Book Review | Sharp, broad and objective look at India’s foreign policy

This book offers a remarkable piece of visualising and writing. For every turn in India’s relations with the principal actors in Asia — to India’s east and west- as well as the great powers — the author summons to the folds of his writing valuable inputs from history, economics, politics, and the military and security dimension. The author assures us that he has not written a history of India’s foreign policy, but has sought to look at our foreign policy “through a wide angle lens”. With the sheer breadth of changes the world has seen in the past 75 years, the author also recommends a conceptualising of India’s foreign policy with a new eye, and taking practical steps to give this shape. To take an example from the chapter ‘What Globalisation Did to Asia’s Geopolitics’, which is multi-dimensional, illuminating, and makes for fascinating reading, Menon writes: “History tells us that crowded environments, such as what we see in Asia today with competing states adjoining each other, bred militarism and pragmatism, as happened after the thirteen century in crowded continental Europe, which experienced five centuries of continuous warfare- the result of geography not character.” Such an observation may have better served its purpose if anchored in closer examination of history.