Access India And Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present Narrated By Shivshankar Menon Provided As Digital

Menon's knowledge of geopolitics and strategy is deep, A must read book. Highly recommended. A goldmine for beginners of IR to understand how India sees Asia, Sweeps India's foreign policy through Independence through Corona crisis ofand how India should make sense and its position in Asia in the coming days.
Excerpts from my review published for Swarajya full link below

"As they say, experience is the teacher of all things.
The book that comes from a former Foreign Secretary and National Security Advisor can never be ignored.
India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present by Shivshankar Menon provides a snapshot of Indias foreign policy in the wider collage of Asian geopolitics.
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"This book attempts to pull Indias strategic discourse back to Asia, The author brings an Asiacentric view of Indian foreign policy, especially when a strategic convergence with the West overshadows its potential for engagement in Asia.
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"The book is a welcome break from the “IndoPacific” dominated foreign policy constructs in recent times and offers good food for thought on Asia.
It is already stirring fervent debates on Indian foreign policy and is a worthy read for enthusiasts.
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For reading the review in its entirety, click
sitelink com/books/asnaps

I tweet at DarthThunderous, A books which summarizes India's Foreign policy from begining to current, easy read with economics and globalization

at center stage A quiet detailed account of history and challenges faced by India in Asian Geopolitics.
. Mostly focussed on China and South Asia neglected west asia
Moreover the writing lacks objectivity, because of clear bias of the writer towards Nehru and his family and against the present dispensation chinaandmarinegeopolitics.
jpg Shivashankar Menon's central axiom is that in the IndiaChinaUS triangle, India must refuse to take a side and be more closer to both other nations than they are to each other.
This is presented without much justification and held almost sacred, While unlike IR theorists of the old, Menon have talked a bit of economic aspects but the understanding seemed rudimentary Fixed exchange rates wrt to USD is stated as an obvious good along with other scepticism towards forces of market in general.


Menon is a critic of the term IndoPacific and states that the word have been forced by Washington and is “dangerously out of touch with reality” preferring the old "Asia Pacific.
" A decade old but still very relevant rebuttal can be found in sitelinkSamudra Manthan: SinoIndian Rivalry in the IndoPacific.


Towards the end Menon offers some of his predictions for the coming future, While the book was published in, judging from bits of pieces of writing, the writing seems to have completed much beforeelections in November.
In the two years since writing, one could see many of his short term predictions were wrong most glaring being about Afghanistan Taliban regime is not accepted in the West yet, India's own neighbourhood Nepal, Maldives, Lanka, Bangladesh have all either turned towards India or stayed the same rather than drifting apart and Eastern Europe Russian rhetoric and posturing were not just 'threats signifying its genuine interests' and have manifested into amonths are running war.
Shivshankar Menon belongs to Indias foreignpolicy royalty, Grandson of independent Indias first foreign secretary K, P. S. Menon and nephew to another K, P. S. Menon Jr, he himself served not only as Foreign Secretary for three yearsbut also as National Security Adviser for the next four.
He consequently writes with authority and panache about the fraught history of Indias relationship with China, and about global geopolitics viewed through a Nehruvian prism.


Unfortunately, the elegance of the writing cannot compensate for the hollowness of his thesisthat nonalignment or “strategic autonomy” has always served India well, and that India must continue to engage “with both China and the United States, not choosing sides, and having better relations with each than they have with each other”.
He glosses over the inconvenient fact that the US and China had far better relations with each other than either had with India betweenand at least.
And that India was obliged to abandon nonalignment in all but name by signing the IndoSoviet treaty of.


The two key pathologies that undermine the credibility of Menons book are, first, a tenuous grasp of economics and, less forgivably, an unrelenting bias in favour of China, which frequently leads him to see issues through Chinas lens, sometimes to Indias detriment.
To be fair, these pathologies were endemic to the Nehruvian diplomatic corps, faithfully reflecting Jawaharlals own blind spots.


The China tilt is evident in Menons dismissal of the term “IndoPacific” as “dangerously out of touch with reality”, replacing it with the old “AsiaPacific”, despite the fact that “IndoPacific” specifically embraces India, while all previous AsiaPacific institutions established since thes had excluded India at Chinas behest.
Astonishingly, Menon commends ASEANs unwieldy East Asia Summit as a better forum to address security concerns “from east Africa to the western Pacific”, even though China has effectively subverted ASEAN itself by using its economic leverage over Cambodia and Laos to destroy ASEANs ability to take a common stand on the South China Sea.


The “Taiwan Straits crisis” is one that Menon returns to repeatedly, This crisis was caused by China firing missiles into the Taiwan Straits to intimidate the electorate during Taiwans first democratic election, called by the late incumbent Lee Tenghui, who transformed Taiwan by democratizing all levels of government there.


Rather than address this as a conflict between democracy and communism, Menon focuses on Chinas view of Lee “as a potential leader of an independent Taiwan”, and the US response of sending “two aircraftcarrier groups to the waters east of the Taiwan Strait”.
He implies that Chinas subsequent aggressive actions in the South China Sealinking rocks and shoals to artificially create islands that will vastly expand Chinas exclusive economic zone at the expense of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesiaare a natural response to Chinas comeuppance during thecrisis.


On economics, he favours the Keynesian institutions that prevailed betweenand, without acknowledging what precisely they entailed: fixed exchange rates implying pegging all currencies to the US dollar without free movement of capital across borders.
He even attributes this to a mythical David rather than John Maynard Keynes, The ReaganThatcher era is dismissed as “market fundamentalism”, a valid critique of some of its financial aspects but also one that unshackled the potential of emerging economies like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, China and India as they embraced globalization.


Menon spends no more than a sentence on Chinas problems of industrial overcapacity, to which Premier Wen Jiabao first drew attention in March.
The liquidity glut unleashed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis ofproved a boon for China, enabling it to nearly triple its steel, aluminium, cement and car capacity over the next decade, thereby globalizing its problems of overcapacity.
These had first emerged because of the propensity of Chinas banks to lend unlimited amounts to stateowned enterprises, even if the latter had previously defaulted on loans.
By June, half of all loans on the books of Chinas stateowned banks were nonperforming,

In the year, world steel production wasmillion tonnes in, China alone produced,million tonnes up frommillion twenty years earlier, while the rest of the world producedmillion tonnes.
China exported surplus steel below production cost to the rest of the world, the classic definition of dumping.
Chinese producers in new industries like photovoltaic cells for solar energy similarly received unlimited loans, and excess Chinese production depressed global prices.
It was insanity for the rest of the world to trade with China as if it was a normal market economy, when it clearly wasnt.
Former US President Trump took countervailing measures in the third year of his presidencyjust as President Obama had imposed antidumping duties on imports from China in his final year.


Perhaps unaware of these complexities, Menon advocates India joining the “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership RCEP, led by China”, excoriating the Modi government for not doing so.
Menon acknowledges that India already has a free trade agreement FTA with ASEAN, India also has FTAs with Japan and South Korea, and is close to concluding one with Australia.
Joining RCEP would effectively amount to an FTA with China and New Zealand, without any additional safeguards against Chinas pervasive nonmarket practices.
Already, Chinese products enter India thinly disguised as ASEANmade,

Joining RCEP would be tantamount to allowing even more aggressive dumping of Chinese products into India.
Menon perpetuates the canard that India has turned inward under Modi: in fact, the Modi government has targeted small tariff increases on products suffering from Chinese dumping, while reducing other import duties.
In, Indias export growth has considerably outpaced Chinas, as it did inof the pastyears,

Menon extols Nehrus vision of an “area of peace in Asia” as the only outcome worth pursuing.
But he acknowledges that this area of peace was disrupted by Pakistan going to war withinweeks of Independence and Partition in, and that China violated Asias peace by its invasion of independent Tibet in October.


Understandably, given his grandfathers key involvement, Menon celebrates Indias role as peacemaker in Korea, asserting that the July“armistice was very close to what India had proposed two and a half years before”.
While India relayed “messages from the Chinese to the United StatesNehrus efforts had convinced Truman that Nehru has sold us down the Hudson.
” There is nary a mention of the fact that, even as Nehru was loftily playing peacemaker between the US and China, the latter was busily building a highway right through Aksai Chin, which was and still is shown as part of India in our maps.
Having ignored its construction, Menon slips this in much later: “Two Indian patrols sent out into check on the Aksai Chin Highway were detained by the Chinese”.
Who built this highway and when remain mysteries to the reader,

Despite the mention of “Asian geopolitics” in the title, the book remains obsessed with China and its perspective on the region, while barely mentioning Indonesia, or the possible strategic importance of Japan and South Korea today.
Nehru missed a great opportunity to join an economic confederation in Asia proposed by Japans Kishi Nobusuke in.
Menon does mention this littleremembered proposal that Nehru dismissed as a stalkinghorse for American hegemony, Southeast Asia responded positively, and the Japanese corporate presence across that region remains ubiquitous and beneficial to this day.


Predictably, given his Sinocentric perspective, Menon is dismissive of the Quad, preferring that India join RCEP despiteyears of relentless hostility from China.
During the NixonMao dialogue in, Mao spent more than half the time discussing his hostility toward India yet Indias policymakers seem oblivious to this strategic reality.


Menon believes the US is a declining power, and that western economic involvement in East Asia is diminishing, “except in Singapore and Vietnam”.
In reality, ASEANs and Chinas export sectors are dominated by “western” companies, including those from the US, Japan, Europe and Taiwan, freeing up domestic capital for technology sectors that China seeks to dominate.
On Pakistan, Menon laments that “we are a long way from the promise of theperiod, when India and Pakistan appeared close to addressing the issues between them”, neatly forgetting that the spirit of that period was disrupted by Pakistans terrorist attack on MumbaiNovember.
Contrasting with Indias feeble nonresponse then, the Modi governments robust response to Uri and Pulwama has considerably reduced terrorism since.


The US remains the global leader in innovation, and the Quad presents unique complementarities between Indias software and pharmaceutical expertise, US technology, Australian minerals, and Japans stillformidable corporate footprint ranging from Toyota and Honda cars, electronics brands Sony, Panasonic, NEC and Hitachi, to massmarket Uniqlo and venture investor Softbank.
The Quadrangular economic relationship, coupled with Indias labour reforms, are helping shift Chinacentred supply chains to India, while Japans partnership in infrastructure and the green transition help India exceed its commitments to theParis climate agreement.


Menon chooses not to appreciate any of this, instead ending with formulaic excoriations of todays India.
His book is sadly emblematic of the vacuity of the Nehruvian approach to diplomacysubservient to China, suspicious of the US, and clinging to nonalignment despite its manifest failures.
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