Grand Strategy: The bigness trap of India’s strategic community |
On Friday August 8, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey signed a joint defence agreement in Mecca. An attack on one is to be treated as an attack on all three, it said. As is to be expected, India’s commentariat had its opinions, and almost all of it was about Pakistan.
Turkey did get some airtime but almost entirely as Pakistan's enabler, the supplier of drones, the country we should have nothing to do with. Which is to say that even when a third state entered the analysis, it was filtered through Pakistan. Saudi Arabia found negligible mention, for, that is a country we don’t really want to upset for obvious reasons. We know which side of the bread is buttered.
Our analysis did not take on board the fact that Turkey has its own regional ambitions, an economy under strain, ongoing quarrels with Egypt and the Emirates on the question of Sunni leadership, and that it has reasons of its own for wanting a foothold in Gulf security which may have nothing to do with us. But that was nuanced. We saw a supplier of Pakistani equipment, and an unfriendly Erdogan – and we made up our mind. And moved on to the next issue.
There were several unasked questions. How was this decision actually taken inside the Saudi system, and who argued against it? What does Erdogan gain domestically from standing in Mecca beside the Crown Prince? How do the roughly nine million Indians in the Gulf read the whole thing from their vantage point? I can think of very few people in this country equipped to answer any of that with authority. In other words, we had a great deal to say about an agreement signed by three states, two of which we hardly studied.
Actually, the knowledge gap is just one part of it. The other is the widespread habit of arriving at........