Page 23 - The Cormorant Issue 14

strategies. The deeply-held belief in state sovereignty and the importance of not interfering in the affairs of other countries limits the scope for the development of a “values-based” foreign policy.
And foreign policy suffers because of India’s location. While India may wish otherwise, relations with Pakistan dominate India’s foreign policy challenges. Relations with other countries in the region fluctuate; but, Bhutan aside, each is affected by fears of Indian “domination” due to its size.
India has attempted to circumvent these difficulties by bolstering its relations with countries further afield. Many of these relation- ships have specific intentions. IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) is utilised to demand UN Security Council reform. The BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) combine emerging eco- nomic power-houses. Another grouping, BASIC (Brazil-South Africa-India-China) grew out of a shared approach towards cli- mate change.
While the “formal” foreign policy-making community may be small, other groupings are beginning to play a role in foreign pol- icy. India is keen to project its soft power – outside of its immedi- ate neighbourhood democratic India is rarely seen as threaten- ing, in contrast to perceptions of China. The growing popularity of Bollywood films are frequently cited as one of the key means of selling India overseas. At the same time, India has started projecting hard power, not least through its naval involvement in anti-piracy operations off Somalia.
More important has been the growing outreach of Indian compa- nies, buying prestige brands such as Jaguar Land Rover in the
UK, and increasingly active in Africa. There is a risk that this com- mercialisation of foreign policy will overtake the foreign ministry. Indian firms describe a “triple A” advantage to their products in other developing countries; the products are appropriate, adapt- able and affordable.
In cases this is clearly true; Indian buses in Afghanistan can be repaired by local mechanics. More technically-advanced buses frequently can not. But India’s private sector is driven by profit, not philanthropy, and some less savoury commercial practices have also come to light.
India’s 30 million-strong Diaspora is also part of India’s foreign policy toolkit. Significant communities exist in North America, the UK, the Gulf, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean and Africa. Recent years have seen attempts to boost the relationship between non-resident Indians and India.
In large part, India successfully balances its relations with a number of divergent countries. But as more is expected of it as a global power, it will have to balance the demands of, for instance, Iran and the US. Its foreign policy framework currently seems ill-equipped to do so. Abstention, as in the vote over military action in Libya, is likely to be the norm. A former foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, recently noted that “If you sit for too long on a fence, the fence enters your soul”. India’s abstention may well reflect long-standing and genuinely-held values of non- interference. But its Western friends may well end up wishing for a new foreign policy to emerge.
Dr Gareth Price is a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House
Can NATO and Russia ever truly cooperate? The case of counternarcotics in Afghanistan
Dr Bettina Renz
Like most of the former Soviet states, Russia joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace Programme in 1994. Ties were strength- ened further when the NATO-Russia Council was established in 2002. However, NATO-Russian relations have been far from smooth due to persistent mutual mistrust and suspicion. Rela- tions hit rock bottom in 1999 when Russia strongly opposed NATO intervention in Kosovo. Formal contacts were also frozen temporarily when NATO objected to Russia’s military actions in Georgia in August 2008. From the point of view of Russia, NATO is very much a relic of the Cold War. There is little under- standing in Russia of the post-Cold War purpose of the Alliance, which had been established to contain the now defunct Soviet Union and its communist regime. While the Warsaw Pact was disbanded with the collapse of the USSR, NATO continues to expand eastwards, infringing on Russia’s national interests and security. Similarly, many NATO members continue to see Russia and their relations with the country through a Cold War lens and have been cautious about closer cooperation. Russian military action, such as the use of force in Chechnya or its conflict with Georgia for example, is often interpreted as the expression of a newly belligerent Russia nostalgic for the Soviet past.
NATO and Russia are unlikely to overcome the Cold War legacy completely, at least not in the near future. This means that coop- eration in traditional military spheres, such as peacekeeping or even joint war fighting, will always be difficult. Having said this,
recent decades have brought in ‘new’ security challenges, such as piracy, disaster relief, international organised crime and the drug business. These issues are not related to the geopolitical rivalries of the Cold War and joint efforts to counter them should therefore be less contentious. Unfortunately, as the example of counternarcotics in Afghanistan demonstrates, NATO-Russian cooperation, even in this fairly uncontroversial sphere, has not been easy to achieve. Interestingly in this case, it is Russia that has explicitly sought closer ties with the Alliance, whilst NATO’s reaction has been far from enthusiastic. Why is this?
In October 2010 US and Russian military personnel engaged in joint raids on Afghan drugs laboratories near the Pakistani border and destroyed more than a tonne of heroin and opium. The raids followed years of criticism in Russia of what it saw as the NATO- led coalition’s failure to eradicate poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, resulting in the exponential growth of opium production since the start of the military operations in 2001. The Russian leadership had also long been calling for the establishment of formal coop- eration with NATO to eradicate the drugs threat from Afghanistan.
Drug use and its consequences are one of the biggest threats to Russian national security today. The country has one of the largest populations of injecting drug users and fastest growing HIV/Aids epidemics in the world. Russia has emerged as the largest single-country market for Afghan heroin; and 90 per cent
21