Thread by @AsiaRedefined

STATECRAFT VS. STAGECRAFT

India's relations with the outside world will be the other test before we can claim to be on solid ground. This essentially means dealing with other countries, especially our neighbours and the big powers, in a manner that ensures peace and security.

According to the theories that currently carry conviction, there are three basic ways of achieving this result—

>>coercion,
>>payment
or
>>attraction.

This mix is regarded as the mantra of a good national
strategy.

But to be historically correct, it must be pointed out that this mantra is neither new nor a Western discovery. As a matter of fact,the basic premise of it has been around for centuries.

As far back as the fourth century BC, #Kautilya had propounded the concept of

>>saam(advice or cajole),
>>daam (pay or bribe),
>>dand (punish),
and
>>bhed (exploit secrets)

as the policies to be followed, as per need, by a ruler.

Ever since, these four forms have been in use as matters of practical statecraft. Since the concept has now been given a Western touch, it has acquired the polish of a new philosophy.

Soft power, smart power, hard power and the latest, sharp power, as the Western debate describes them, are in fact all derivatives of Kautilya’s saam, daam, dand and bhed

Soft power is the ability of a country to persuade others to do what it wants without force or coercion.

To put the same thingdifferently in the manner made famous by Daniele Vare, ‘Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.’

But soft poweralone cannot produce effective foreign policy. With the exception of

#MahatmaGandhi and #NelsonMandela , it is hard to think of anybody who has been able to lead using soft power alone

Hard power swings to the other extreme; it is the use of coercion and payment.

Five hundred years ago, Niccolò #Machiavelli recognized the shortcomings of both options.

He wrote that ‘a prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred.’

In a way, Machiavelli was anticipating #JosephNye and his use of the term ‘smart power,’ which he first introduced in 1990 in his book, Bound to Lead.

It is just that Nye put a name to it—otherwise Teddy Roosevelt, too, had famously meant more or less the same thing when he said that ‘we must speak softly and carry a big stick’.

We could go back further in time on this, because for one reason or the other, ‘smart power’ has been in use for a long time now.

There have been various interpretations of what smart power should be, but its most public articulation was given by #HillaryClinton during her

Senate confirmation hearing on 13 January 2009 for the position of Secretary of State:

"" We must use what has been called smart power—the full range of tools at our disposal—diplomatic, economic, military, political, legal, and cultural—
picking the right tool,

or combination of tools, for each situation. With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy. ""

A recent addition to this lexicon of power is ‘sharp power’.

Simply put, it is the use of manipulative diplomatic policies by one country to influence and undermine the political system of a target country.

As Nye had put it, sharp power is the deceptive use of information for hostile purposes. Russia and China are currently considered the ablest users of sharp power as a force that ‘pierces, penetrates, orperforates the political and information environments in targeted countries.’

These various types of power need not be applied exclusively or one by one. It is possible to mix and match them as per need.

For instance, as a rising power, #China employs ‘soft power’ to achieve its objectives as also the ‘sharp power’ of disruption and censorship.

But these two goals are hard to combine, and sometimes they canboomerang. In Australia, for example, the Chinese use of deceptive sharp power has undercut its soft power.

The public approval of China was growing until the revelation of its use of sharp power tools
to meddle in

#Australian politics.