Authors: Henry Kissinger
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.
The Hindu classic
the Bhagavad Gita framed these spirited tests in terms of the relationship between morality and power. The work, an episode within the Mahabharata (the ancient Sanskrit epic poem sometimes likened in its influence to the Bible or the Homeric epics), takes the form of a dialogue between the warrior-prince Arjuna and his charioteer, a manifestation of the god Lord Krishna. Arjuna, “overwhelmed by sorrow” on the eve of battle at the horrors he is about
to unleash, wonders what can justify the terrible consequences of war. This is the wrong question, Krishna rejoins. Because life is eternal and cyclical and the essence of the universe is indestructible, “the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There has never been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.” Redemption will come through the fulfillment of a preassigned duty, paired with a recognition that its outward manifestations are illusory because “the impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal.” Arjuna, a warrior, has been presented with a war he did not seek. He should accept the circumstances with equanimity and fulfill his role with honor, and must strive to kill and prevail and “should not grieve.”
While Lord Krishna’s appeal to duty prevails and Arjuna professes himself freed from doubt, the cataclysms of the war—described in detail in the rest of the epic—add resonance to his earlier qualms. This central work of Hindu thought embodied both an exhortation to war and the importance not so much of avoiding but of transcending it. Morality was not rejected, but in any given situation the immediate considerations were dominant, while eternity provided a curative perspective. What some readers lauded as a call to fearlessness in battle, Gandhi would praise as his “spiritual dictionary.”
Against the background of the eternal
verities of a religion preaching the elusiveness of any single earthly endeavor, the temporal ruler was in fact afforded a wide berth for practical necessities. The pioneering exemplar of this school was the fourth-century
B.C.
minister Kautilya, credited with engineering the rise of India’s Maurya Dynasty, which expelled Alexander the Great’s successors from northern India and unified the subcontinent for the first time under a single rule.
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.
Tradition holds that at some point during or after completing his endeavors, Kautilya recorded the strategic and foreign policy practices he had observed in a comprehensive manual of statecraft, the
Arthashastra
. This work 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. The
Arthashastra
encompasses a world of practical statecraft, not philosophical disputation. 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.”
European theorists proclaimed the balance of power as a goal of foreign policy and envisaged a world order based on the equilibrium of states. In the
Arthashastra,
the purpose of strategy was to conquer all other states and to overcome such equilibrium as existed on the road to victory. In that respect, Kautilya was more comparable to Napoleon and Qin Shi Huang (the Emperor who unified China) than to Machiavelli.
In Kautilya’s view, states had an obligation to pursue self-interest even more than glory. The wise ruler would seek his allies from among his neighbors’
neighbors.
The goal would be an alliance system with the conqueror at the center: “
The Conqueror shall think of the circle
of states as a wheel—himself at the hub and his allies, drawn to him by the spokes though separated by intervening territory, as its rim. The enemy, however strong he may be, becomes vulnerable when he is squeezed between the conqueror and his allies.” No alliance is conceived as permanent, however. Even within his own alliance system, the King should “
undertake such works as would
increase his own power” and maneuver to strengthen his state’s position and prevent neighboring states from aligning against it.
Like the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, Kautilya held that the least direct course was often the wisest: to foment dissension between neighbors or potential allies, to “
make one neighboring king fight
another neighbor and having thus prevented the neighbors from getting together, proceed to overrun the territory of his own enemy.” The strategic effort is unending. When the strategy prevails, the King’s territory expands, and the borders are redrawn, the circle of states would need to be recalibrated. New calculations of power would have to be undertaken; some allies would now become enemies and vice versa.
What our time has labeled covert intelligence operations were described in the
Arthashastra
as an important tool. Operating in
“
all states of the circle
” (that is, friends and adversaries alike) and drawn from the ranks of “holy ascetics, wandering monks, cart-drivers, wandering minstrels, jugglers, tramps, [and] fortune-tellers,” these agents would spread rumors to foment discord within and between other states, subvert enemy armies, and “destroy” the King’s opponents at opportune moments.
To be sure, 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
Arthashastra
advised
that restrained and humanitarian conduct was under most circumstances strategically useful: a king who abused his subjects would forfeit their support and would be vulnerable to rebellion or invasion; a conqueror who needlessly violated a subdued people’s customs or moral sensibilities risked catalyzing resistance.
The
Arthashastra
’s exhaustive and matter-of-fact catalogue of the imperatives of success led 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.” Unlike Machiavelli, Kautilya exhibits no nostalgia for the virtues of a better age. The only criterion of virtue he would accept was whether his analysis of the road to victory was accurate or not. Did he describe the way policy was, in fact, being conducted? In Kautilya’s counsel, equilibrium, if it ever came about, was the temporary result of an interaction of self-serving motives; it was not, as in European concepts after Westphalia, the strategic aim of foreign policy. The
Arthashastra
was a guide to conquest, not to the construction of an international order.
Whether following the
Arthashastra
’s prescriptions
or not, India
reached its high-water mark of territorial extent in the third century
B.C.
, when its revered Emperor Asoka governed a territory comprising all of today’s India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and part of Afghanistan and Iran. Then, about the time when China was being unified by its founding Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in 221
B.C.
, India split into competing kingdoms. Reunified several centuries later, India fractured again in the seventh century, as Islam was beginning to mount its challenge to the empires of Europe and Asia.
For nearly a millennium, India—with its fertile soil, wealthy cities, and resplendent intellectual and technological achievements—became a target for conquest and conversion. Waves of conquerors and adventurers—Turks, Afghans, Parthians, Mongols—descended each century from Central and Southwest Asia into the Indian plains, establishing a patchwork of smaller principalities. The subcontinent was thus “
grafted to the Greater Middle East
,” with ties of religion and ethnicity and strategic sensitivities that endure to this day. 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.
In this vortex of languages, cultures, and creeds, the appearance of yet another wave of foreign adventurers in the sixteenth century did not at first seem to be an epochal event. Setting out to profit from an expanding trade with the wealthy Mughal Empire, private British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese companies vied with one another to establish footholds on land in friendly princely states. Britain’s Indian realm grew the most, if initially without a fixed design (prompting the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge to say, “
We seem, as it were, to have conquered
and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind”). Once a base of British power and commerce was established in the eastern region of Bengal, it found itself surrounded by competitors, European and Asian. With each war in Europe and the Americas, the British in India clashed with rivals’ colonies and allies; with each victory, they acquired the adversary’s Indian assets. As Britain’s possessions—technically the holdings of the East India Company, not the British state itself—expanded, it considered itself threatened by Russia looming to the north, by Burma by turns militant and fragmented, and by ambitious and increasingly autonomous Mughal rulers, thus justifying (in British eyes) further annexations.
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.
When London responded to the 1857 mutiny of Muslim and Hindu
soldiers in the East India Company’s army by declaring direct British rule, it did not conceive of this act as establishing British governance over a foreign nation. Rather, it saw itself as a neutral overseer and civilizing uplifter of multifarious peoples and states. As late as 1888, a leading British administrator could declare,