World Order

by Henry Kissinger

offers a practical, not a normative, guide to action.

the state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.

Arthashastra.

sets out, with dispassionate clarity, a vision of how to establish and guard a state while neutralizing, subverting, and (when opportune conditions have been established) conquering its neighbors.

power was the dominant reality. It was multidimensional, and its factors were interdependent. All elements in a given situation were relevant, calculable, and amenable to manipulation toward a leader’s strategic aims.

“The conqueror shall [always] endeavor to add to his own power and increase his own happiness.”

Qin Shi Huang (the Emperor who unified China)

states had an obligation to pursue self-interest even more than glory.

the least direct course was often the wisest:

covert intelligence operations

spread rumors to foment discord within and between other states, subvert enemy armies, and “destroy” the King’s opponents at opportune moments.

Kautilya insisted that the purpose of the ruthlessness was to build a harmonious universal empire and uphold the dharma—the timeless moral order whose principles were handed down by the gods. But the appeal to morality and religion was more in the name of practical operational purposes than of principle in its own right—as elements of a conqueror’s strategy and tactics, not imperatives of a unifying concept of order.

the distinguished twentieth-century political theorist Max Weber to conclude that the Arthashastra exemplified “truly radical ‘Machiavellianism’ . . . compared to it, Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.”

The only criterion of virtue he would accept was whether his analysis of the road to victory was accurate or not.

In Kautilya’s counsel, equilibrium, if it e...

The Arthashastra was a guide to conquest, not to the construction of an international order.

China was being unified by its founding Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in 221 B.C.,

For most of this period, the conquerors were too hostile toward each other to permit any one to control the entire region or to extinguish the power of Hindu dynasties in the south. Then, in the sixteenth century, the most skillful of these invaders from the northwest, the Mughals, succeeded in uniting most of the subcontinent under a single rule. The Mughal Empire embodied India’s diverse influences: Muslim in faith, Turkic and Mongol in ethnicity, Persian in elite culture, the Mughals ruled over a Hindu majority fragmented by regional identities.

By deciding after the mutiny to administer India as a single imperial unit, Britain did much to bring such an India into being.

The diverse regions were connected by rail lines and a common language, English.

In the process, Britain reawakened in India the consciousness that it was a single entity under foreign rule and inspired a sentiment that to defeat the foreign influence it had to constitute itself as a nation. Britain’s impact on India was thus similar to Napoleon’s on a Germany whose multiple states had been treated previously only as a geographic, not a national, entity.

Modern India conceived of its independence as a triumph not only of a nation but of universal moral principles. And like America’s Founding Fathers, India’s early leaders equated the national interest with moral rectitude.

We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs and no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage of that country.

The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a “balancer” in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side—as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests.

The essence of this strategy was that it allowed India to draw support from both Cold War camps—securing the military aid and diplomatic cooperation of the Soviet bloc, even while courting American development assistance and the moral support of the U.S. intellectual establishment.

nascent

India found itself involved in a war with China in 1962 and four wars with Pakistan (one of which, in 1971, was carried out under the protection of a freshly signed Soviet defense treaty and ended with the division of India’s principal adversary into two separate states, Pakistan and Bangladesh—greatly improving India’s overall strategic position).

Pancha Shila (Five Principles of Coexistence), these were in effect a more high-minded recapitulation of the Westphalian model for a multipolar order of sovereign states:

With the end of the Cold War, India was freed from many conflicting pressures and some of its socialist infatuations. It engaged in economic reform,

A particular complicating factor will be India’s relations with the larger Muslim world, of which it forms an integral part. India is often classified as an East Asian or South Asian country. But it has deeper historical links with the Middle East and a larger Muslim population than Pakistan itself, indeed than any Muslim country except Indonesia.

A further radicalization of the Arab world or heightened civil conflict in Pakistan could expose India to significant internal pressures.

Like China, it does not hesitate to use distant “barbarians” like the United States to help achieve its regional aims—though in describing their policies, both countries would use more elegant terms.

over the course of the twenty-first century India has felt obliged to play a growing strategic role in Asia and the Muslim world to prevent these regions’ domination by countries or ideologies it considers hostile.

Asian Regional Order?

In the face of Asia’s vast scale and the scope of its diversity, its nations

deal with security and economic issues on a case-by-case basis, not as an expression of formal rules of regional order.

They share a conviction that world order is now rebalancing after an unnatural Western irruption over the past several centuries, but they have drawn vastly different lessons from their historical journeys.

“Sinocentric”

In this traditional concept, China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign government of the world. Its Emperor was treated as a figure of cosmic dimensions and the linchpin between the human and the divine. His purview was not a sovereign state of “China”—that is, the territories immediately under his rule—but “All Under Heaven,” of which China formed the central, civilized part: “the Middle Kingdom,” inspiring and uplifting the rest of humanity.

world order reflected a universal hierarchy, not an equilibrium of competing sovereign states. Every known society was conceived of as being in some kind of tributary relationship with China, based in part on its approximation of Chinese culture; none could reach equality with it. Other monarchs were not fellow sovereigns but earnest pupils in the art of governance, striving toward civilization. Diplomacy was not a bargaining process between multiple sovereign interests but a series of carefully ...

the Great Wall

was begun by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang,

the “five baits”

kowtow—kneeling and touching one’s head to the ground to acknowledge the Emperor’s superior authority—was

two peoples that conquered China—the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchus in the seventeenth—were induced to adopt core elements of Chinese culture to facilitate the administration of a people so numerous and so obdurate in its assumption of cultural superiority.

the first British envoy, George Macartney, arrived in the late eighteenth century, bringing with him some early products of the Industrial Revolution and a letter from King George III proposing free trade and the establishment of reciprocal resident embassies in Beijing and London,

The Emperor saw no need for trade beyond what was already occurring in limited, tightly regulated amounts, because Britain had no goods China desired:

low status of the military in China’s Confucian social hierarchy, expressed in the saying “Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers.”

the middle empire [China]

On October 1, 1949, in Beijing, the victorious Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China with the words “The Chinese people have stood up.”