India's foreign policy has an 'a la carte approach': Niall Ferguson

India’s economic potential in relation to China is bright, but unlike the latter it does not yet have a strategy in foreign policy, said historian Niall Ferguson.
“India has to decide if it needs one,” he said during a conversation with author Patrick French at Times Literary Festival on Sunday. The occasion marked the launch of the Indian edition of the first volume of his authorised biography of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Ferguson referred to India’s foreign policy as an “a la carte approach.” According to Ferguson, heads of governments should have a council of historical advisors to learn lessons from the past.
Ferguson boiled down the lessons he learnt from studying the first half of Kissinger’s life into four broad points which should guide a country’s foreign policy strategy. According to Ferguson, history is to states what character is to people. A deficiency of history can undermine policy, he added.
The second lesson identified by him was that the key problem in decision making is the problem of conjecture. “In a democracy it’s extremely tempting to kick the can down the road because of asymmetric pay-offs,” he said.
The third lesson was that in foreign policy choices are always between evils.
Finally, in Kissinger’s eye, ruthless realism cannot always succeed because it won’t have legitimacy, said Ferguson.
During the course of his opening remarks, Ferguson compared US’ current foreign policy in the context of the four lessons. He concluded that US appeared to have forgotten the lessons and it currently carried out foreign policy without an underlying strategy. Ferguson strongly advocated work on a biography as vital to historical enterprise. One of the lessons he learnt during the course of his research was the criticality of individual decision making at key moments.
He advocated the importance of historical inputs into policy making and felt history should capture the intellectual high ground. The Kissinger biography is an exercise in applied history which aims to learn lessons from the past, he added.
In response to questions from the audience on the Richard Nixon administration’s uneasy relationship with the Indira Gandhi government, he said the US tilt to Pakistan was not based on personal dislikes. It was made in the context of a strategic game where US was trying to exploit the Sino-Soviet split. In this situation, Pakistan was the channel to help bring about rapprochement between US and China.