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

by Henry Kissinger

In 1924, the secular-nationalist leaders of the newly proclaimed Republic of Turkey abolished the principal institution of pan-Islamic unity, the caliphate, and declared a secular state. Henceforth the Muslim world was stranded between the victorious Westphalian international order and the now-unrealizable concept of dar al-Islam. With scant experience, the societies of the Middle East set out to redefine themselves as modern states, within borders that for the most part had no historical roots.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein, of comparable humble origins, practiced a more extreme version of secular military governance: ruling by intimidation and brutality from the early 1970s (at first as de facto strongman, then as President beginning in 1979) to 2003, he sought to overawe the region with his bellicosity. Both Hussein and his ideological ally, Syria’s shrewd and ruthless Hafez al-Assad, entrenched their sectarian minorities over far-larger majority populations (ironically, of opposite orientations—with Sunnis governing majority Shias in Iraq, and the quasi-Shia Alawites governing majority Sunnis in Syria) by avowing pan-Arab nationalism. A sense of common national destiny developed as a substitute for the Islamic vision.

By the end of the 1970s, Middle East crises began to look more and more like the Balkan crises of the nineteenth century—an effort by secondary states to manipulate the rivalries of dominant powers on behalf of their own national objectives.

Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived.

In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system offering the only true form of freedom: freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global implementation of the Quran. The culmination of this process would be “the achievement of the freedom of man on earth—of all mankind throughout the earth.” This would complete the process begun by the initial wave of Islamic expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries, “which is then to be carried throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.” Like all utopian projects, this one would require extreme measures to implement. These Qutb assigned to an ideologically pure vanguard, who would reject the governments and societies prevailing in the region—all of which Qutb branded “unIslamic and illegal”—and seize the initiative in bringing about the new order.

This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.

The Arab Spring started as a new generation’s uprising for liberal democracy. It was soon shouldered aside, disrupted, or crushed. Exhilaration turned into paralysis. The existing political forces, embedded in the military and in religion in the countryside, proved stronger and better organized than the middle-class element demonstrating for democratic principles in Tahrir Square. In practice, the Arab Spring has exhibited rather than overcome the internal contradictions of the Arab-Islamic world and of the policies designed to resolve them.

This experience raises the issue of humanitarian foreign policy. It distinguishes itself from traditional foreign policy by criticizing national interest or balance-of-power concepts as lacking a moral dimension. It justifies itself not by overcoming a strategic threat but by removing conditions deemed a violation of universal principles of justice. The values and goals of this style of foreign policy reflect a vital aspect of the American tradition. If practiced as the central operating concept of American strategy, however, they raise their own dilemmas: Does America consider itself obliged to support every popular uprising against any nondemocratic government, including those heretofore considered important in sustaining the international system? Is every demonstration democratic by definition? Is Saudi Arabia an ally only until public demonstrations develop on its territory? Among America’s principal contributions to the Arab Spring was to condemn, oppose, or work to remove governments it judged autocratic, including the government of Egypt, heretofore a valued ally. For some traditionally friendly governments like Saudi Arabia, however, the central message came to be seen as the threat of American abandonment, not the benefits of liberal reform.

At least three viewpoints are identifiable in Arab attitudes: a small, dedicated, but not very vocal group accepting genuine coexistence with Israel and prepared to work for it; a much larger group seeking to destroy Israel by permanent confrontation; and those willing to negotiate with Israel but justifying negotiations, at least domestically, in part as a means to overcome the Jewish state in stages.

Israel, with a small population (compared with its neighbors) and territory and a width of just 9.3 miles at its narrowest point and some sixty miles at its widest, has hesitated to cede territory, particularly in areas adjoining major population centers, on behalf of what may turn into a revocable document. Its negotiating positions therefore tend to be legalistic, elaborating definitions of security and political assurances that have a combination of theoretical sweep and occasionally grating detail, with a tendency to reinforce the very passions a peace process is designed to overcome.

The conflict of two concepts of world order is embedded in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Israel is by definition a Westphalian state, founded as such in 1947; the United States, its principal ally, has been a steward and key defender of the Westphalian international order. But the core countries and factions in the Middle East view international order to a greater or lesser degree through an Islamic consciousness.

What is today Saudi Arabia emerged from Turkish rule after World War I, when Ibn Saud reunified the various feudal principalities scattered across the Arabian Peninsula and held them together by patriarchal allegiance and religious devotion. The royal family has since faced daunting tasks. It governs tribes living in the traditional nomadism and fiercely loyal to the crown, as well as urban concentrations approaching—in some cases surpassing—those of Western metropoles, though placed like mirages across otherwise barren plateaus. An emerging middle class exists in the context of an age-old, semifeudal sense of reciprocal obligation. Within the limits of an extremely conservative political culture, the ruling princes have combined a monarchy with a system of consensus by which the far-flung members of the extended royal family have some share in decisions, and ordinary citizens have gradually been granted a degree of participation in public life.

Saudi rulers live with the awareness that the covetousness of their neighbors might translate itself into attempted conquest—or, in an era of revolution, potential sponsorship of political or sectarian agitation. Conscious of the fate of nearby nations, they are inevitably ambivalent about economic and social modernization—knowing that an absence of reform may alienate their youthful population, while reform undertaken too rapidly may develop its own momentum and ultimately endanger the cohesion of a country that has known only conservative monarchy. The dynasty has tried to lead the process of social and economic change—within the pattern of its society—precisely in order to control its pace and content. This tactic has allowed the Al Saud to produce just enough change to prevent the accumulation of potentially explosive social tensions while avoiding the destabilizing effects of overly rapid change.

Saudi Arabia has adopted a course as complex as the challenges facing it. The royal family has judged Saudi security and national interests to lie with constructive relations with the West and participation in the global economy. Yet as the birthplace of Islam and protector of Islam’s holiest places, Saudi Arabia cannot afford deviation from Islamic orthodoxy. It has attempted to co-opt radically resurgent Islamist universalism by a tenuous amalgam of modern statehood and Westphalian international relations grafted onto the practice of Wahhabism, perhaps the most fundamentalist version of the faith, and of subsidizing it internationally. The outcome has at times been internally contradictory. Diplomatically Saudi Arabia has largely aligned itself with the United States while spiritually propagating a form of Islam at odds with modernity and implying a clash with the non-Muslim world. By financing madrassas (religious schools) preaching the austere Wahhabist creed throughout the world, the Saudis have not only carried out their Muslim duties but also taken a defensive measure by making its advocates act as missionaries abroad rather than within the kingdom. The project has had the unintended consequence of nurturing a jihadist fervor that would eventually menace the Saudi state itself and its allies.

In the wake of revolution or regime change, absent the establishment of a new authority accepted as legitimate by a decisive majority of the population, a multiplicity of disparate factions will continue to engage in open conflicts with perceived rivals for power; portions of the state may drift into anarchy or permanent rebellion, or merge with parts of another disintegrating state. The existing central government may prove unwilling or unable to reestablish authority over border regions or non-state entities such as Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, ISIL, and the Taliban. This has happened in Iraq, Libya, and, to a dangerous extent, Pakistan.

When states are not governed in their entirety, the international or regional order itself begins to disintegrate. Blank spaces denoting lawlessness come to dominate parts of the map. The collapse of a state may turn its territory into a base for terrorism, arms supply, or sectarian agitation against neighbors. Zones of non-governance or jihad now stretch across the Muslim world, affecting Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and Somalia. When one also takes into account the agonies of Central Africa—where a generations-long Congolese civil war has drawn in all neighboring states, and conflicts in the Central African Republic and South Sudan threaten to metastasize similarly—a significant portion of the world’s territory and population is on the verge of effectively falling out of the international state system altogether.

The first implementation of radical Islamist principles as a doctrine of state power occurred in 1979, in a capital where it was least expected—in a country unlike the majority of Middle Eastern states, with a long and distinguished national history and a long-established reverence for its pre-Islamic past. So when Iran, an accepted state in the Westphalian system, turned itself into an advocate for radical Islam after the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, the Middle East regional order was turned upside down.

Submerged in waves of conquest by Alexander the Great, the early Islamic armies, and later the Mongols—shocks that all but erased the historical memory and political autonomy of other peoples—Persia retained its confidence in its cultural superiority. It bowed to its conquerors as a temporary concession but retained its independence through its worldview, charting “great interior spaces” in poetry and mysticism and revering its connection with the heroic ancient rulers recounted in its epic Book of Kings. Meanwhile, Persia distilled its experience managing all manner of territories and political challenges into a sophisticated canon of diplomacy placing a premium on endurance, shrewd analysis of geopolitical realities, and the psychological manipulation of adversaries.

The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of convenience in a broader religious struggle. The twentieth-century map of the Middle East, Khomeini announced, was a false and un-Islamic creation of “imperialists” and “tyrannical self-seeking rulers” who had “separated the various segments of the Islamic umma [community] from each other and artificially created separate nations.” All contemporary political institutions in the Middle East and beyond were “illegitimate” because they “do not base themselves on divine law.” Modern international relations based on procedural Westphalian principles rested on a false foundation because “the relations between nations should be based on spiritual grounds” and not on principles of national interest.

In the past decade, Iran has witnessed the removal of two of its most significant adversaries, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—ironically by American action—and it has deepened its influence and its military role in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Two of its principal competitors for regional influence, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been preoccupied by internal challenges even as Iran has moved swiftly and apparently successfully to crush its internal opposition following a 2009 pro-democracy uprising. Its leaders have largely been welcomed into international respectability without committing to any major substantive change in policy and courted by Western companies for investment opportunities even while sanctions are still in place.

For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings. In Iran’s proud and rich history, one can distinguish three different approaches to international order. There was the policy of the state preceding the Khomeini revolution: vigilant in protecting its borders, respectful of other nations’ sovereignties, willing to participate in alliances—in effect, pursuing its national interests by Westphalian principles. There is also the tradition of empire, which viewed Iran as the center of the civilized world and which sought to eliminate the autonomy of its surrounding countries as far as its power could reach. Finally, there is the Iran of jihad

These goals were reached because three conditions were met: an active American policy; the thwarting of designs seeking to establish a regional order by imposing universalist principles through violence; and the emergence of leaders with a vision of peace.

Even during their most brutal depredations, the expansionist powers put forth, especially in Britain, a vision that at some point conquered peoples would begin to participate in the fruits of a common global system. Finally recoiling from the sordid practice of slavery, the West produced what no other slaveholding civilization had: a global abolition movement based on a conviction of common humanity and the inherent dignity of the individual. Britain, rejecting its previous embrace of the despicable trade, took the lead in enforcing a new norm of human dignity, abolishing slavery in its empire and interdicting slave-trading ships on the high seas. The distinctive combination of overbearing conduct, technological prowess, idealistic humanitarianism, and revolutionary intellectual ferment proved one of the shaping factors of the modern world.

national-interest-based foreign policy premised on Westphalian principles seemed to have prevailed in Asia. Unlike in the Middle East, where almost all the states are threatened by militant challenges to their legitimacy, in Asia the state is treated as the basic unit of international and domestic politics. The various nations emerging from the colonial period generally affirmed one another’s sovereignty and committed to noninterference in one another’s domestic affairs; they followed the norms of international organizations and built regional or interregional economic and social organizations.

Asia has emerged as among the Westphalian system’s most significant legacies: historic, and often historically antagonistic, peoples are organizing themselves as sovereign states and their states as regional groupings. In Asia, far more than in Europe, not to speak of the Middle East, the maxims of the Westphalian model of international order find their contemporary expression—including doctrines since questioned by many in the West as excessively focused on the national interest or insufficiently protective of human rights. Sovereignty, in many cases wrought only recently from colonial rule, is treated as having an absolute character. The goal of state policy is not to transcend the national interest—as in the fashionable concepts in Europe or the United States—but to pursue it energetically and with conviction. Every government dismisses foreign criticism of its internal practices as a symptom of just-surmounted colonial tutelage. Thus even when neighboring states’ domestic actions are perceived as excesses—as they have been, for example, in Myanmar—they are treated as an occasion for quiet diplomatic intercession, not overt pressure, much less forcible intervention.

Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historic international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overlordship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map.

Within the space of little more than a century after 1868, Japan moved from total isolation to extensive borrowing from the apparently most modern states in the West (for the army from Germany, for parliamentary institutions and for the navy from Britain); from audacious attempts at empire building to pacifism and thence to a reemergence of a new kind of major-power stance; from feudalism to varieties of Western authoritarianism and from that to embracing democracy; and in and out of world orders (first Western, then Asian, now global). Throughout, it was convinced that its national mission could not be diluted by adjusting to the techniques and institutions of other societies; it would only be enhanced by successful adaptation.

Japan’s insular position allowed it wide latitude about whether to participate in international affairs at all. For many centuries, it remained on the outer boundaries of Asian affairs, cultivating its military traditions through internal contests and admitting foreign trade and culture at its discretion. At the close of the sixteenth century, Japan attempted to recast its role with an abruptness and sweep of ambition that its neighbors at first dismissed as implausible.

Japan drew from the Western challenge a conclusion contrary to that of China after the appearance of a British envoy in 1793 (discussed in the next chapter). China reaffirmed its traditional stance of dismissing the intruder with aloof indifference while cultivating China’s distinctive virtues, confident that the vast extent of its population and territory and the refinement of its culture would in the end prevail. Japan set out, with studious attention to detail and subtle analysis of the balance of material and psychological forces, to enter the international order based on Western concepts of sovereignty, free trade, international law, technology, and military power—albeit for the purpose of expelling the foreign domination. After a new faction came to power in 1868 promising to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians,” they announced that they would do so by mastering the barbarians’ concepts and technologies and joining the Westphalian world order as an equal member.

After the exhaustion of Europe in World War I, Japan’s leaders concluded that a world beset by conflict, financial crisis, and American isolationism favored imperial expansion aimed at imposing hegemony on Asia. Imperial Japan detached Manchuria from China in 1931 and established it as a Japanese satellite state under the exiled Chinese Emperor. In 1937, Japan declared war on China in order to subjugate additional Chinese territory. In the name of a “New Order in Asia” and then an “East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” Japan strove to organize its own anti-Westphalian sphere of influence—a “bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers,” arranged hierarchically to “thereby enable all nations to find each its proper place in the world.” In this new order, other Asian states’ sovereignty would be elided into a form of Japanese tutelage.

The effect of the first stage of Japan’s postwar evolution was to take its strategic orientation out of Cold War contests, freeing it to focus on a transformative program of economic development. Japan placed itself legally in the camp of the developed democracies but—citing its pacifist orientation and commitment to world community—declined to join the ideological struggles of the age. The result of this subtle strategy was a period of concerted economic growth paralleled only by that following the 1868 Meiji Revolution. Within two decades of its wartime devastation, Japan had rebuilt itself as a major global economic power.

As at other pivotal moments in its history, Japan is moving toward a redefinition of its broader role in international order, sure to have far-reaching consequences in its region and beyond. Searching for a new role, it will assess once again, carefully, unsentimentally, and unobtrusively, the balance of material and psychological forces in light of the rise of China, Korean developments, and their impact on Japan’s security. It will examine the utility and record of the American alliance and its considerable success in serving wide-ranging mutual interests; it will also consider America’s withdrawal from three military conflicts. Japan will conduct this analysis in terms of three broad options: continued emphasis on the American alliance; adaptation to China’s rise; and reliance on an increasingly national foreign policy. Which of them will emerge as dominant, or whether the choice is for a mix of them, depends on Japan’s calculations of the global balance of power—not formal American assurances—and how it perceives underlying trends. Should Japan perceive a new configuration of power unfolding in its region or the world, it will base its security on its judgment of reality, not on traditional alignments.

India has long developed its qualities at the intersection of world orders, shaping and being shaped by their rhythms. It has been defined less by its political borders than by a shared spectrum of cultural traditions. No mythic founder has been credited with promulgating the Hindu tradition, India’s majority faith and the wellspring of several others. History has traced its evolution, dimly and incompletely, through a synthesis of traditional hymns, legends, and rituals from cultures along the Indus and Ganges rivers and plateaus and uplands north and west. In the Hindu tradition, however, these specific forms were the diverse articulations of underlying principles that predated any written text. In its diversity and resistance to definition—encompassing distinct gods and philosophical traditions, the analogues of which would likely have been defined as separate religions in Europe—Hinduism was said to approximate and prove the ultimate oneness of manifold creation, reflecting “the long and diversified history of man’s quest for reality … at once all-embracing and infinite.”

China, until the modern age, imposed its own matrix of customs and culture on invaders so successfully that they grew indistinguishable from the Chinese people. By contrast, India transcended foreigners not by converting them to Indian religion or culture but by treating their ambitions with supreme equanimity; it integrated their achievements and their diverse doctrines into the fabric of Indian life without ever professing to be especially awed by any of them. Invaders might raise extraordinary monuments to their own importance, as if to reassure themselves of their greatness in the face of so much aloofness, but the Indian peoples endured by a core culture defiantly impervious to alien influence. India’s foundational religions are inspired not by prophetic visions of messianic fulfillment; rather, they bear witness to the fragility of human existence. They offer not personal salvation but the solace of an inextricable destiny.

World order in Hindu cosmology was governed by immutable cycles of an almost inconceivably vast scale—millions of years long. Kingdoms would fall, and the universe would be destroyed, but it would be re-created, and new kingdoms would rise again. When each wave of invaders arrived (Persians in the sixth century B.C.; Alexander and his Bactrian Greeks in the fourth century B.C.; Arabs in the eighth century; Turks and Afghans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Mughals in the sixteenth century; and various European nations following shortly after), they were fitted into this timeless matrix. Their efforts might disrupt, but measured against the perspective of the infinite, they were irrelevant. The true nature of human experience was known only to those who endured and transcended these temporal upheavals.

Kautilya wrote about an India comparable in structure to Europe before the Peace of Westphalia. He describes a collection of states potentially in permanent conflict with each other. Like Machiavelli’s, his is an analysis of the world as he found it; it offers a practical, not a normative, guide to action. And its moral basis is identical with that of Richelieu, who lived nearly two thousand years later: the state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.

For Kautilya, 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. Geography, finance, military strength, diplomacy, espionage, law, agriculture, cultural traditions, morale and popular opinion, rumors and legends, and men’s vices and weaknesses needed to be shaped as a unit by a wise king to strengthen and expand his realm—much as a modern orchestra conductor shapes the instruments in his charge into a coherent tune. It was a combination of Machiavelli and Clausewitz.

Millennia before European thinkers translated their facts on the ground into a theory of balance of power, the Arthashastra set out an analogous, if more elaborate, system termed the “circle of states.” Contiguous polities, in Kautilya’s analysis, existed in a state of latent hostility. Whatever professions of amity he might make, any ruler whose power grew significantly would eventually find that it was in his interest to subvert his neighbor’s realm. This was an inherent dynamic of self-preservation to which morality was irrelevant. Much like Frederick the Great two thousand years later, Kautilya concluded that the ruthless logic of competition allowed no deviation: “The conqueror shall [always] endeavor to add to his own power and increase his own happiness.” The imperative was clear: “If … the conqueror is superior, the campaign shall be undertaken; otherwise not.”

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.

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. The glories of India’s ancient civilization were researched and catalogued and India’s elite trained in British thought and institutions. 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.

The manner in which India achieved its independence and charted its world role reflected these diverse legacies. India had survived through the centuries by combining cultural imperviousness with extraordinary psychological skill in dealing with occupiers. Mohandas Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule was made possible in the first instance by the spiritual uplift of the Mahatma, but it also proved to be the most effective way to fight the imperial power because of its appeal to the core values of freedom of liberal British society. Like Americans two centuries earlier, Indians vindicated their independence by invoking against their colonial rulers concepts of liberty they had studied in British schools (including at the London School of Economics, where India’s future leaders absorbed many of their quasi-socialist ideas).

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. But India’s leaders have acted on Westphalian principles with respect to spreading their domestic institutions,...

Emerging into a world of established powers and the Cold War, independent India subtly elevated freedom of maneuver from a bargaining tactic into an ethical principle. Blending righteous moralism with a shrewd assessment of the balance of forces and the major powers’ psychologies, Nehru announced India to be a global power that would chart a course maneuvering between the major blocs.

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. However irritating to Cold War America, it was a wise course for an emerging nation. With a then-nascent military establishment and underdeveloped economy, India would have been a respected but secondary ally. As a free agent, it could exercise a much-wider-reaching influence.

The ultimate rationale for India’s rejection of what it described as the power politics of the Cold War was that it saw no national interest in the disputes at issue. For the sake of disputes along the dividing lines in Europe, India would not challenge the Soviet Union only a few hundred miles away, which it wished to give no incentive to join up with Pakistan. Nor would it risk Muslim hostility on behalf of Middle East controversies. India refrained from judgment of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and North Vietnam’s subversion of South Vietnam. India’s leaders were determined not to isolate themselves from what they identified as the progressive trends in the developing world or risk the hostility of the Soviet superpower.

In quest of a leading role among the nonaligned, India was adhering to a concept of international order compatible with the inherited one on both the global and regional level. Its formal articulation was classically Westphalian and congruent with historic European analyses of the balance of power. Nehru defined India’s approach in terms of “five principles of peaceful coexistence.” Though given the name of an Indian philosophical concept, 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: (1)mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, (2)mutual non-aggression, (3)mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, (4)equality and mutual benefit, and (5)peaceful co-existence.

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. India has thus far been able to wall itself off from the harshest currents of political turmoil and sectarian violence, partly through enlightened treatment of its minorities and a fostering of common Indian domestic principles—including democracy and nationalism—transcending communal differences. Yet this outcome is not foreordained, and maintaining it will require concerted efforts. A further radicalization of the Arab world or heightened civil conflict in Pakistan could expose India to significant internal pressures.

Like the nineteenth-century British who were driven to deepen their global involvement to protect strategic routes to India, 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. In pursuing this course, India has had natural ties to the countries of the English-speaking “Anglosphere.” Yet it will likely continue to honor the legacy of Nehru by preserving freedom of maneuver in its Asian and Middle Eastern relations and in its policies toward key autocratic countries, access to whose resources India will require to maintain its expansive economic plans.

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. In this view, 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.

Still, China was not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer.