World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

by Henry Kissinger

Ultimately, Britain found itself conceiving of an Indian entity whose unity was based on the security of a continental swath of territories encompassing the contemporary states of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Something akin to an Indian national interest was defined, ascribed to a geographic unit that was, in fact, run as a state even in the absence (it was assumed) of an Indian nation. That policy based the security of India on British naval supremacy in the Indian Ocean; on friendly, or at least nonthreatening, regimes as far-flung as Singapore and Aden; and on a nonhostile regime at the Khyber Pass and the Himalayas. In the north, Britain fended off czarist Russia’s advances through the complex forays of spies, explorers, and indigenous surrogates backed up by small contingents of British forces, in what came to be known as the “Great Game” of Himalayan geostrategy. It also edged India’s borders with China north toward Tibet—an issue that arose again in China’s war with India in 1962. Contemporary analogues to these policies have been taken over as key elements of the foreign policy of postindependence India. They amount to a regional order for South Asia, whose linchpin would be India, and the opposition of any country’s attempts, regardless of its domestic structure, to achieve a threatening concentration of power in the neighboring territories.