Posted by In a provocative essay in Foreign Affairs, Shashank Joshi lays out the reasons why India has, by and large, stayed out of Middle Eastern affairs. Of particular interest to me are the ideological reasons:
New Delhi has deeper ideological reasons for its opposition to intervention in the Middle East. Indian policymakers tend to view recent Western intervention in the Middle East as comparable to the U.S.-funded and Pakistan-led effort to support opposition forces in Afghanistan after the Soviet Union’s invasion in 1979. In the Indian view, it was the West’s intervention that primed Afghanistan for the growth and spread of radical Islam. Suhasini Haidar, strategic & diplomatic affairs editor of the Indian newspaper The Hindu, summarized the feelings of many Indians in a July 2014 op-ed: “Each of the countries today at the center of the world’s concerns over extremism is, in fact, a country that has seen direct or indirect Western intervention, not Western absence — Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Iraq.”
Well, imagine that! You mean to say that Western action in the Middle East (ostensibly usually led by the United States under both Democratic and Republican regimes) isn’t a magical panacea to what ails that troubled region?!
It’s true that India has enough on its regional plate with rather ornery neighbors in Pakistan and China. Regardless, I don’t consider it an isolationist move to stay out of Middle Eastern affairs. It just pragmatic. There is little to be gained by wading into the morass of complicated, centuries-old grudges, alliances and enmities that tangle Western Asia.
Joshi strays from the wisdom of India’s position towards the end of the essay by advocating for an increased Indian role in Middle Eastern politics.
New Delhi could nevertheless leverage its unusual position — positive relations with both Iran and Israel, for instance — to play an important role in regional diplomacy. A larger and more diverse Indian diplomatic and intelligence footprint in the region would also help India protect its citizens and understand the complex mosaic of regional players in a place like northern Iraq.
The British and French spent decades in the Middle East, effectively accomplishing nothing before turning over their mandates to the Bedouins who wandered these deserts. No one can deny the strategic and economic importance of the region but it stretches the imagination to understand why the American cognoscenti believe they understand the region so well when other outside powers have failed. The NeoCons and the Liberal Hawks just project their hopes (DEMOCRACY! CAPITALISM!) and fears (BLOOD-THIRSTY MOHAMMEDANS! SOCIALISM!) onto the region and swash buckle their way through conflict after conflict.
India, which has far many more citizens in the region than the United States, still stays out. Would that the USA would do the same.
