much lower expenditure of resources.
#
So that's rhetoric. That's what rhetoric does for you.
#
Correct. Yeah, every act needn't necessarily be an act of coercion, right? So if you want
#
every country to collaborate with you, there are two ways, right? Every time you go and
#
say that, you know, I have power over you. If you don't do this, I will be, you will
#
be having sanctions or whatnot. The other way is that just the countries believe in
#
what you have said or believed because of what you've acted before or believed in the
#
larger principles that you have propagated for whatever reason, right? Whether you believe
#
it or not is a secondary thing. So there is a lot of things which can happen through the
#
second way, right? So in that sense, rhetoric does play a role in international affairs.
#
I mean, I think, you know, the two ways that I would see it is as a negative sum game where
#
you use force and etc, etc. Negative sum game or zero sum game as the case may be. In the
#
case of war, it's a negative sum usually. And the positive sum game where you speak
#
to common interests and talk about how we can both be better off. But it also seems
#
to me that, you know, whatever rhetoric you might spout, the other country, when they
#
are considering what you might do or might not do, they are just looking and they know
#
you're realist as well, right? All in a sense, the entire foreign policy community, I would
#
imagine is one country, right? They kind of know everybody that they know what people
#
share interests and values are. They know what the levers are. You know, they know what
#
the carrots and sticks they can use against India, for example. So everybody would discount
#
everybody else's rhetoric and just look at what their interests are. And like, I think
#
in this current situation, for example, there was this big outcry on Twitter that India
#
should take Ukraine side and speak out against Russia and not abstain and all that. And my
#
point was that, you know, Twitter rhetoric, but in the real world, there are costs. And
#
you know, the way I would have looked at what India did was that you got to do what you
#
feel is in your interest, which at that point in time, the establishment felt was abstaining.
#
And then you can dress it up in whatever rhetoric you want or whatever principles you want.
#
And you know, part of that rhetoric might well have been strategic autonomy, no matter
#
how incoherent it is. But you take an action according to your interests and according
#
to what you can do or cannot do. And then you figure out the principles to sort of dress
#
that up with. So is that something you'd agree with?
#
Again, I'll sort of push back against that in the sense that these morals or these narratives
#
and stories which we tell are not constant, right? And they are the overton window sort
#
of moves over time. So I'll give you an example. Think in terms of what should nation states
#
do in times of humanitarian disasters. Now, now the large rhetoric over the last few years
#
has been if you are a great power of any significance, you should be doing something there, right?
#
And in reality, also now a lot of nation states do that, you know, so the rhetoric which was
#
set many years ago, that rhetoric now is sort of become a norm, which generally nation states
#
follow and some do deviate, but there is a perceptible change in how nation states would
#
respond to. So that in that sense, there's an example where rhetoric comes before that
#
Yeah, that's a great point. Let's kind of talk about world orders and just understanding
#
the state of the world. And you know, you guys had this chapter, which was also a discussion
#
paper I think you did from the book India's Marathon, where you spoke about different
#
scenarios of how the world order can kind of evolve or different kinds of equilibria
#
which can emerge. And one of them is what you call the great walls sort of theory. And
#
your argument being that Russia, Ukraine actually doesn't kind of change that. We are, that
#
is a world order that we are in and some some ways it might even solidify it. So can you
#
sort of explain to me the outline of that and very briefly if the outlines of the other
#
kind of possible world orders and you know, what is special about this one and so on and
#
Yeah, I'll attempt that. So yeah, so this is basically a model that we made. And like
#
all models, it is just somewhat useful and definitely wrong. But the model that we tried
#
to imagine was that a lot of people when they talk about world orders, that we are only
#
talking about who's the hegemon, right? Is it US, China, etc. But probably there are
#
more dimensions to what the world order is. And that's why we thought that two important
#
dimensions would be the global distribution of power, which is the geopolitical angle.
#
And the second is, what is the distribution or what is the way the economics is arranged?
#
What is the geoeconomics looks like, right? So that's the second axis. So we constructed
#
world order scenarios at the intersection of how the world might go on the economic
#
side and how the world might go on the political side. So there were some trends which we saw
#
on the political side, right, which you can imagine one is US being a sole superpower,
#
or there is sort of a cozy relationship between US and China, which is a cooperative G2. That's
#
the geopolitical trend. The third one was you could have actually a confrontation outright
#
confrontation, or you could have a competitive thing where you have competition plus confrontation.
#
And finally, there's something called the multipolar world where all nation states,
#
all important nation states have their own nicely marked spheres of influences where
#
they are the most important power. This is on the political side. On the economic side
#
also key trends being if you look at what is the situation of trade, global growth,
#
automation, etc. Based on that, we had a few trends that we could look at. So there were
#
a global recession trend, a secular stagnation trend, a new economic boom trend and a great
#
disruption trend. So now, broadly, if you look at intersection of these economic and
#
political scenarios, you get world order scenarios that you can imagine. So the Great Walls scenario
#
is at the intersection of a new Cold War politics and a secular stagnation economics. So what
#
does new Cold War politics means that yes, there are two powers, US, China, and broadly
#
there is a confrontational relationship between them, not war necessarily, but really confrontational
#
and both have decided that you want to decrease each other's powers as their main geopolitical
#
aim. And second one would be secular stagnation on the economic side, where after COVID-19,
#
we've seen the global economy still recovering, the inflation rates are high in many countries,
#
etc. So that sort of marks the economic side. There is also a lot of questions being asked
#
about whether we can go back to the free trade scenario of the late 1990s or 2000s, because
#
China took disproportionate advantage of it. So there are also those questions of whether
#
you want to limit trade, whether you should form groups in which you trade freely, but
#
not with the world at large. So that is what the economic trend looks like. Now at the
#
intersection of these two trends, we get what is called the great wall scenario, right?
#
And the way we defined it as there were sort of three major trends, one stable geopolitics
#
and dynamic geoeconomics. So what you see is one US is countering China as an overriding
#
national priority. And then there are also supply chains are getting reoriented to reduce
#
dependence on China, which I already mentioned. So that is the trend which is still continued.
#
What we'd written in terms of the political side was that if you look at what has happened
#
with Russia, Ukraine, probably it is more likely that Russia and China because of the
#
limited options now available with Russia, it will probably go on the side of China even
#
more in the next few years. And that's why what we are saying is it's not that the world
#
order scenario is probably changed dramatically, but possibly it has just hardened these lines,
#
right? Now Russia has very little option, but to now take help of China, given the unprecedented
#
sanctions and et cetera, which has happened. So those things are what are likely to play
#
out, right? So that is on the geopolitics side. We are also seeing, you know, one too
#
many economic webs. So again, like I said, a lot of questions being asked about whether
#
we should have the same kind of trade movement of ideas, movement of labor, good services,
#
like it was earlier, right? So there is probably a question around that. And probably we might
#
see this reorientation of supply chains. It's already being talked about. It's already being
#
attempted to carve out something, which is not the same way as earlier, where China dominates
#
and becomes a trading partner of most of the nation states, which matter, right? And finally
#
there is a new age of multilateralism in the sense that again, UN and the idea of UN allied
#
institutions like the WTO, et cetera, have lost a lot of their shine because of what
#
has happened. So there is also a question of, do we require a new age of multilateralism
#
where different countries from their own smaller groups, and then they decide their actions
#
there rather than this big umbrella of a world government aspirational kind of UN, which
#
has not delivered on the kind of results that it was hoping for. So these, this is broadly
#
how this great world scenario looks like. And our assessment, at least preliminary assessment
#
after the last few days was that it has, it just hardens this boundary. We are going even
#
more so in this space where the politics gets defined as a new cold war kind of scenario
#
and there is already a secular stagnation. So Russia and China getting together against
#
a lot of other countries, which are also getting together in turn because of what Russia did
#
in Europe. And earlier again in Europe, there was this question of whether we can, we are
#
still buying a lot of oil from Russia. So is there a need to take a stance against Russia,
#
et cetera? But what Putin has done in Ukraine just makes it clear to them that there's no
#
other option. So there is overwhelming sort of a unity that you see in purpose between
#
European countries and the US, which you didn't see until now for a lot of years, right? So
#
you're seeing a lot of defense pending commitments also coming from countries like Germany, etc.
#
So there is this sort of coalescing of two opposite poles happening because of this Russia
#
Fascinating. And this, you know, before I kind of double click on that for all of my
#
listeners who might've been surprised to hear you say that, you know, that this model is
#
probably useful, but definitely wrong. I'll just point out that that's obviously harking
#
to the famous quote about all models being wrong, but some models are useful. And the
#
world is so deeply complex that no model is actually ever going to be right. What you
#
want to build is you want to build useful models. You want to build frameworks of looking
#
at the world that explain as much of it as it possibly can. And I found that this is
#
actually a fantastic model because looking through your paper, a lot of what you said
#
actually seemed so prescient, like when you spoke of, you know, the second of the three
#
aspects that you spoke of from one to many economic webs. And, you know, and I'll quote
#
from what you wrote in that paper, you and your co-authors, where you wrote, in the post
#
COVID-19 world, many great walls of China may come up a new version of the Iron Curtain,
#
where the world is split into three economic webs, one dominated by US markets and investments,
#
one by Chinese markets and investments, and a more diffused collection of middle powers
#
who independently strike bargains with the US and China led economic webs and form their
#
own networks of trade with friendly countries. Stop quote. And this is, you were talking
#
about what may happen in a post COVID world. And part of it seems to already have happened
#
in unexpected ways with Russia invading Ukraine. Like, again, from one of your newsletters
#
and this was RLJ writing about it, I learned about the concept of weaponized interdependence,
#
which the way Daniel Dresner defines it is, weaponized interdependence court is defined
#
as a condition under which an actor can exploit its position in an embedded network to gain
#
a bargaining advantage over others in a contained system. Stop quote. And to break it down,
#
to give a concrete example of this, there is a swift payment system. So you want to
#
impose sanctions on Iran. What do you do? You take them out of the swift system and
#
they can't do anything in an economic sense. And, you know, you've basically, you've got
#
your hegemony as the academic term would go over that financial payments and you can really
#
hurt someone. But what happened here with Russia is that it didn't quite work for a
#
number of reasons. I mean, one reason, of course, was that when, you know, Biden said
#
that, okay, we'll take them out of the swift system, he made an exception for energy companies
#
because he had to. And, you know, RLJ has this great quote where he writes, all the
#
network interdependence by itself doesn't create real hard assets on the ground. It
#
only facilitates a trade in a manner that reduces friction. The real world operates
#
a step removed from this. Russia has cheap energy and the EU needs it. And the EU doesn't
#
love Ukraine more than the cheap, assured heating in their homes. That's a reality.
#
The other thing we learned is that any kind of freezing out of a node in a global interconnected
#
network doesn't put that node away for good. This network is so vast with so many stands
#
crisscrossing them that quite soon a new equilibrium is reached. Order is restored and the free
#
circumvented. The simple lesson here is that cyber warfare, paralyzing a network or cutting
#
someone loose from the interdependence are legitimate and novel weapons in international
#
conflicts. But when it comes to the crunch, real assets trump everything. Stop quote.
#
And this is exactly what, you know, you speak about from one to many economic webs kind
#
of playing out. And this is fascinating. And is there then a harsh wake up call for the
#
US where they thought that they had these powerful levers and now they've suddenly
#
realized that, hey, wait a minute, we actually don't. The world will go on without us.
#
Amit, before we go to the US, this is a good point in time to point out something about
#
Europe. Right. There is absolutely no doubt about interdependence, et cetera, and the
#
need for energy. But you cannot, you know, the startling thing about the Ukraine conflict
#
and if you have to blame somebody, you have to blame Europe. Right. Because here you are
#
in 2008 or 2007, 2008, where Putin does his first jerking of Ukraine. He turns off the
#
taps and punishes the Ukraine during, during the winter. And they realized for the first
#
time that Putin can actually use energy as a weapon to get to score coercive political
#
points. Now you are Europe and you spent the last 15 years having built some pipelines
#
and buying gas from Europe because you believe that after the Soviet Union fell, Russia has
#
to be accommodated and, you know, you don't want an impoverished Russia. So you buy good
#
relations with Russia by buying, you know, gas from those pipelines, which are actually
#
Soviet era. Even you would buy this during the Soviet Union also. Right. So Europe was
#
buying gas. And then suddenly in 2008, you see Putin playing a hokey with the pipes and
#
using pipes to twist arms of the Ukrainians. And what do you do? Oh, I mean, if you're
#
a sensible person, what you would say is that, look, I think this is a problem here. This
#
guy is using gas to twist arms. So we should reduce our dependency on Russia. What does
#
the, what does the European Union do? They increase their dependency on Russia. Not only
#
do they buy gas from Russia, they buy it in pipelines from Russia. Right. And we'll come
#
to the pipelines a little later. Not only do they buy pipelines, gas from pipelines,
#
they buy gas in pipelines that bypass other countries. Right. The Nord Stream 2, for example.
#
Right. So you're signaling to the guy that, look, I'm giving you my cojones. You can squeeze
#
it whenever you want. Right. And that guy decided to do it. Right. Now, why is, why
#
is pipeline a problem? The pipeline is a problem because it connects one buyer to one seller.
#
Right. One set of buyers to one seller. And if the, that relationship is inherently unstable
#
because you know, the buyer can say, I don't want to buy it. And then the whole thing goes
#
for a toss. Or the seller can say, I don't want to sell and then coerce the buyer. Right.
#
So for example, that was a problem with this famous IBI gas pipeline, which they were talking
#
about Iran, Pakistan, India, where it would originate in Iran, pass through Pakistan and
#
we would buy it, which meant Iranians could coerce us. The Pakistanis could coerce us
#
and we could do nothing to them. Right. And these are people, I mean, the Pakistanis,
#
we have a problem with those guys. I mean, they have a problem with us, whatever, however
#
you want to define it. So this is what happens in Europe. Now, how do you still buy natural
#
gas, but not use pipelines, use liquefied natural gas, LNG. Right. Mercifully India
#
took the LNG route. We decided not to do the pipeline. We took the LNG route. Europe did
#
not. The first LNG terminals were announced, I think earlier this year, Germany's terminal.
#
So if you have an LNG terminal, you have a port where liquefied natural gas comes on
#
ships and you could buy it from anybody. You could buy it from the Russians. You could
#
buy it from the Venezuelans. You could buy whoever has gas, you can just ship it there.
#
Right. So buy it from the market. So it's a market based solution. And there are, you
#
know, short and long term ways to manage your risk. Europe doesn't do that. Okay. They buy
#
from gas. And then what happens? The Fukushima happens. And these guys say, oh my God, nuclear
#
Fukushima. Right. And they turn off the nuclear reactors. And when what happens to your energy,
#
where do you need to get energy from? From Russia again. Right. And look at the Fukushima
#
thing. You know how many people died in the Fukushima nuclear disaster? Zero. Not a single
#
person died because of radiation. Right. All the deaths which happened, happened due to
#
other reasons, due to flooding and some accidents and so on. Not a single person died because
#
of radiation. And you turned off all the reactors and you bought gas from Russia. Right. And
#
look, Putin walks into Crimea. You can do nothing. Putin shoots down a freaking airliner.
#
You do nothing. Putin now invades, surrounds Ukraine on all three sides. You could do nothing.
#
And only after the guy actually, you know, breaks the eggshell, the tanks roll in and
#
Zelensky makes this wonderful speech at the EU. You decide, oh my God, yes, we were wrong.
#
Now we're going to ship weapons to those guys and we're going to get LNG and so on. Right.
#
So I think stupidity can't be insured against, you know, the EU's stupidity is a charitable
#
way of putting it. The EU was stupid. The non-charitable way is that you can't rule
#
out corruption in this. The fact that Russian money can grease political machines in democratic
#
countries is well known. And they've probably, you know, purchased this influence because
#
I cannot imagine a bunch of smart people like the strategists in Germany and France and
#
rest of Europe falling for this, you know, kindergarten level ploy of putting all your
#
eggs in one basket. Just to add to Nitin's last point that a lot of recent literature
#
suggests that, you know, a lot of foreign policy decisions can be explained either by
#
public choice or by other reasons. Right. So a lot of times when foreign policy is discussed,
#
it is discussed only in the sense of, you know, you taking nation state as a unit actor
#
and what is in their interest, et cetera. But there are real domestic interests have
#
a lot to play on international affairs as well. So a lot of these can be explained by
#
probably there was also this angle of domestic corruption or other things. And that's why
#
you get the outcomes that you get in even classic realist terms. You would have said,
#
what, why would you even do that? But if you take into account domestic considerations,
#
electoral politics, maybe you will be able to explain these results.
#
Yeah. And just to kind of double click on what you said about Fukushima and sort of,
#
you know, nuclear power, which is, you know, it's kind of one of the most bizarre movements
#
that has happened, how Germany moved away from nuclear power. And that's still in an
#
ongoing debate with France. And I link to that, to an excellent op-ed in the New York
#
Times by Steven Pinker, among others, and two co-authors, where I'll just quote a para
#
from that. And this is a digression, but it's kind of, you know, I keep coming back to this
#
where they write, the authors write, quote, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents
#
have raised public alarm. Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one. Fukushima in
#
2011, which killed no one. Brackets, many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some
#
from a panicked evacuation near the plant. And Chernobyl in 1986, a result of extraordinary
#
Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer.
#
Around the same number killed by coal emissions every day. Even if we accepted recent claims
#
that Soviet and international authorities covered up tens of thousands of Chernobyl
#
deaths, the death toll from 60 years of nuclear power would still equal about one month of
#
coal related deaths. And this just makes me absolutely mad because so much of what is
#
happening around climate change can actually be mitigated by just embracing nuclear, which
#
is a safest form of energy by a massive order of magnitude. And, you know, you know, leaving
#
aside the old dogmas of, oh, it's not safe and all that, because, you know, we kind of
#
have the data, the technology is advanced a lot. And Chernobyl was really more about
#
the dangers of bureaucracy and an ossified system of governance rather than nuclear power
#
per se. And this is, you know, and speaking of climate change, you know, one of the things
#
you say in your Great Wall's sort of formulation is that it makes reaching agreements on climate
#
change also next to a kind of impossible over there. Yeah. So, you know, since we're talking
#
about the response of the different powers of Europe and all that, you know, let's for
#
a moment go back to the US. And you mentioned Nord Stream 2. And, you know, one of the blunders
#
that the US made involved that, like I'll quote Neil Ferguson here, where he compares
#
Biden to Dostoevsky is an idiot. And Ferguson says, in Russian literature, there is a great
#
novel, Dostoevsky is an idiot. Biden is an idiot. The reason this happened is because
#
the Biden administration slowed down deliveries of armaments to Ukraine, lifted the sanctions
#
on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was supposed to bypass Ukraine, signaled to Russia that
#
the US would not support Ukraine militarily, and therefore made it clear to Putin that he
#
had an opportunity to take military action with only sanctions to fear. The administration's
#
strategy was to threaten the worst sanctions as if sanctions were going to deter Putin.
#
Then they tried something even crazier, which was to say, you're going to invade and we
#
know the date, as if that was somehow going to stop him from invading. And the worst thing
#
they tried was to get the Chinese to dissuade him from invading when the Chinese had given
#
him the green light on the condition that he didn't go until after the Beijing Olympics.
#
And, you know, and he paints this completely as Biden's debacle in the course of a roundtable,
#
which Barry Weiss hosts, in which Francis Fukuyama, by the way, holds the opposite view.
#
So I'll link to that so you can read both views. But what's your sense of, you know,
#
what the US could have done here? Because a new verb that has now come into the English
#
language is a verb, Ukraine. And for someone to get Ukraine is that you promise someone
#
that enter the fight and we will kind of support you. And then, you know, you're not there when
#
they enter the fight. And by the way, I'm going to take a brief digression here to tell you this
#
delightful story of Mr. Madhya. Have you heard the story of Mr. Madhya? You couldn't have,
#
because I just heard it last night. But I heard it from my friend Naren Shanoi. And I take the
#
permission to tell you the story that once back in the day, his family, when he was a little child,
#
used to have next door neighbors called Mr. and Mrs. Madhya. Right. And one day, they kind of
#
noticed that a thief seemed to have broken into the yard or into an upstairs balcony. I forget
#
exactly what. So they managed to scare the thief away. And the thief then jumps into the muddy
#
hours compound. So they immediately phone call Mr. Madhya from the landline. And they tell Mr.
#
Madhya that, listen, we think there's a thief in your compound. He may still be there. You better
#
watch out. And then from the window, they are looking at Mr. Madhya's house to see what action
#
Mr. Madhya takes. And soon the door opens and they find a reluctant Mrs. Madhya being pushed out by
#
Mr. Madhya. And he's telling her to just go and check and don't worry. I'm here for you. You know,
#
so Narain uses as an analogy for, you know, Mrs. Madhya, of course, is being Ukraine here.
#
And Mr. Madhya is totally sort of chilling. And the story of how Mr. and Mrs. Madhya fell in love
#
is also hilarious, but it's probably not apropos to this Russia Ukraine discussion. So what do you
#
feel about all that? You know, the role that Europe played where they are assuring Ukraine that, hey,
#
we are on your side and NATO and et cetera, et cetera, even though they are so dependent that they
#
know that there's not much they can do and Ukraine is basically on its own. And then America doing
#
the same thing and America, in a sense, blundering. And, you know, there's an argument to be made that
#
America has been blundering from, you know, George W. Bush's time, where through Obama, through Trump,
#
through Biden now, they've just been blundering on this issue completely. So what's your sense
#
of this? You know, I think the US political discourse and the political academic discourse is
#
just so cute, right? Because, you know, somehow they sort of connect everything which is happening
#
in the world to the policies of the current leadership. We are the veneer of saying that
#
we are actually bungling, we are not good. In a way, it's like what we do in India, right? That,
#
oh, you know, everything that the government does can be criticized and it's absolutely wrong and
#
so bungled and so wrong. And because it's in the English language, everybody else who speaks and
#
hears the English language also takes that trope and that becomes conversation, right? So in this
#
case, a lot of what, you know, Biden did or didn't do seems to be largely irrelevant to this, right?
#
Because if you have to pick the point where the US might have gotten it wrong,
#
it's about 25 years ago, 20 to 25 years ago, after Yeltsin and after just after Putin takes over,
#
where you're not able to manage the divergence with Russia well enough. As Putin said, you don't
#
want us to be part of your side, but why do you want us as your enemy, right? But if you look at
#
the choices made in 2002, Russia did look like a big, powerful player. It looked like a middling
#
power, which did have very nasty intentions and so on. And the level of nationalism or, you know,
#
the kind of support for Putin, the kind of aggressive policy didn't exist. It was not
#
a big economic player. So you could say that the Americans sort of disregarded the possibility
#
that Russia can be a big player in 10, 20 years from now, right? So they sort of overlooked
#
Russian sensitivities, not even interests, sensitivities, right? So which is, for example,
#
trying to get the post-Russian, post-Soviet republics into NATO and EU and so on. So that,
#
I think, can be positioned as a strategic error which the Americans made about 25 years ago.
#
A big strategic error which they made was not to renew the Anti-Ballistic Missiles Treaty,
#
because the whole set of arms control relationships which the Soviets and the
#
Americans had signed during the Cold War were actually stabilizing. They tied both hands,
#
which meant that things couldn't get out of hand. Sorry for mixing up the metaphors, right?
#
So, but once the Bush administration walked out of the ABN, it created two things, right? One is
#
Russia was also out of the ABN. And second, it created a precedent that you could walk out of,
#
you know, strategic arms control relationships that you had written, which you had signed
#
20-30 years ago, right? So that becomes a actual problem, because now you have missile
#
proliferation, all of that thing happening. Now, the problem with this narrative of the United
#
States disregarding Russian sensitivities is simply this, that the post-Soviet republics have agency.
#
So, if Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia want to be part of the European Union,
#
if Ukraine wants to join NATO, how can you disregard their agency? It's not that just
#
that the United States gets to make the call, right? They get to make the call. I mean,
#
what are they independent for if they can't exercise their independence in ways that they
#
want to secure themselves, the way they perceive themselves? The Lithuanians want to be part of
#
the West. The Estonians want to be part of the West. Now, are you going to say that, oh,
#
the Americans should now disregard the interests of these independent countries?
#
Just because Putin will be upset, right? So, if you accept the fact that these are post-Soviet
#
sovereign states, they have agency, you respect their independence, they have interests, then,
#
you know, it's a convergence of both sides. It just so happens that Putin dislikes this, right?
#
Now, the second error is knowing that this is a possibility, right? Let's say about 10 years ago,
#
you started, okay, after Putin did his Georgia thing and after he did his Ukraine, cutting off
#
the gas, you realize that this guy is going to cause trouble. Did you do what you needed to do
#
to manage the guy? That you did, right? Because you were caught in this Obama era, oh, the US is
#
overextending itself. That's the narrative, you know, the narrative which Pranay was talking about.
#
You told yourself that US is overextending itself. Oh, you know, we need to look inwards.
#
We are not a great power. You know, if you look at the Obama rhetoric, it was all about being
#
humble, about being, knowing the limits of your actions and so forth, right? And that not only
#
signaled to the rest of the world that you're not a big player. And Putin said, oh, okay, these guys
#
think that they're not big players, so maybe I should be encouraged, you know, let me do Trump
#
something. And it also told the Americans to redirect their resource investments in terms of
#
defense and other things into other things. I mean, every government has a budget constraint.
#
Of course, the US government has a budget constraint. But how you spend your budget
#
follows your narrative. You know, if you spin a narrative that we are a weak power,
#
we have to consolidate, and then your budget says we're going to build a big Navy,
#
then people will ask you, you know, you just told me that, you know, we want to consolidate,
#
and now you want money for the Navy, right? So the Americans got it wrong during the Obama era.
#
Both with respect to Russia, and with respect to China, right? They allowed China to
#
reach a critical mass without having enough backstops. And they overlooked the fact that
#
they had put some ions in the fire in order to manage Russia if should the need arise,
#
right? Discouraging Europe from doing this stupid energy strategy, for example.
#
Then something these Americans could have done. But they did, as you said, they, you know, went
#
on and went into Nord Stream, encouraged Nord Stream. Any self-respecting strategist would have
#
said Nord Stream too is a bad idea, right? In any sense of the word. So it's that is where I think
#
the mistakes were. They were in the Obama administration rather than the Biden administration.
#
Let me follow up with like a couple of questions on that. And one is you say that that is when
#
America could have done something. And in fact, during the Obama administration, they could have
#
done something about China as well. So question one is what specifically could they have done?
#
And question two is that earlier we spoke about how national interest is defined from within a
#
country by the elites or whatever. And you go according to that. Now, another definition of
#
the American national interest could easily be that we should not try to be a global hegemon.
#
We should just chill, look after our own economy, be friends with everyone, do our own thing, not
#
try to meddle everywhere else in the world, citing principles, citing democracy, citing blah, blah,
#
blah. Just do our own thing. And I have a fair amount of sympathy for that view. If I if I was
#
American, I would have a lot of sympathy for that view, that let's just mind our own business and
#
not mess around in this way. So, you know, so the idea that it is that America has a responsibility
#
to intervene in all of these to control the rise of China, to, you know, control the rise of Russia
#
or to control Russia's, you know, nefarious desires is also comes from looking at the
#
world in a particular prism. But there are different prisms. So that's one question that
#
why this prism over that or is it... Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's a responsibility
#
thing at all. It's not America's responsibility. It's in America's interests, right? And...
#
But you can define that interest differently, right? Like I pointed out.
#
That's right. That's what, see, if you are a superpower, you're not, see, I think we are not
#
mentally equipped to understand the superpower's responsibilities and interests, right? And the
#
responsibilities that come from interests, not responsibilities as in altruistic responsibilities,
#
right? We are not in that thing. You can't be a leader in the game. You can't be a world leader
#
without having to do certain things. And those things are not the kind of things which India
#
will do, right? So, for example, if something happens in Ukraine, we could say, hey, guys,
#
you know, we have 20,000 students there. Once we get them out, our job is done. We don't have a
#
talk in the fight, right? Nothing there will influence us and affect us. If the United States
#
is not like that, the moment the Americans overlook the fact that a red line has been crossed,
#
there is a domino effect. The Syrians, those things will happen to you politically, militarily,
#
technologically, economically, which will affect your interests, right? Now in the Syria thing,
#
I can't remember the exact thing which Obama did, but he said there's a particular red line in Syria
#
that if you cross the red line, we'll do something, right? And the guys crossed the red line and he
#
didn't do anything, right? And what signal does it say? And you have the remaining, you know, Putin
#
walking into Crimea, the Turkish guys doing something, Xi Jinping walking into South China
#
Sea. Because the calculation is this, that if you were not willing to defend a red line, which you
#
said there is a red line, I'm quite rightly, I mean, I can be justified in believing that you
#
won't do anything when you have no red lines. You don't have a red line in South China Sea,
#
so I'll go and encroach that, right? So you soon start losing the status and the preeminence as a
#
superpower, right? It's like the British, it's like the British government now, right? If you're
#
content becoming like the British are today as a small country with, I don't know, 80 million people,
#
60 million people, still a lot of military power and economic power, but yes, you're not a force
#
in international relations that used to be a hundred years ago, right? If you're willing to accept
#
that, then you could, you know, go for that, let's hunker down, let's manage our own business, let's
#
pull east of Suez, you know, all that, which the British did, right? It was a, and the British did
#
not because they wanted to. The British did because they were forced to, because after the
#
Second World War, they were spent forced, they just didn't have the resources to sustain that.
#
The Americans are not in that situation. Just to sort of clarify what I meant, you know,
#
what you say is right, that if you say there's a red line and if you cross it, we will do something
#
and then you do nothing, obviously that affects your credibility, but that's if you're playing
#
the game, if you're not playing the game, if you just say not my circus, not my monkeys, we'll do
#
our thing, then what's the problem with that? Like one of the things that you seem to be saying is
#
that if you are the biggest boy in school, it is your responsibility to be the bully. But what if
#
the biggest boy in school just wants to chill in a corner? Now is there then a follow-up argument
#
that if it does not, you know, act according to its size and power to, you know, go all across the
#
world and stop China in the South China Sea and maybe, you know, Arunachal if it comes to that,
#
then that in some way they are going to suffer for it in the long run. Is that the argument
#
that is being made that it is going to harm your national interest if you don't go out and assert
#
your power? Where we get into a mental trap is when we anthropomorphize it, right? So when you
#
look at the bully, big bully and so that's anthropomorphism won't give you a good frame
#
to understand what the US has to do. The issue is really this, in an international system you have
#
to be more powerful than everybody else. How much more powerful? As much power as you can get.
#
Because the moment that gap starts reducing, others start sort of encroaching onto your
#
interests and those can be very serious ones. I mean, in the old, I mean, 100 years ago it could
#
be your territory which is taken away by somebody else. It could be as direct as that. Your territory
#
is taken away because you decided that that's not core interest, you know. That's my colony in
#
that part of the world. I don't really want to worry too much about the colony but somebody else
#
will come and take it, right? And that has consequences both economically, politically,
#
etc. So it's not that, it's not about being a bully or it's about that kind of emotion, right?
#
It's about holding up an order, right? That's exactly, I mean, we've started by talking about
#
order, right? The moment the United States start under Obama started sort of shrinking its vision
#
of the world, the ability of the United States to uphold that order became much weaker, right?
#
The willingness, you know, not just your, when you say I'm less willing to uphold this order,
#
you signal this both to your domestic population and to the rest of the world. You tell your people
#
that maintaining this order is no more my business, right? I'm going to, I don't know, jobs for
#
Americans or whatever Obama was talking about. Or yes, we can. I don't know what that meant. And you
#
also signal to the rest of the world that you're less willing and less inclined to go and do things
#
which are necessary to support order, right? And that immediately gives license to a lot of other
#
people. That's the point I'm coming to, right? Because what it says is your superpower, nature
#
makes you an investor in public goods, very broadly called public goods. Maintaining that order
#
is your investment in public goods, because of which a lot of people benefit from that, because
#
you did, you know, you're upholding the order. But the biggest beneficiary of that, upholding
#
the order is you yourself, right? And to the extent that you now have, you know, let's say
#
you have to contend with China for influence, right? You've lost that influence. Now, if you
#
have to, you know, let's say the Chinese now walk into Taiwan and take away Taiwan, you've lost an
#
you've lost an important trading partner, right? Or if they say, hypothetically, India decides that,
#
oh, Hindi, Chini, Bhai Bhai and you know, what is this little border dispute between Xi Jinping
#
and us? Let's become friends with China. The, you know, East shall rise. The US loses the Indian
#
market, right? So what I'm saying is, it's very hard for a lot of us to see and I don't claim to
#
see it perfectly either. But I can sympathize with the Washington worldview from a realist standpoint,
#
right? And I know for sure that our mental models of seeing our neighborhood, the stakes that we have
#
are very different from what a superpower has to do. I mean, we have the luxury of being saying,
#
we have no, we don't have a dog in the fight. You know, I don't have to, I don't have to uphold
#
international order. Whatever happens in Ukraine is not my business. But if that creates a good word
#
order, then I benefit from it, right? So I can free ride on that because I'm a smaller power.
#
I mean, when I say I am talking about the Republic of India, we are a smaller power.
#
But if you are a power which has to create that, that's a very different game.
#
So, you know, we've kind of spent almost a couple of hours chatting about this and that and digressing
#
in the delightful way that I often find happens here. But one of the main purpose of this episode
#
is really to talk about principles of foreign policy through the prism of, you know, Russia-Ukraine.
#
So, you know, many people are just kind of, especially people who haven't studied foreign
#
policy or read deeply into it, are kind of confused. How do we look at what's happening?
#
You can have a standpoint as an individual that Russia is wrong or Russia is right or whatever,
#
but how do you look at it? So, you know, you guys have very kindly drawn up a
#
sort of set of frameworks of looking at it. And the first part of those is about the role of
#
power. And there, you know, I'm especially, you know, people keep talking about economic
#
sanctions. We'll do this, we'll do that. And there is one fundamental question of principle
#
that I kind of want to bring up here, which is that when we talk about sanctions of any sort,
#
or taking action and so on, what we risk doing is hurting the people more than the state.
#
Like what I kind of find important to emphasize is that the Russian people are different from
#
the Russian state. So whenever you plan any action about them, you need to think about
#
who are you harming and who are you helping. And for me, this was starkest where recently,
#
you know, more than 40 Russian chess grandmasters, all their top players, barring
#
in one, basically signed a letter condemning the invasion. And in fact, another grandmaster,
#
Alexander Grishuk, spoke very eloquently on it. And his press conferences are known for his wit
#
and they're hilarious. And here he was deeply affected, almost in tears when he said that he
#
is so disturbed and he would support Russia in 99% of things, but he can't support them in this.
#
And my point was these are the Russian people, that you don't want these guys to kind of get
#
harmed. There was some European university which randomly decided Dostoevsky is Russian and they
#
took him off the syllabus and tried to cancel him. Before it was pointed out that he was a
#
dissenter all his life, the czar put him in prison and all of that, and they kind of brought it back.
#
And I think that this kind of conflation is sometimes dangerous. And I also think of this
#
in the context of what Walter Russell Mead said about Ukraine, where I'll quote him quote, he said,
#
the country has a real split. On one hand, the civil society movement for democracy is part of
#
a move westward. On the other hand, the political parties, economic institutions and government
#
bureaucracy remain wedded to structures that date back to Soviet times. It is a country of powerful
#
oligarchs who often work through the political process. During this national crisis, we are
#
seeing a new kind of Ukraine struggling to be born. And I think it's going to transform the role of
#
the president and maybe catapult him into a place he didn't think he was going to be. You know,
#
the Ukrainian response has just been stunning. Putin may go down in history as a man who made
#
Ukraine a nation, stop quote. And this conflation that people simplistically often make between a
#
people and a nation is to me disturbing. And Prane, we've done an episode in the past about
#
Pakistan, where you've spoken about the difference between Pakistan's putative state, which is,
#
you know, the military jihadi complex and the people of Pakistan on the other hand.
#
So at a foreign policy level, how do we kind of think about this? Because it strikes me that
#
then there is a dilemma that you want to take action against a country that has done something
#
wrong, but it is a state that has done something wrong and not the people per se. And you don't
#
really want to hurt the people because in the long run, the people are perhaps your best hope
#
against that particular regime. You know, I mean, the thing is, we get the framing a little
#
off, right? Sanctions are not a substitute for normal life, right? Sanctions are the substitute
#
for military action. So you do sanctions because the alternative is military action,
#
which is obviously worse, right? The people get hurt much more with military action than they
#
would get with sanctions, right? So therefore, you know, you look at sanctions as not something
#
which you would do, you know, willfully to somebody. You do it because you have a political
#
purpose to achieve. And the political purpose using military force is much worse than using
#
sanctions. So you use sanctions as an alternative, as a substitute, right? So that's how I would see
#
it. Now, the question really was, and is in this case, were sanctions on Russia or the threat of
#
sanctions enough to deter, right? Now, people will argue that, oh, you know, the sanctions
#
are very unprecedented. They will damage Russia's economy. But look, they didn't stop Russia from
#
invading in the first place because, you know, very clearly the US said war is off the table
#
and that, you know, people might criticize that. But I would, you know, I'm not an apologist for
#
the United States, I might be taking their side in this particular conversation, but I'm not an
#
apologist. But you know, why that is necessary? Because these are nuclear, there is a nuclear
#
relationship between the West, between NATO and Russia. And all of this is automated, you know,
#
there are set procedures which will happen if the risk escalates, you know, you know, you just quickly
#
climb up the ladder. So when the West says we are not going to use military force, it is a declaration
#
of saying, look, let's keep stability, let's not get into the place where you can escalate to
#
nuclear. So that's the reason to say I won't use force. But when I say I won't use force,
#
I still want to stop the other guy from doing something. What do I do? So I say I'll use
#
sanctions. The question is, did the sanctions deter or not? But here's the point. Putin was
#
eyeing Crimea and the Ukraine since 2008 and 9. He invaded once in 2014. Why didn't he do the whole
#
thing back then? I think there is a fear that there was some sanctions, etc., which would come
#
into play. And back in 2014, maybe he sized up that, you know, sanctions would be such that
#
they would be much harmful to him and to Russia than they are today, because China was not big
#
enough a force, right? So now that you have China as a backstop, Putin knows that the sanctions
#
won't hurt the Russian economy as they might have if he had done it in 2008 and 9. So you can make
#
an argument that sanctions deterred a Russian invasion of Ukraine for about 10 years, right?
#
So that's 10 years time that you buy, you could have done other things. You didn't do other things,
#
right? That's where the failure is, which is what I was talking about. Now, will sanctions now
#
change anything for Putin and in the war game? I think as an alternative to doing nothing,
#
I think this is still a good way. Of course, people will suffer, right? The moral responsibility of
#
the suffering Russians are not the people who are imposing sanctions, but Putin, right? So, I mean,
#
nobody would have done these sanctions if Putin hadn't invaded Russia. So it's just like saying,
#
you know, if there's a person in a family, now I'm anthropomorphizing, but at the risk of violating
#
my own injunction, it's always dangerous, you know, whenever I violated my own injunction,
#
I've gotten into a lot of trouble. So, but I still violated it, which is, you know, if the family,
#
you know, there's a poor family, a person commits a crime and you throw that person into jail for
#
having committed a crime, the poor family suffers, right? But that's not a reason for not throwing
#
that person into jail, you know. So I think the same kind of a logic applies here. There is pain
#
and suffering, but the moral responsibility for the pain and suffering is on the instigator of
#
that invasion, right? Again, I'm not an opponent of the Russian side also. I don't oppose the
#
Russians. I mean, I want to look at it in a, you know, as objective way as possible. But if I'm
#
Russian, I say, look, you got me into trouble. This is an unnecessary war, right? Why would you
#
have to do this? Because the Russian prosperity before the sanctions of 2014 was really linked
#
to interaction with the West. They were doing fairly well in terms of, you know, not just the
#
oligarchs buying yachts, but also startups, technology startups, movement of people and so on.
#
It was quite, it was quite a good deal, you know, 2014 actually destroyed it.
#
So a question I asked earlier, but that we kind of digress from, which is what could the US have
#
done? Like you spoke about how Obama could have handled it all differently, handled,
#
treated Russia differently, treated China differently. What specifically could they
#
have done which would not have led us here? Oh, it's back. See, one thing is that get right is
#
the sanctions, you know, threat of sanctions, right? But I think the biggest mistake which the
#
Europeans, the Americans made back in the Obama era, was to accentuate or support the European
#
sense of peace and entitlement, you know, that we can do these wonderful gas deals with Putin.
#
We don't need to invest in our own military resources. NATO is just this talk shop, you know,
#
we don't need to have political solidarity in terms of promoting liberal democratic values.
#
They said, oh, you know, there's a set of complacency with the European Union had
#
and the sort of Americans, instead of trying to sort of nudge them away from it, they sort of
#
accentuated it. To that extent, you know, for all the craziness which Trump did, Trump did two very
#
smart things with respect to the Europeans. First is he told them that, hey, guys, you have to pay
#
up your share of NATO fees, you know. Now, this is an interesting aside, but I think I should
#
tell it because it's interesting for people. You know, in India's defense expenditure,
#
whenever India's defense budget comes, people say, you know, it's less than 2% of GDP, you know,
#
defense budget should be around 2% of GDP. Then you wonder where this 2% number comes from, right?
#
The 2% number comes from NATO's admission criteria. So when they formed NATO,
#
they said this is a common defense pact. We want everybody to contribute their membership fees
#
to this common defense pact so that nobody freerides. But you have very rich countries
#
and you have very poor countries in NATO. So how do you have a fair membership fee?
#
They said 2% of your GDP is your defense expenditure. That's your fair membership fee,
#
right? That was 2%. A lot of these European countries were paid less than the 2%.
#
They were free riding on the American defense expenditure and they enjoyed it, right? And why
#
not? So Trump told them, hey, guys, you know, this is not quite what you should be doing, right?
#
And the second is also to nudge them into some kind of responsibility towards their own defense,
#
because they were just saying, you know, in fact, the Europeans used to criticize other
#
countries who would spend more on defense, right? They would, they would condemn India for saying,
#
why are you spending your poor developing country? Why are you spending so much on defense? Why do
#
you need these kind of weapons? And we judge you, right? But look at the neighbors we have, right?
#
We are not, we don't have the luxury of pretending that we have a, you know, peaceful neighborhood.
#
Neither did Europe, right? They only realized it now. So I think to you, the American mistake
#
really was to sleep on the wheels of NATO, not push NATO and the Europeans enough on security
#
and defense. I can't think of any direct things that they could have done with respect to Russia.
#
I don't think, I mean, I'm not an expert in Russia-U.S. relations. Probably there might be
#
deeper things, little levers and buttons they could have pressed in the third and the fourth
#
decimal place. But I don't think on a big note, they could have done anything which would have
#
been difficult. Europe is your big player, you know, and Europe is the one which fell short.
#
So, you know, two hours are up and Nitin, I know you have to go, which is like really sad. This is
#
like, you know, the U.S. abandoning the rest of the world and what's going to happen, you know,
#
you, you're supposed to be the, you're supposed to be the hegemon in this conversation, but you
#
know, Pranay and I will sort of carry on manfully the best we can after the break. But any, any final
#
words before you go? I had some final words before this, but once you characterized me as a hegemon
#
and dropping off, I'm like thinking very hard of what's a good smart one-liner to give you back.
#
Can't think of any, but it was really nice being on your show, Amit. And I think you've,
#
we've managed to get to the bottom of the issue in this episode instead of the superficial question
#
of what should India do, who's right and who's wrong, which almost everybody and his cousin
#
are talking about. I think it's really nice that we got a chance to go under, to go into the unseen
#
and the unheard areas of this issue. So I'm glad I was here and I hope to be back soon.
#
Yeah, yeah. You know, you're coming back for an eight-hour episode where we'll talk about
#
your life and, you know, all the unseen aspects of Nitin Pai over there. But for, for now,
#
let's take a quick commercial break. And when I come back, we'll come back without the hegemon.
#
Thanks. Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer. In fact, chances are that many of you
#
first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut, which was active between 2003 and 2009
#
and became somewhat popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me. And I feel I was
#
shaped by it in many ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was forced to think about
#
many different things because I wrote about many different things. Well, that phase in my life
#
ended for various reasons. And now it is time to revive it. Only now I'm doing it through a
#
newsletter. I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com, where
#
I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of the themes I cover
#
in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to indiancut.substack.com and
#
subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write will land up in your
#
email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free. The India Uncut newsletter
#
at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you. So welcome back to the Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with
#
my good friend Pranay Kutaswane. We are now freed from the hegemony of our good friend Nitin Bhai.
#
And now we'll kind of continue talking about principles of foreign policy and, you know,
#
how we can look at them through the Russia-Ukraine conflict or rather through the Russian invasion
#
of Ukraine. So Pranay, you know, we were chatting about economic sanctions before the break.
#
Give me, you know, we speak about different kinds of leverage, about different kinds of power.
#
You know, when we talk of economic power per se, you know, what exactly do we mean by it and what
#
is it good for? Like, you know, I think Nitin was the first person from whom I read the formulation
#
to the effect of a rising GDP is the best foreign policy, right? Obviously referring to how economic
#
growth increases your leverage in the world and economics therefore matters. So tell me a little
#
bit about this, that, you know, why does it matter beyond the obvious sense that, hey, we are a bigger
#
market for everyone and we have more goods and services to export and all of that. Beyond that
#
sense, you know, why does it matter? What is it good for? How do we use it in foreign policy?
#
Yeah, right. So I guess like the one central lesson of one of the lessons of this conflict is
#
about how military power still matters, you know, so sharpening the military instrument,
#
regardless of your economic power is also important. Now, having said that, let's look at
#
economic power and military power. What is the difference? Why is it important, right?
#
So one thing is that in international relations, we always talk about the idea of fungibility of
#
power. So this is a concept by David Baldwin, the idea that, you know, you can convert one form of
#
power to the other, right? So in that sense, economic power is important. So there was this
#
study by Paul Kennedy is a historian who looked at great powers over the last 300, 400 years,
#
what was their relationship between economic might and military might? So he sort of concludes that
#
economic power produces military power, and military power is used to acquire or protect that
#
economic power, you know, so there is a sort of a spiral arrangement, you can think of where economic
#
power helps you to produce military power, and then military power is used to acquire, protect,
#
so on and so forth, you keep gaining this over time, right? Now, there are also bounds to this.
#
If too much of economic power is diverted to the military, right up front, then, you know,
#
your economic might decreases, you don't produce enough productive resources to be able to improve
#
your might over time, right? And conversely, if there is a lot of overstretch on the military side,
#
then your economic power also declines, because you have taken up challenges that you are not
#
ready for, like it has happened with the case of Russia, right? So now, there is a sort of a
#
military stretch where you have applied military power beyond your means. And now, the nation
#
states which can respond are responding in the economic domain, right? So, one of the sort of
#
corollaries of this fungibility of power is that a problem in one domain can be addressed through
#
the application of power in another domain, right? And that's what you're seeing now that
#
militarily, the West wouldn't want to provoke sort of a nuclear risk, because they both are
#
nuclear power, so there is a risk in going in that direction. But economic sphere is where the West
#
does have a lot of power, and it can apply it in direct means, in indirect means. So, direct means
#
would be like sanctions, right? There are export controls now being thought of, even investment
#
controls, investment barriers will be there. Then there are also means through the international
#
system, right? So, WTO, what happens in the trade system there, how is Russia treated, like you
#
mentioned about SWIFT, etc., right? So, there are global economic systems where you can influence
#
what Russia can do and what you cannot do, right? So, now what you're seeing unfold is that the West
#
applying power in a dimension they are more comfortable with, and where Russia is weak,
#
relatively weak. Military power in Ukraine was its strength, so it could do a lot of things,
#
but now you're seeing US and the West get together and apply pressure in that dimension, right? So,
#
that's how economic power operates. Now, obviously, there are fallouts, there are negative
#
consequences of each of these, right? So, military power, one sort of relative advantage is that it
#
can pose an existential threat and can influence decisions in a very quick time. And this is what
#
General Menon always reminds us when he teaches his sessions in defense and foreign affairs,
#
that military power's advantage is that it can pose an existential threat in a very limited time
#
frame. Whereas the effects of economic sanctions or economic power are over time, one, in building
#
your own strength, and second, if you want to directly use it in a conflict, you have to be
#
immensely more powerful than your adversary. Now, so that's why you saw in terms of economic power,
#
right? So, there are lots of these measurements about how much bigger power you should be
#
for sanctions to have a coercive or a deterrent effect. And they are like, you need to have an
#
economy which is 100X, some people argue in order to actually have the kind of deterrent effect that
#
you want, which was clearly not the case in this conflict, right? Russia is still a big power.
#
So, economic sanctions, in a sense, didn't work as well as a deterrent. But what economic power can
#
do in this conflict is to reduce Russia's economic power over time. And then because of the economic
#
power reducing, Russia's military power will also reduce over time, right? If you have very limited
#
resources, you're not able to buy the best kind of equipment, collaborate with the best kind of
#
researchers across the world, it will hurt your ability to produce weaponry to even what they
#
can't even sell to some of the buyers now, right? Because of these sanctions, there will be a
#
deterrent effect on that. So, it will hurt their military power also over time, right? So, the idea
#
is economic power can be used in this way, but its effect will not be as instantaneous as military
#
powers was and what you saw playing out, right? So, this is one way of thinking. The next also like
#
this concept of power itself is very ambiguous. There are lots and lots of papers and careers
#
made on thinking about power in international relations. But one sort of measure that I like is
#
by this political scientist, Mike Beckley, who talks about power of countries should not be
#
thought of as you can accumulate it over time with no cost. So, he thinks of power as a ledger.
#
You know, there are costs ledger where you also have some costs that you have to incur and also
#
benefits that you incur. So, if in that ledger formulation, power can be thought of as, for
#
example, population. Population is also on the positive side and it also can be on the negative
#
side in the sense that you also have to provide for a larger amount of population, etc. And
#
definitely it's on the positive side because after all people give a lot of benefit, right? So, if
#
you look at that formulation, he thinks of power as you can predict outcomes of a lot of great
#
power rivalries if you think of power as GDP multiplied by GDP per capita. So, this is a rough,
#
again a model, but which says that if a country's power is determined by this formulation, then you
#
are able to predict even the outcomes of great power rivalries well. And it has, he does this
#
over last five or six rivalries or 200, 300 years in order to get this. Now, this is an interesting
#
formulation because GDP represents sort of the benefit side, right? The more, the bigger the
#
country will have, the bigger the GDP. Whereas GDP per capita also takes into account the costs for
#
providing for a larger population, whether you are able to have enough growth so that you are able to
#
also increase the productivity of every individual, right? So that, so if you look at this formulation,
#
so if you look at this formulation, it is interesting, right? GDP, India's GDP is big, but
#
when you do GDP into GDP per capita, we might be in the middle income range, right? So, that sort of
#
is a good formulation to think of power in international relations. And it takes into
#
account economic power and its impact on military power as well. So, one of the points you made was
#
that, you know, that when we talk about the fungibility of power like this, that a problem
#
in one domain can be addressed in another. Now, it just strikes me that if I'm Putin and I'm sitting
#
there and I see your economic power and I see what the sanctions will do and it will lead to a vicious
#
circle where I'll get economically affected and therefore I'll get militarily affected because,
#
you know, I have less to invest in building up my arms and so on. And it's a spiral to the bottom
#
and I can't win. So, why would he not then bring his nuclear, put his nuclear weapons back on the
#
table and say that fine, you know, since it's, you know, shift the focus from one domain to other
#
and say that fine, economic sanctions, fine, I'm crazy, you know, play the game theorists would
#
call the game of chicken. And, you know, whether or not he is actually rational, but it's rational
#
for him to play that game and to give the impression that he can do anything. And so,
#
if nuclear weapons come on the table, then doesn't that kind of balance the whole economic power
#
equation? I mean, you mentioned General Menon, I recorded that excellent episode where he gave
#
me so much insight on India going nuclear and all of that. And one of the things that India
#
going nuclear obviously did was that it actually brought India on par with Pakistan or rather
#
brought Pakistan on par with India because they both got nuclear weapons and therefore
#
any engagement they have has to be a superbly limited engagement because neither side can
#
afford an escalation. And while we, in terms of conventional army, at that time, we would have
#
had a massive superiority, suddenly we were equal because both sides have a nuclear weapon.
#
So similarly, I would imagine that putting the nuclear option on the table would be one way for
#
Putin to reduce the asymmetry otherwise. Yeah, so absolutely like nuclear powers,
#
addition of nuclear weapons sort of gives you an offset, right? You can suddenly bridge some
#
of the gaps that you would, but Putin has already brought nuclear weapons to the table, right? He's
#
already mentioned that if any country were to intervene, they will have consequences,
#
which you have never heard of and things like that. So that thing has already passed. After that
#
is where these economic sanctions have been improved. And of course he can say what he wants
#
to say, but the consequences of nuclear escalation will be felt by him, by Russia at large as well,
#
right? So it's not as if you can, the bluster is fine, but for you to act, you know that there is
#
the consequences only one and that's annihilation. So how long can you play that game of chicken,
#
right? That is one. Before that, I would say that actually what Putin did because of this economic
#
sanctions and knowing that economic power is the Western is that they tried to isolate themselves,
#
gain more economic power over the last four, five years, right? So if you read many articles on this,
#
there were this idea of building their foreign exchange reserves. Also this idea of they knew
#
that they are connected with Europe because of the gas connection energy. So there are only certain
#
things that the West can do without incurring costs on their own citizens. So that calculation
#
was also there because the sanctions game is actually quite old. So he tried to make sure
#
that generally they are shielded from the effects of another sanction of the kind that had happened
#
earlier. I guess the difference this time is that the current sanctions are like unprecedented in
#
scope. Earlier you had sanctions from us, et cetera, but us and Russia don't trade much anyways.
#
But this time, because of how abhorrent this invasion is being seen, there are not just
#
sanctions, there are secondary sanctions and you know, sanctions of the kind that if you are a
#
supplier to Russian military or say Russian strategic establishment, and you just buy some
#
equipment from the US, these sanctions also apply to you. So that's like the kind of sanctions which
#
we generally don't see and which are very difficult to enforce actually. But this is what has been
#
attempted and there is a lot of overwhelming support from a lot of countries on this,
#
which makes it difficult for Russia to sort of sidestep this. So there is real cost like you
#
were saying on Russian citizens also because of this. Even though the sanctions are tried,
#
they have tried to craft it in a way that they don't affect the common person. But I think the
#
effect will still be felt by a lot of people. So essentially if you are buying anything which
#
is to do with Russian military, if you are a company which deals with the Russian military
#
in any way, or say data centers that are owned by the Russian government, you sort of come into
#
the ambit of this sanction if you are buying something which is significantly American,
#
which is pretty much everything, a lot of things will be American. So that's why these economic
#
sanctions are a new thing in that sense. They are unprecedented in scope. And let's see how that
#
plays out. So I don't think it will sort of necessarily lead to toppling of the regime
#
or et cetera, but there's genuinely a pressure which it puts and probably reduces economic
#
power over time. Even if this war ends in two, three days, the sanctions are not very easily,
#
they won't go away very easily. There will be this impact of reducing economic power and reducing
#
military power over time. So, you know, you referred to Putin's nuclear rhetoric as bluster
#
and you said, how long can you play the game of chicken? And you were laughing and part of the
#
sort of implication of that was, okay, in the end, we are all rational people, the cost is too much.
#
But could it be the case that foreign policy may sort of, foreign policy perhaps doesn't adequately
#
take into account the fact that humans can be irrational, frail, even insane. I mean, if you
#
kind of look back into the 1930s and you talk about Hitler, for example, you know, you may not take
#
into account how far he will go because a lot of it is irrational. You know, if at some point people
#
were to hear about plans of the Holocaust, they would surely discount it. They would say it is
#
not rational for anybody to do something so monstrous. But the point is, he went out and did
#
it. And the thing is, foreign policy can largely treat people as rational actors, but you only need
#
to be wrong once, you know, for the kind of annihilation that you're speaking of, especially
#
in this case, especially if Putin sees that so many stars who would never have spoken out
#
against the regime, the chess players, sportsmen, the prominent people in civil society who had
#
otherwise stayed shut, are suddenly speaking up against it. If he feels his position is personally
#
threatened, you know, and we already, we've spoken about his visions of glory, whether he's Peter
#
the Great or Catherine the Great or, you know, whoever, then it becomes dangerous. Why? You know,
#
because it's a very low probability event that he would do something incredibly irrational that
#
sparks off a chain of events that leads to catastrophe. But that possibility is surely
#
non-zero and the cost is too high. So how does one take that into account? And if it is rational
#
for us to take that into account, then is it not rational for him to continue playing that game
#
of chicken because at some point someone's got to back down and we know that we'll have to back down
#
sooner or later? Yeah, no, I agree. There is definitely a non-zero chance of an event which
#
has catastrophic impact. And that's why the idea about nuclear de-escalation, et cetera,
#
is about that, that you reduce these chances. And I'm sure you have spoken about this with
#
gentlemen and so not going into those details, but yeah. So foreign policy, that's why I think
#
history is not that great a guide for some of these things. You know, there might be such
#
events which completely change what foreign policy or your model for explaining international
#
relations could be. And you have to also think of this, that foreign policies, the way we study it,
#
it's a small N study, right? N being the number. There are not very many experiments you can run.
#
There are not many very events that happen. So it is tentative to the extent that you know
#
right now and it can change. So that risk definitely exists. But the way people try to
#
then study is to think of models from outside foreign policy. And, you know, think of, you know,
#
what can public choice theory tell you or what can public policy tell you about how this will act or
#
what is the relationship between the oligarchs and the organizations within Russia, who I'm sure
#
also don't want nuclear war, right? So there are, it's not just Putin being equal to Russia, right?
#
In fact, even for this invasion, I'm sure there were a lot of other people on board as well. We
#
generally tend to see in the simplest model, we see one person or one rational actor called the
#
state, which is not right. There are bureaucratic actors everywhere. There are also political actors
#
who are acting in different direction. And finally, the policy that you have is a resultant of a lot
#
of things that are being acted. So that so it applies in Russia's case as well. It's not just
#
Putin, there will be various other actors inside, which you can apply pressure on, which you think
#
they will act in a direction which will push Putin to act in a particular way as well, right? So
#
that is what detailed analysis of people who would know Russia would be thinking of right now. It's
#
not the centrality of Putin only, but who are the other actors? There will at some point of time,
#
there will be a cost benefit calculation, which will come into play with or without Putin, right?
#
So that's what they are trying to influence at this point. Yeah, I mean, the way you mentioned
#
public choice theory, public policy, I think from all of those, all of those depend on assumptions
#
of how people tend to behave, which are correct. For example, public choice theory would say people
#
tend to respond to incentives, which is obviously correct. But they don't always and there are
#
outliers. Now, the point is that when you speak of public policy in general, you know, if there are
#
outliers, the outliers are on the margins. They don't really matter. They get smoothed out
#
soon enough. But in a case like this, an outlier is basically, I mean, not the whole world going
#
up in smoke. I don't want to kind of exaggerate, but you know, the consequences are immense. But
#
I kind of get that. So let's kind of talk about, you know, how conflicts like this in modern times
#
are necessarily different from conflicts in earlier times. I mean, this is a conflict in
#
the information age, you know, a trade war is also, as you have said, by default, a technology war.
#
And, you know, Nitin speaks about the concept of an authoritarian disadvantage in the information
#
age. So can you elaborate a bit on how in modern times with the internet in the information age,
#
you know, how should we look at such conflicts differently? And what are the different kind of
#
dynamics that come into play here? Yeah, so this is going to be a long answer,
#
but we can discuss some parts of it. So first, let's take this idea about war in the information
#
age and how trade wars generally are now becoming also tech wars. So we saw that in the case of
#
China and US, where it was not just financial restrictions, investment restrictions, but also
#
active restrictions to prevent nation state from getting ahead on the technology front, right? So
#
you have restrictions on China's semiconductor industry or Huawei or 5G companies, etc. So why
#
is that so, right? So one way to think of it is now the role of, if you think of national power
#
as being composed of economic elements, technology elements, military elements, whatever. I think
#
the role of technology in this overall bucket of national power is, is emphasized a lot more now,
#
right? A lot of nation states believe that technology could be a way for you to garner
#
more power on all other fronts. So the idea then becomes that how do you prevent other nation
#
state from getting that technology, or you prevent or you how do you beat them before they get it,
#
right? So that's the dynamic, which is playing out a lot more on the technology front earlier.
#
Everything is being seen in this strategic quote unquote terms, right? Everyone, a lot of
#
technologies, whether it is AI, semiconductors, quantum technology, etc. So on this, there is
#
another interesting framework that I came across that how can technology impact national power if
#
you have to think of it. So there is this paper by the center for security and emerging technology,
#
Georgetown, where they talk about three ways. And I quite like them. One is innovations can introduce
#
new elements of power, which didn't exist, right? So for example, you have one Dutch company, which
#
produces the kind of machines that go into making really cutting edge semiconductor chips. Okay.
#
It's called ASMR. Now, just because you have that kind of capability, the Dutch national power
#
increases in the sense that now US wants to influence Netherlands so that they don't give
#
this technology to China or Chinese companies, right? So they, it was not a element of power,
#
which Netherlands would have had if this kind of innovation was not done out of that, right? So
#
there's one way. The second way is innovations can change the importance of existing elements
#
of power, right? So even if you are militarily superior, but suppose there you have the
#
technology to blind the enemy satellites, for example, then the effectiveness of the
#
military instrument decreases, right? So probably you can't use your ballistic missiles, et cetera,
#
because you have the technology to blind satellites, right? So this is the second way.
#
The third one, which is interesting is innovations can alter intermediate goals that states pursue.
#
Now, for example, there is with the current technology, you have social controlled temptations,
#
information warfare is easier. So China can do a lot of things. It can pursue a goal of
#
totalitarian control, which it couldn't without some of these technologies, right? So if this is,
#
these are the three ways you can think of how technology impacts national power. And we are
#
seeing some of these play out now, right? So now let's come to the, the current conflict.
#
In this conflict also, you see this entire dimension of tech war also, right? So it's not
#
just where US is saying that we will apply the traditional sanctions, which were on financial
#
institutions, central bank, et cetera. But also the fact that if the Russia was purchasing anything
#
with respect to semiconductors, with respect to some of these cutting edge technologies,
#
there are sanctions on that as well. So in a sense that what US was, US did to Huawei, a company,
#
Huawei and ZTE a couple of years ago, that has become a template. And they are now applying it
#
to an entire nation state, which is Russia, you know? So this is sort of the first time that,
#
you know, the such extensive export controls are being applied on a whole nation state, you know,
#
not just a few companies. So that has impact, right? Again, that over time, if we believe this
#
idea that technology is a substantial part of national power going ahead, it will have an impact
#
on Russia in the sense that it will slow down some of these connections. Also, we need to
#
remember a lot of technology. The areas that we are talking about now are not national industries
#
in the old sense, where you could do everything locally, you know, like steel, you could do
#
everything you could have, you could build a steel industry locally. But can you, for example,
#
do a lot of AI research or a lot of semiconductor development in-house, just self-sufficiently?
#
It's not possible in the current sense, because a lot of these industries are globally distributed,
#
you need to collaborate with other countries. For example, a nice stat I heard was a lot of,
#
I think around 50% or so of cutting edge AI research and AI people happens by people
#
who are immigrants in another country. So this was also some stat. It is even in the US, if you're
#
not born in that country. So a lot of it is based on ideas, movement of ideas, people also on good
#
services, etc. So now Russia, the only alternative Russia has on the tech front is then to do a lot
#
of these things locally or do things with China, etc. But this entire idea of collaboration being
#
mutually beneficial, that gets cut off because of some of these trade tech sanctions which get
#
applied. So that's an interesting angle to look at. Something similar is also being tried with the
#
US-China war, that is also happening. A lot of these tech sanctions are being applied to them as
#
well. So it has tangible effects because of current technology industry, which is not
#
national industries, but global supply chains. And if you interfere with a nation state's ability to
#
participate in this global supply chain, they have only one option to do some things locally,
#
which they can catch up over time, but it delays it to a certain extent, right? Because they are,
#
you can't do those things as you could do earlier through collaboration. So you will have to build
#
strength. They can probably catch up, but it will take time. And you have sort of bought yourself
#
more time on this technology front. So that's what I would say on this trade wars becoming tech wars,
#
right? And you will see it with time that anything related to tech will be used in subsequent
#
conflicts, more so than in the past, right? So that is one new thing that has. So now the other
#
question that you brought up was about authoritarian disadvantage in the information age. Now this is
#
also an interesting, this is Nitin's concept and we've co-authored a paper on this recently,
#
but currently what is the thinking about the information? If you look at this war also,
#
Amit, you would have observed that Russia's propaganda is missing from a lot of our discourse,
#
right? There's a lot of great things that Ukraine has done and how Ukraine has stood against an
#
Imperial sort of superpower and hegemon, but not, we don't see anything from the Russian side, right?
#
That is quite curious because the Russians are thought to be this, you know, masters of information
#
warfare. They have cracked this from a long time. So why is it the case that we don't see a lot of
#
Russian propaganda, right? That is also an interesting case study that we can probably learn
#
from the ongoing conflict. Now, one thing is again, generally, if you think again,
#
let's go to the basic of power, right? What is power and essentially power is A can exercise
#
power over B in sort of three ways. You know, first is the direct use of force or the direct threat of
#
use of force by direct or indirect means to get B to comply. You know, so for example, when there is
#
a cyber attack disabling other states' critical infrastructure, you would say, or a threat of it,
#
you would say that A has exercised power over B and that's why you have to do. Now, the second
#
one is A can exercise power over B at the decision-making level, you know, by changing
#
its desires, choice perceptions, payoff calculations, etc. You know, so psychological warfare, when we
#
say by state A, it is trying to intervene at how the state B thinks of state A. So for example,
#
if you have convinced Indians that China is militarily so powerful that you can't do anything
#
with respect to it, it's a psychological warfare, right? Without even having fought the war, you
#
have changed their desires and calculations. Third, you know, A can exercise power over B by
#
changing its preferences, morality and understanding of reality itself. You know, so
#
successful interference by state A in a democratic elections of state B, for example, is an example
#
there, right? So what Russia was able to achieve with respect to US in 2016 elections was there,
#
right? Now, the entire idea of democracy and what democracy is, is whether it is even genuinely
#
democracy, those questions were thrown up, right? So it is sort of changing reality, etc. itself.
#
Now, these are the three kinds of ways in which A can exercise power over B, right? Now, over the
#
last 15-20 years in this information age, a lot of focus was on the first way of exercising power.
#
So a lot of ideas on cyber attack and what can be done, etc. But now over the last four or five years,
#
a lot of thought has been gone into A that it's not so much about attacking some physical
#
infrastructure, but it is about influencing minds, desires, the way nations think of themselves,
#
right? And you discuss this, I think, with Shivam in that episode on their book as well. But this is
#
what we are talking about, about information control, etc. And what can be that influence?
#
Now, let's come to the Russian angle here, right? Overwhelmingly over the last few years,
#
the thought was that because an authoritarian regime can control information locally, and whereas
#
a lot of this information, the way people think is disseminated, decentralized in democracies,
#
authoritarian regimes actually have an advantage. That was the common narrative, right? So they can
#
influence elections in US, what will you do, right? That kind of narrative was there. But now,
#
if you see in the, there is a flip side to it as well, right? That a lot, if you're focusing a lot
#
on your domestic narrative, shaping that, it doesn't come at zero cost, right? An authoritarian
#
regime has to spend a humongous amount of resources in trying to shape domestic narratives, right? So
#
that's what China does. That's what Russia has been doing. I mean, there are estimates that the
#
great firewall in China employs more than around 100,000 people to sort of Chinese censors, right?
#
To see and shape a lot of this thing. So that opportunity cost comes into being in the kind of
#
conflict situation, right? So Russia is so much now has to invest their resources in trying to
#
shape their domestic narrative that, you know, this is the right war. We are going and trying
#
to do things that are desirable, et cetera, that they have lost seated that space to Ukraine and
#
the West on the international front, right? So there in internationally, there's just one narrative,
#
which is about how Ukraine is standing up to it. And despite all their supposed power in the
#
information domain, you actually see Russia being behind in this particular game. So this is one
#
more interesting lesson that we can think of from this idea, right? Again, there is another angle
#
to this. So this is again a paper where they try to study what is the impact of authoritarians
#
on information warfare. So this paper talks about this idea of the authoritarian information
#
paradox. And they say the same thing that the absence of trusted sources of information
#
for debunking propaganda outside the state apparatus makes authoritarian regimes susceptible
#
to target information operations. And that's what you're seeing now as well, that there is a lot of
#
information, a lot of things that are coming out from Ukraine are not necessarily the truth as
#
well. There is information warfare from the other end as well. But there is just this idea that
#
because you have a very small state apparatus, which is focusing on certain things, you can have
#
other ways of attacking with the state apparatus wouldn't have. So you can think of it as the
#
application of the use of knowledge in society in the information warfare sphere. So you can,
#
because there is decentralized power on the other end, you can formulate new ways of attack,
#
new dimensions where you can attack on the other side. Whereas the state apparatus on Russia is
#
thinking in one way and only in one direction and primarily now focused on their local information
#
control and management, and hence seeding space to the other side, which can come at it from
#
various angles. And that's why we were thinking of this as an information as a sort of an authoritarian
#
disadvantage. And this we'd written before this conflict. And you are probably seeing that play
#
out in the sense that there is Russian propaganda, which is missing out and seeding space to the
#
other actors. Yeah, the moment you mentioned Hayek and spoke about his great essay, the use of
#
knowledge in society, I sort of got your point immediately, because till that point, I was kind
#
of struggling where I thought that, okay, you know, the amount of money an authoritarian leader would
#
spend on tech is, you know, not that much comparatively compared to how much you would spend
#
buying missiles and all that. So what is the problem? You can kind of keep the propaganda
#
going internationally. But the key realization there is that authoritarians tend to think in top
#
down ways. And you cannot sort of centrally plan things like narrative strategies, you can do it
#
up to a certain limit. But otherwise, you know, if dissenters are decentralized and widespread,
#
you will have just a greater variety of strategies and tactics being thrown at the
#
wall. And the best of them will invariably be way better than the authoritarian in question.
#
And therefore will succeed. By the way, for my listeners, I'll inform them that Pranay, of
#
course, as all of you would know, has this incredible Hindi podcast, which he co-hosts with
#
our friend Saurabh Chandrakot, Polyabazi. And I spoke for an hour there on Hayek in Hindi.
#
So that is one of the, you know, signal achievements of my life. So I have no idea
#
what Hindi speakers would have thought of it or what Hayek lovers would have thought of it.
#
You know, my next question goes to something that you said that, you know, there's something
#
that Thin likes to say that why do you need to hack EVMs when you can hack minds? And that to
#
me is really powerful. And now one of the things that we have kind of realized over the last 10,
#
15 years is how frail humans are in the sense of being in control of their thoughts and their
#
actions. This is something that I got a sense of in my gambling years. I mean, I was a, I was
#
a gambler. I was a professional poker player for five years. And I did spend a lot of time in
#
casinos. And I read up a fair bit on, you know, the tactics that casinos use to keep gamblers
#
gambling, mind manipulation in a sense. Like the first time I went to this offshore casino in Goa,
#
then called Casino Royale back in circa 2009, 2008, I realized that these casinos have no
#
windows, nothing. You have no sense of daylight coming in. So you don't know what the time is.
#
They have no clocks. They pump in oxygenated air through the ship. So you stay energetic much
#
longer. So your sense of time passing is, you know, reduced. You know, I remember starting a
#
game at two o'clock and after some time thinking, and I look at my time on my mobile and it's like
#
eight o'clock, you know, so time passes really fast. The idea is to keep gamblers gambling as
#
much as possible. And even in terms of how in the eighties and nineties slot machines were designed
#
where, you know, one, the music and the sound effects and the lights and all were meant to
#
keep you almost in a state of trance where you're just playing, playing, playing. But as much as
#
that, you know, AI came in in the late nineties and early application of AI, where you'd kind of
#
analyze from what was happening on a player's screen, that what is the point at which he is
#
likely to stop playing. And just five minutes before that, somebody from the casino would come
#
and they would tap the gambler on the shoulder and say, sir, you've been playing for so long.
#
We'd like to offer you a free drink and so on and so forth. And you end up playing more. Right. So
#
I'll there's a great book on it, which I'll link from the show notes. I've forgotten the name,
#
but it was it had many TILs for me. And what we see in the modern age is that social media is
#
doing this kind of constantly on a constant basis, like in all kinds of little ways, the idea is to
#
keep us addicted, to keep us scrolling, to just keep us in there looking for the next dopamine hit.
#
You know, Jonathan Haidt points to the Facebook like button and the Twitter retweet has been
#
particularly toxic because it incentivized a kind of performative behavior because that is the only
#
way that you could actually get more likes, more retweets, more dopamine. Right. And, you know,
#
another example is many apps earlier you're in an app, you press a back button, you go out of the
#
app. But now many apps have been redesigned. So you press a back button and the page refreshes
#
and you can't help but see what new thing has come up there. So you're kind of trapped into that.
#
And this strikes me as therefore something that, you know, makes it possible for a savvy state
#
to not just take control of its own citizens if it masters this, but also of that of, you know,
#
other countries in informational warfare like this, like the allegations against how Russia
#
interfered in the 2016 elections, for example. But does this then become a necessary part of
#
the and a more important part than one would otherwise think, you know, otherwise one would
#
think, okay, this is a sideways thing. It's like soft power. You think about it a little bit, but
#
no need to spend too many resources on it. But now it would strike me that, you know, any sensible
#
authoritarian, you know, while you may be limited by your top down thinking and obviously your
#
dissenters being decentralized and so on and so forth, radically networked societies, as you guys
#
put it, and we have an episode on that also would eventually have an upper hand because of high
#
gain reasons. But, you know, if you can adequately master these tools, then you can go a long way.
#
And China particularly comes to mind because China is advanced enough in technology to do this.
#
And plus they have their own ecosystem, which is cut off from the rest of the world in a sense.
#
And that's one of the things you predicted that you could have parallel internets existing
#
across the world. How does this then affect the future of international relations and public policy?
#
I absolutely agree with you, Amit. Just like we were thinking, talking about nuclear weapons,
#
giving you a sudden offset with respect to other forms of conventional accumulation of power,
#
right? Where you get an economic power, gradually you also build it into military power. Again,
#
it helps you to build economic power. So in a way, nuclear powers help you offset that suddenly.
#
Similarly, in the information age, getting control of this information warfare can sort of,
#
you know, offset some of the other dimensions of power where you might not be great at, you know?
#
So that's why it's an attractive thing where a lot of authoritarians would want to have this
#
control. And we are seeing that play out in many places, right? So that I completely agree that that
#
is one domain that you would want. The other angle to this was, and we were talking, there's
#
this great book, by the way, called The Revolt of the Public by Martin Garry. I don't know if you've
#
read it. It talks about this idea about how there is no monopoly over the information sphere now,
#
right? So because there's no monopoly over the information sphere, a lot of failure sets the
#
agenda in terms of, especially in free societies, right? Because you can actually point the failures
#
and a lot of these extremes make a lot of news. So what his thesis was that the West's failure
#
sets the agenda on a lot of things that get discussed. So, and the regime sort of accumulates
#
pain points, whether it is police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures,
#
or boss responses to disasters, these are his words. So these sort of things, these failures
#
can no longer be concealed. They can't be explained away easily. So in fact, if you are on the other
#
side, you can sort of amplify these kinds of failures, try to keep pumping this kind of
#
narrative that, you know, your system is flawed, see the kind of failures that are happening,
#
etc. And that sort of leads to this idea that, you know, you constantly think of whether you are
#
on the failing side, on the wrong side, you are actually influencing the way we think. That's why
#
I started right in the beginning, talking about narratives and the importance of narratives,
#
right? So no monopoly on the information sphere can play out in this way. I don't know if recently
#
the economist also has this great article on how social media is turbocharging the export of
#
America's political culture. And a lot of that gets discussed, right? We are always discussing
#
American politics in India for because of these radically networked societies. And the idea is
#
because a lot of the discussions there are about failure, about how democracy is flawed, how
#
democracy has not been able to achieve what it wants to. Actually, if you are on the other side,
#
like Russia and China, you can probably use that as a weapon to constantly amplify that kind of a
#
narrative. Instead of talking about success, instead of talking about all the things that Steven
#
Pinker keeps telling us about, right? So that is something that can be weaponized and is being
#
weaponized. So yeah, radically networked societies have their advantages and also some of the fallouts
#
that can come because of this kind of information warfare angle to it. So, you know, so here's a
#
question now that Russia has done what it's done. And your overwhelming sense is that it's not going
#
to work out for Russia in the long run. You know, whether it's a negative sum game and all of us
#
suffer and all of that is a different matter. But how does it affect the dynamic in times to come
#
with China being a player in this picture? Because, you know, you would then naturally expect Russia
#
and China to become even firmer allies after this with, you know, helping each other in whatever
#
different ways they can. And China would be really good at some of this information warfare stuff.
#
I'm guessing on some margins, good on some margins, not so good, like in terms of advanced tech and AI
#
and all is going to be very good. On some margins, like maybe ossified ways of thinking at this
#
and not the kind of distributed decentralized way of innovative dissenters, it would be a little
#
behind. But what is then in the medium to long term, the scenario that you see playing out,
#
like is there going to be this new sort of big walls equilibrium, which you spoke about earlier,
#
or is there sort of, you know, what are kind of the dangers that lie ahead and where do you
#
sort of see this going? Because my sense is that in a sense, you know, and I could be wrong and
#
correct me, but my sense is that the US could do nothing here, that, you know, that so far,
#
what you see from the early response, it feels a bit ineffectual, you know, that it has also
#
been forced to take a step back, that it has also perhaps lost credibility as a hegemon, as it were.
#
Yeah. So let's talk about the Russia-China angle. See, one thing that we can sort of infer from this
#
conflict is because of the response of other states and what it does to the Russian economy,
#
Russia becomes in the long and medium term, a smaller power than it currently is, right?
#
Because of all these pressures that are being applied, I mean, it can't even export its
#
equipment, even if this war continues for longer, maybe there will also be restrictions on their
#
oil and energy industry, right? So that is a real consequence to Russia. Now, what then it does is,
#
though Russia becomes a smaller economy, then it has no other option but to collaborate more
#
with the only other power, which will be sort of look the other way, which is China, right?
#
So also we should remember Russia and China also have deep long-term divergence of interest, right?
#
And that's why the Sino-Soviet split also happened way back. And even now there are
#
genuine things like what has to be done in Central Asia, etc. These are areas of contestations.
#
They have also had a border conflict, etc. So those are for now suppressed because Russia has
#
no other options, right? And China also needs Russia in the sense because of the Arctic,
#
the Arctic opening up huge amount of mineral resources, etc., which China gets access to
#
because of its relationship with Russia. So what I see is Russia becomes probably a smaller
#
power than it currently is. And hence, it aligns more with China rather than sort of breaking out
#
on its own and trying to do things on its own because of the restricted options. So in that way,
#
sort of that new Cold War trend that we were thinking gets accelerated, right? So Russia
#
has to take help of China and China would also want to extract more out of this bargain because
#
of Russia's lesser options now. And on the other hand, because Russia is now so central
#
to this entire conversation, Europe, on the other hand, sort of becomes more allied with the US,
#
right? Because of centrality of Europe and the questions of Ukraine, etc. So that way,
#
you are seeing more polarization of power happening over the long and medium term.
#
So yeah, many people say that probably over time, Russia and China will split because they have
#
inherent divergences on these issues. But I sort of agree with the view that that's not happening
#
anytime soon. It's more likely that Russia and China will collaborate on a lot of things
#
and tilting towards more of what China wants than what Russia wants because of how things are
#
stacked up currently. And what also strikes me is that China must be sitting and looking at this
#
current crisis with a little bit of a giggle and, you know, kind of enjoying the show because,
#
in a sense, the rest of the world has proved a little more ineffectual than you would have
#
imagined. And that therefore means that, you know, it's got to be thinking that tomorrow,
#
if we march into Arunachal, you know, the international community is going to make noises,
#
but there's not really much they can do. I mean, there's certainly nothing India can do,
#
you know, our leverage, it feels to me and tell me if I'm wrong, our leverage is extremely limited
#
in terms of in military terms is really nothing we can do and economic terms is nothing we can do.
#
You know, the last time something happened, we banned TikTok. So, you know, and so what's the
#
deal there? How is, you know, marching into Arunachal or whatever parts of it they want,
#
and some of which they've already done, as a dress rehearsal for eventually doing something
#
similar in Taiwan, are all of those possibilities more on the table than before? Because, you know,
#
the best kind of Ukraine, Ukraine. Yeah, so I actually don't agree at all there is because
#
the essential differences, India is a nuclear power, right? So, and if you see what China has
#
been able to do is, it's a lot of this salami slicing, take a part of a land where it is
#
contested, where there are also no people, no Indians, right? So those, those are the areas
#
which China can do and Indian government is still trying to find a way out of that. But Arunachal
#
is where, you know, we Indians live there. If there is this idea that, I mean, the again,
#
the same thing applies, you know, you are actually attacking a nuclear power in a way that nuclear,
#
then there is an option for them to respond as they desire. So I don't think even China would
#
want that it's too high a cost to pay for them as well, you know, barring if there is complete
#
craziness, which happens. So in, and if you see what China has done over the last few years is
#
again, this accurately, as you said, they know that to an extent, they can push things and no
#
other countries will respond. So that's why you see a lot of this, you know, take this ridge here,
#
fear in the South China Sea or take a bit of land there. That is the extent to which China can go
#
against India and India can retaliate. Also a lot of Indian responses are also on the table.
#
It's not just that the border is completely blocked and India can't do the same thing to China,
#
you know, those options are also open. And in the Indian military, I'm sure as many of these plans
#
to do a quid pro quo wherever China does things on its side. And at the border,
#
India has enough capability to increase presence for let's say one, two years to match the force,
#
you know, so that I think it's a different thing. Russia, Ukraine is not comparable to
#
India, China at all, especially on Arunachal and things, questions of that sort. So that is
#
different. Now let's go to the Taiwan question. Yes. On Taiwan, there is also a lot of now
#
commentaries, et cetera, thinking that does this make something like China occupying Taiwan more
#
likely, et cetera. But also we should remember the USS security commitments on Taiwan question
#
are a lot, lot more. And it matters a lot, lot more to it than what has happened in Ukraine,
#
right? That again, Ukraine was a, it was a question debated from a long time, a country which came
#
into being into 1991, et cetera. There were a lot of, but Taiwan question is a slightly different
#
one. I think us also has it's a lot more to lose if that were to happen, right? I mean, in many
#
angles, you can think of Taiwan being the center of semiconductors, also this idea of this entire
#
Indo-Pacific construct that USS has been talking about USS close relationships with Japan, South
#
Korea, and Taiwan itself, their military bases that a lot of things get questioned if they were
#
to allow China to walk in, right? So that's where they have a lot more to lose. There's a lot more
#
focus on that question than it was on the Ukraine thing. So yeah, maybe China, in fact, I would say,
#
because Russia has now given a template of what can happen, it becomes that much more unlikely
#
because a lot of nation states now know what kind of thing can play out. And there are already
#
conversations on how Taiwan can be helped so that such a thing doesn't get repeated. So
#
that also sort of becomes more unlikely. A lot of nation states are thinking of that already.
#
So yeah, so firstly, thanks for disagreeing because I feel really no one will mess with
#
Arunachal. So that's good to know. But again, perhaps a noob question on the China-Taiwan thing
#
that if China does decide that fine, we're going to go in, you know, what does the US specifically
#
do? Because over here, they really couldn't do much. Obviously, it's completely different.
#
Taiwan is way more central to the world economy and way more important to the US and say Ukraine
#
is so in terms of interest way greater. But what do they do in practical terms? You know,
#
if they find out like they found out the date when Russia is planning to get into Ukraine,
#
say they find out a date when China is planning to get into Taiwan, what do you do? What leverage
#
do you have? What's the game? Yeah, so if one is like, you know, there is also this, a lot of
#
conversation in the US military circles of how can you deter China? That's the idea, right? You
#
eventually don't want to reach that situation itself. So there is a lot of things in what would
#
go in this deterrence package. So a lot of things people are talking about that, you know, if you
#
were to come into Taiwan, we'll destroy the semiconductor industry itself, all those of
#
fantasies of military planners are there. But this idea is that there are ways to deter China
#
right now, make it very costly for them if they were to do something in Taiwan, you know, and
#
there are these options, you know, whether on the military front or the technology front says that
#
even if they were to get control of Taiwan, they will not get the returns of that sort of act. So
#
that's what is being shaped a lot in and if you look at this, Taiwan and a lot of those countries
#
are also talking about say nuclear submarines, etc. themselves, right? So a lot of the conversations
#
which are off the table earlier. So for example, Japan has been with the pacifist constitution
#
from a long time, but recently the former PM Shinzo Abe also talked about that, you know, can
#
we now change our stance? Can there be a nuclear powered submarines, etc. in that area, right? So
#
now the stakes are being, there's an attempt to raise China, raise the stakes of any such sort of
#
invasion, you know, so the idea is to say that if you were to do this, there will also be a nuclear
#
consequence, there will be a lot to pay for. So don't do it, right? So that's what any country
#
can do. Beyond that, there is nothing else you can do. You raise the costs for such an attack and
#
those conversations are already happening on nuclear powered submarines in East Asia,
#
increasing some of those there. So that is the stance that US and others are taking.
#
But can you give concrete examples of what are the ways to deter China, for example, so you can
#
talk about, hey, that, you know, you can talk about sanctions, you can talk about, you know,
#
how you won't get the benefits if you kind of invade them, you can talk about the possibility
#
of nuclear submarines in the future. But apart from that, what are the concrete ways in which
#
China can be sort of deterred, which are credible for China? Isn't this credible enough that you if
#
you were to attack Taiwan, you will have a nuclear consequence, you will have things to pay for,
#
I think that itself is a big credible threat. Why would you want to do that? Right? So I think
#
these are all these are all credible threats. I don't know. I mean, let's say that they say
#
this and let's say China walks into Taiwan tomorrow. Is the US actually going to use nuclear weapons?
#
Yeah, US probably won't. But there are others in that region. That's why I read the ideas.
#
Can you arm the other states as well with this? That's the conversation which is going to happen.
#
Right. So the so the unpredictability for the Chinese kind of goes up.
#
Yeah, that's one way. So tell me now about India's perspective in all of this. Like,
#
how do we sort of look at Russia? And you mentioned earlier that there are three ways in
#
which we see relations with Russia, and which which might determine the what we choose to do,
#
what we should do, so on and so forth. So can you elaborate upon that?
#
Yeah, so this is a very interesting question, right? So again, I had written this hum apke
#
hai kaun kind of question, right? So that's the who what are we of Russia. So the three kinds of
#
arguments that I have heard, right? So one argument is the strategic autonomy argument,
#
which we discussed earlier, the fact that you align or you acting in favor of Russia in on any
#
of these questions is itself a sign of strategic autonomy. That's one way of thinking, right? So
#
and that has a strong resonance with a lot of people in Delhi still, right? So and we discussed
#
why this is sort of probably problematic, because strategic autonomy itself is a function of power,
#
right? So that's what one thing we discussed. The second way to think of it is in anthropomorphic
#
terms, right? That Russia helped us in 1971 war, Russia has been a reliable partner. So how can we
#
ditch them at this point of time, right? Again, doesn't make sense because international relations
#
are not familiar relations or relations between human beings. Interests are more important than
#
your friends or there are no friends, there are no enemies, right? Interests are what they are.
#
So in that sense, again, this doesn't make sense. And also, there is one long standing
#
narrative that Russia has been a reliable and super reliable partner. So again, I was thinking
#
of what does super reliability mean, you know, in real terms. So super reliability, in my definition
#
would be when a state A is doing something for state B, even though it is not in interest of
#
state A, right? So you are like sacrificing something in, especially for a state. That is
#
what a thinking of a lot of people in India is with respect to Russia, because they helped in
#
the 1971 war, etc, right? So again, help itself is not a right term, because as Nitin was mentioning,
#
we'd actually signed, we had allied with them effectively three months before the war. So what
#
they were doing was effectively in their interest to stop US from doing what US could, right? So
#
they were at best, we had common interests with them, and they were acting on those grounds,
#
right? So I don't agree with them being like a super reliable partner, etc. Okay, so that is the
#
second way of thinking. The third way of thinking about the India-Russia relationship is just
#
in terms of very realistic terms, the fact that India and Russia have very close defense
#
relationship, you know, and that I think I find some sympathy with that. Yes, that argument makes
#
sense that some estimates suggest that, you know, 50-60% of our defense equipments come from Russia,
#
not just small equipments, but also Russia has partnered with India on things, which others
#
haven't till now, right? So nuclear submarines are thought, are talked about, the BrahMos missile is
#
talked about. Now, these were things that were not possible or other countries were not willing to
#
trade with India for a long time, right? Especially because of the Cold War and etc. And the fact that
#
India had allied with Soviet Union after 1971 effectively. So those were things which were not
#
possible then. So I agree with this argument that we probably need Russia in the short run because
#
of this partnership. But I would say that, and a lot of other people have also said that this idea
#
of you being 60% dependent on one state is absolutely strategic folly and strategic foolishness.
#
And a lot of government policy now has been to move away from that. You know, so over the last
#
few years, if you see, there is one, at least develop the partnership with Russia so that you
#
have other leverage points, not just them giving you weapons, right? And the other is that you also
#
buy from partners with whom you have much, much broader interests, right? So like US, France,
#
etc. So that is already shaping up. And I think that would then allow us to have more options.
#
The other thing which I would change is that a lot of people like they say that Russia gave us the
#
equipments that other countries didn't. But that is not something which can't be changed now,
#
right? So if you see the geopolitics has significantly changed now with China being
#
the primary threat, actually US has a chance to tell India that we can give you the weapons that
#
others couldn't and we ourselves didn't at that point of time, but we can change their opinion.
#
So for example, you have already seen this happening with respect to the AUKUS deal where
#
Australia, UK and US have agreed to transfer nuclear powered submarines to Australia,
#
which was something like this was off the table even in three, four years ago, right? But that
#
has happened now because of the change geopolitical circumstances. So I think now there is a chance
#
for the US to make that if they want India on their side and India can also make this offer that
#
let's deepen the military partnership to areas which were forbidden earlier because of the
#
change geopolitical realities. And that will help us also reduce our dependence on Russia
#
and in many ways. So I think that's one another way to think of it. So out of these three ways,
#
I have some sympathy with the third way of thinking, which is a more realistic way.
#
The other two are just ideological, but and also I think the more realist way of doing that would
#
be reduced dependence and form a new sort of relationship on the military terms with the West
#
and it is possible now. Yeah. I mean, that's a fantastic point about the win-win game between
#
US and India. If we kind of change that balance and our dependence on Russian weapons, otherwise
#
is something like Europe's dependence on their pipelines, for example, instead of opening up
#
their options with LNG and so on. And we've mentioned 71 a few times. I have a couple of
#
great episodes on that period of time. One with both of us, Srinath Raghavan. One is on the US
#
involvement in South Asia through the decades, which also covers that period, which is fantastic.
#
And one on the Bangladesh war itself, which covers in great detail all the geopolitics
#
of that period. So I'll link those from the show notes. Now, my other sort of question is about
#
how much of foreign policy, like we've spoken earlier about how the foreign policy establishment
#
is something that's almost independent of politics or has been so far that there is
#
a continuity that comes and that runs across different governments and different parties and
#
so on. But what is the possibility of future foreign policy being affected? I won't say
#
dictated, but being affected by domestic considerations and domestic politics. So on the
#
one hand, there would be domestic political compulsions that you always have to take a
#
nationalistic line and show yourself as a strong guy out there. And, you know, the kind of rhetoric
#
that was floating around against China, for example, a couple of years back when TikTok
#
was banned would again, you know, and you could enter a vicious circle kind of situation there,
#
purely at a rhetorical level. And the other angle would be things like social media and civil
#
society pressure, which, you know, where there will be pressure to do posturing and take this
#
stand or take that stand, morals, principles, all of that nonsense, ignoring, you know,
#
the hard reality of what interests underground are. Now, typically, rational foreign policy
#
establishment would not take that so seriously, but politically, it might become difficult. So,
#
you know, how big a danger is that of our foreign policy being led astray by domestic politics? And
#
are there sort of examples from other countries in the world where this has actually happened and
#
things have gone bad? Yeah. So, yeah, like we were discussing earlier, domestic policymaking does
#
have an impact on foreign policy as well, there will be. So a lot of, for example, think Richard
#
Hanania has this book on public choice theory and the illusion of grand strategy recently. But that
#
book talks about how the military industrial complex, etc., has had a lot of an overbearing
#
effect on the US supposed grand strategy decisions that we talk about, right? So we attribute it to
#
grand strategy. But if you think of it, it will, it might be because of not just political interest,
#
domestic interest also. Now, now there's this contested view, right? It's not something maybe
#
should take on face value, but it is one view. So similarly, there are other examples also that
#
there will be impact of domestic affairs on our international relations as well. I think it is
#
particularly so in the case of Pakistan, right? Because of this idea of the new idea that is
#
being put out, this idea of India and Pakistan, etc., right? So that is definitely the case. But
#
on the case of China, which is what the larger conversation now is, I don't think there is so
#
much divergence, you know, there is in fact a lot of convergence across parties. And if you see there
#
is this, the strongman idea and all are there, but I don't think, for example, the PM has even
#
spoken about China and taken its name as with regards to the border conflict, at least, right?
#
So there is this idea that you're leaving space for a negotiation to happen. That I think is
#
understood across party lines, that probably some form of resolution of the border dispute is
#
on the interest. So that space is still being left, right? If you look at the rhetoric,
#
there is a lot of rhetoric on Twitter, but forget that if you look at the government rhetoric,
#
it's not been that case where they have even said, in fact, if you see recent arguments,
#
many people have also said that the US wanted to take a much more anti-China stance on some of
#
the things that have happened. But the Indian government said that back off, I think we will
#
sort it out on our own. We don't need. So in fact, that's the conversation currently, you know,
#
and that's why the people on the US side are thinking that, are you going to be with us also
#
with or against China or not? You know, so that that's the current level of conversation instead
#
of this idea that, you know, domestic interest will lead to some taking up arms against China
#
on other things. So that is what I would say on the interplay of domestic interests, domestic
#
relationships and international affairs. Yeah, to the other thing, there is some continuity
#
in international relations. But like you also mentioned a lot of this, a lot of this also has
#
been happenstance due to contingent realities, etc. Right. Think of the 1966, 67 devaluation,
#
where this there was this idea that, you know, we'll do devaluation according to what also there
#
was an overwhelming recommendation, probably we'll get closer to US. But the relief that was
#
supposed to come from the US side didn't happen. And then the domestic politics of Indira Gandhi
#
trying to stand out against the other adversaries in Congress took out and then she went into a
#
totally different direction and went socialist, right? So maybe if that if the attitude of US,
#
etc. would have been different, we wouldn't have seen, we would have probably seen devaluation,
#
probably would have seen that economic growth and reform pathway happen much sooner rather than what
#
it happened in 1991, eventually, right? So even those things could have happened. So I would say,
#
largely, India's national foreign policy, India's foreign policy has been realistic,
#
realist. And I don't think any other nation state would say it is not realist, everyone acts
#
according to their interests. But the inevitability in direction is not a given, you know, there could
#
have been different paths taken. But we took that path because of one how we think of the world and
#
also because of some contingent realities which happened during that time. Excellent. Let's sort
#
of also now at this point talk about unintended consequences of the of the conflict because the
#
world is complex and things can always spiral out of control, you know, there is the oil situation,
#
you know, and you simply don't know, you know, where this butterfly effect can really land up,
#
that oil prices go up and how it affects the domestic politics of different countries and
#
how relations between them are reconfigured. We simply don't know that. And that's just one way.
#
And another unintended consequences, of course, is that hacking attempts over the last couple
#
of weeks have gone down massively because the Russians are busy doing other things and they've
#
kind of been cut off. So give me an opportunity cost. Yeah, so give me a sense of sort of the
#
possible unintended consequences, both bad and good that can come out of this, if you might care
#
to speculate. Yeah, no, this is a tough one. Yeah. One thing again, because now the relationship,
#
for example, between Russia and China becomes less of partners and more of one being overwhelmingly
#
more powerful than the other. So it might expose some weaknesses, accelerate them, which couldn't
#
have been done earlier. Right. So for example, China can get more aggressive with respect to Russia
#
on some of the things because they know that they are not the same power or they'll have
#
consequences to bear now. So those kinds of things are one unintended consequence that might happen.
#
So that idea, which people are talking about, about possibly a future Russia, China split
#
might get in one scenario, right. Tough to predict. That is one. The second one is, yeah,
#
it's a wake up call to a lot of countries in Europe as well. Also that the idea that military
#
power, etc. needs to be beefed up. You can't depend on the US itself for a lot of these
#
security guarantees. So you will see a lot of movement on that front as well. So that's
#
possibly depends. You want to see it as a positive or negative thing. So there might be some sort of
#
more focus on military power as such, rather than other instruments of power as well.
#
So that is another unintended consequence. That's it. I am not able to think of more right now.
#
But yeah, I mean, the future is unknown unknowns and all of that. So, so a final question before
#
I will tell you, I think I should end this episode relating a mother friend, the story,
#
my good friend Arun Shonoy told me about how Mr. Madhyaar and Mrs. Madhyaar met and fell in love.
#
But before that, final kind of question on this that if you are to say, look ahead 10 years,
#
and from, you know, and this is in a sense, an extension of the question on unintended
#
consequences, but not quite. But if you if you want to look ahead 10 years and just see the world
#
order and how things are on the global stage, what's kind of the worst case scenario and the
#
best case scenario? Yeah, that's a good question. See, I think one, the worst case scenario for India
#
will be very India itself is a reduced power rate. So and that's why I think a lot of this
#
relationship with the West, etc. also matters because it is central to our economic power,
#
right? If we want to gain more strength in many dimensions, you have to collaborate with others.
#
We talked about technology, etc. being global supply chains coming into play there. So those
#
things are really important. So the worst case scenario for me is forget about the world order,
#
it is in a world where we think of autarky, where we think we can do everything on our own,
#
we don't need us, we don't need China. The best solution for all this is Atma Nirbhartha. If we
#
go around that path, I think that is the worst case scenario. And once our power reduces,
#
no one will want India to I mean, they won't India becomes a less important power at the
#
international stage, right? You're just one more country. A lot of people I think think India is
#
already there, you know, but I think it is still touch and go, you know, over the last 10 years,
#
in fact, in economic terms, we haven't done that well. The if you look at the narratives in the
#
2006 to 10, it was about India, China, right? Can India be a competitor to China? Now it's
#
not even being taught. And then next, if we go down that path, probably we'll be again compared
#
to Pakistan, right? So that's like the worst scenario that I can think of. So for me, that's
#
why I think this idea of Atma Nirbhartha and all is good as a narrative, but it should mean
#
to build strength. I call it Atma Shakti is more important than Atma Nirbhartha right used to build
#
strength not to become autarkic and try to become self sufficient in everything that's not possible
#
in today's scenario. So that I think is the worst possible scenario for in the best possible
#
scenario and I'm thinking in the range of acceptable I mean, you can think of others, I think one
#
scenario which is which relates to the current conflict is where India is actually able to
#
maintain relationships with Russia, US and China, all of them, right? So it's a power which all of
#
them want on your side. That's the possibly the best scenario you could be in. Then you are,
#
you can have a military relationship with Russia, you can have economic relationships with the West
#
and with China as well, right? So that is possibly the best scenario over the 10 year period. Now,
#
if you want to talk about the next two, three years, I would say with relating to this conflict,
#
India's scenarios depend on two variables. And this is the analysis we've done at Takshashila.
#
Some of us that one variable is the state of Russia, China ties. And the second is how much
#
restrained US shows towards India's Russia ties, right? Because they are not going away anytime
#
soon because of our military relations. So the best case scenario is where India where US is
#
shows a lot of restrained consideration for India's relationship with Russia. And on the other end,
#
Russia, China ties sort of become weakening, right? That way then India is also is more confident of
#
Russia supplying military weapons if it were to come into conflict with China, right? If India,
#
China things escalate and if Russia is can be depended on given that now it is for its military
#
supplies, then we are in a better scenario, right? So that is possibly the best scenario we can be
#
in the next two, three years. The worst possible case, of course, is in the next two, three years,
#
if Russia, China ties are really strong, which means then you can forget about Russia being a
#
reliable partner, right? Because Russia is already dependent on China in turn. Why would it help you
#
or give you weapons when you are actually attacking its core ally, which is China, right? So we can
#
forget about that. That is the worst case. And on the other variable, if US also takes a very
#
stringent stance on India's relationship with Russia, right? So that becomes the really tough
#
situation for India to be in. So I guess the strategy would be to try to move as far as
#
possible to that quadrant where US understands India's equation with Russia and also that
#
Russia-China relations probably are weakened over time, probably through more interaction with the
#
West, also emphasizing India's own growth and India's own economic power. That's the best India
#
can hope for. Well, there's that old Chinese curse, which goes, may you live in interesting
#
times. And I think we do seem to be living in interesting times. Not sure if it's a curse or
#
not, but let's see where it goes. So I want to end with the story of how Mr. Madhiyar met Mrs. Madhiyar
#
and you at the end of this as a challenge for you Pranay, you've got to give me a foreign policy
#
lesson out of this, right? So I'm just making sure you pay attention during the story. So both
#
the Madhiyars, by the way, have passed away long ago. They'd probably be in their 90s if they were
#
alive. So this is a story that Naren Shinoi tells me that Mr. Madhiyar, while going to work,
#
goes to a particular bus stop every day, the young Mr. Madhiyar, and catches a bus and all that.
#
And there one day, while he's waiting at the bus stop, and perhaps the atmosphere is slightly
#
overcast and, you know, a spell of rain in the air, but not quite rain, you know, buses going by,
#
he's looking around casually, suddenly he stops because he spots the future Mrs. Madhiyar. Though
#
it must be noted at this point that even if the impulse comes within him to recognize her as a
#
future Mrs. Madhiyar, she is not yet Mrs. Madhiyar. He doesn't even know her name. But he spots this
#
lovely lady and, you know, stops breathing for a few moments, remembers thankfully to breathe,
#
otherwise the story would not continue, and is completely spellbound. And then Mrs. Madhiyar gets
#
into a bus and she goes away and then Mr. Madhiyar's bus comes a little later and he gets into it and
#
he goes away. So the next day, Mr. Madhiyar goes again at the same time and, you know, and she's
#
there again and she takes the same bus and she goes and he takes the same bus and he goes. So
#
when he's on that bus, he misses his stop because his mind is somewhere else and it's, you know,
#
he's on an entirely different journey and human beings are good at patterns. So the day after that,
#
he doesn't actually have to go to office that particular day, but he goes out to the bus stop
#
anyway. And there she is and she gets into the bus and he can't gather up the courage to go and
#
talk to her. I don't remember which year this was, 1830s, no, probably a little later, 1940s,
#
possible, but it's a long, long, long, long time ago. So Mr. Madhiyar doesn't gather up the courage
#
to kind of go to her, but of course he is very attracted and now he's, you know, earlier he was
#
living in one world and now there is a parallel world and that parallel world has just her,
#
everything else seems the same, but you know. So one day, one day, this transformative moment
#
happens in his life where, you know, he sees her, gets into a bus and just as she gets in,
#
he realizes that she's dropped her pink raincoat. She's left it behind at the bus stop and she's
#
gotten into the bus. So he grabs his moment. Mr. Madhiyar jumps up and you've got to realize that
#
before this, that Mr. Madhiyar is a scholarly kind of nerdy geeky person, not much given to physical
#
exercise and so on. But now he jumps up and he jumps and he picks up this raincoat and he starts
#
running after the bus and the bus picks up speed and Mr. Madhiyar picks up speed and the bus goes
#
faster and Mr. Madhiyar goes faster and then somehow Mr. Madhiyar catches up with the bus.
#
He jumps into the bus, swinging in, holding, you know, one of those handles or whatever they
#
have on the side of the bus and there she is and he drops the raincoat at her foot and immediately
#
he jumps back out because he's got to go back and catch his bus. After all, one has to be practical
#
but he's done the job and he somehow manages to get back to the raincoat and he realizes that there
#
is this policeman waiting for him looking incredibly angry because you see there was a case of mistaken
#
identity here that raincoat was not the future Mrs. Madhiyar's raincoat, it was this policeman's
#
raincoat and so the policeman hauls Mr. Madhiyar off to jail and that is where Mr. Shanoi ended
#
his story and I said that bro, can you kindly tell me how Mr. Madhiyar and Mrs. Madhiyar then
#
eventually spoke after this and Shanoi said that no, no, I didn't ask that, I was so charmed by the
#
story but the way Mr. Madhiyar got into the story is that he said that that is the day I decided I
#
would marry her because after all I went to jail for her. So it's a beautiful story, any foreign
#
policy lessons you like from the earlier Mr. and Mrs. Madhiyar story we got the Russia-Ukraine story
#
so what can you derive from this? Yeah, I mean miscalculations can have strange consequences
#
that is one thing you can think of and yeah I think I'll really like that quote by Will and
#
Ariel Durant in their book that states have our instincts without our restraints so yeah so
#
some of these things that's why we try to anthropomorphize sometimes some things look like
#
they are human relations in the state context international context but yeah the states don't
#
have our restraints so states can do what they want and this is in fact if you think about the
#
older Mr. Madhiyar he has restraints he's sending his wife out to fight the intruder but the younger
#
Mr. Madhiyar you know has instincts but no restraints and that's a great thing and that in a sense it's
#
a kind of a metaphor for youth itself so Pranay on this profound note I mean thank you for this
#
profound note and thank you for giving me so much of your time and so many of your insights. Thank you Amit.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode and want to learn more about foreign policy consider doing
#
Takshashilal GCCP course in defense and foreign affairs which introduces students to the role of
#
military and economic power in global affairs the link is in the show notes you can follow Pranay
#
on twitter at Pranay Kotas you can follow Nitin at Akon A-C-O-R-N you can follow me at Amit Verma
#
A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A you can browse past episodes of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot
#
i-n thank you for listening and hey listen do not invade anyone this week not this week thank you.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of the scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the
#
production of the show you can go over to scene unseen dot i-n slash support and contribute any
#
amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking thank you.
