How should foreign policy be conducted?
We Indians have this fantasy that we are in a morality play where the US is the villain and we are the good guy. There are two versions of this fantasy. In the leftists’ version, we are actually leading a revolution of the third world countries against the imperialist superpower. In the rightists’ version, we are a wannabe superpower, but we are nicer.
So both sides criticise the US – just about any criticism will do, even contradictory ones.
I cannot do that. To criticise, I need a standard of behaviour and I need to be able to say that this standard was not upheld. I have to be able to say: “X was the expected behaviour. The US did not do X. Hence the US is wrong.”
That brings me back to my first question: How should foreign policy be conducted? Or, What is X?
Is it: Do not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs?
If so, what were we doing in East Pakistan circa 1971?
Is it Act in self-interest?
If so, why did we send in the IPKF to Sri Lanka in 1987? (and why did Rajiv Gandhi train LTTE militants?) Sri Lanka was our Vietnam. No one knows why we went there and what we were expected to achieve there. All we know is that we needlessly lost the lives of a lot of our soldiers.
Is it Be friendly with democratic governments and oppose dictatorships?
If so, what are we doing in Myanmar? That country is ruled by a gang of thugs who have kept its legitimate government out of power. Unfortunately, the rebels fighting the Myanmar junta are in cahoots with insurgents in the northeast. Do we co-operate with those thugs or do the right thing?
Is it Respect world opinion?
If so what are we doing about the 1948 UN resolution? Why are we unilaterally claiming that Kashmir is a bilateral issue?
I am not pointing out India’s foreign policy record to claim that we cannot cast the first stone because we too have sinned. Rather, I am pointing out that there is no single criterion under which we can judge all foreign policy actions. We can have multiple criteria, but they will often contradict one another and there is much more scope for error.
What happens, for example, when our self-interest requires us to ally with a bunch of thugs? What happens when we have to choose between two gangs of thugs? What if we aren’t sure which of the two gangs is the lesser evil?
What will we do if the Maoist rebels take over Nepal, or if the pro-China king comes to an agreement with pro-China Maoists and establishes a hostile government there? What if he Nepal becomes a base for ISI activities? Is it okay to use dirty tricks to destabilize that government and install a friendly one?
In other words, X is indeterminate. I cannot propose a set of hard standards by which to judge a country’s foreign policy. The best I can come up with is:
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Act in long-term self-interest.
Don’t be a complete bastard while doing so.
Don’t get into something unless you know how to get out.
Do as little as possible.
Even by these loose standards, the US falls short. They got into the Vietnam quagmire. They trained terrorists in Afghanistan. They supported dictatorships in South America.
But then, so does every other country. When I evaluate the US, I ba?ance it out against the good it has done – in Japan, South Korea, Kosovo.
India is now developing global interests, and facing global threats. As it does, it will face some of the same choices that faced the US, and I daresay it will tend to make the same mistakes as the US did. It is counterproductive to oppose everything that the US does instead of learning both from its mistakes and from the things it did right.