Peter John Brobst, The Future of the Great Game: Sir Olaf Caroe, India’s Independence and the Defense of Asia. Akron, University of Akron Press, 2005.

 

Sir Olaf Caroe, the Foreign Secretary of the British Government of India and the last governor of the volatile North West Frontier Province, was an exponent of the centrality of the geopolitics of Asia just at the moment the British Empire passed away. With an eye on current affairs, Brobst re-examines Caroe’s vision of the future and finds many similarities. Caroe felt that India would be the counterpoise in the Asian balance of power and, despite the skepticism of his contemporaries, predicted the re-emergence of China as a Great Power. Those familiar with the Pentagon’s map of world strategic zones will find resonances with Caroe’s concept of the Seven Theaters of Power (xv)

 

Brobst analyses Caroe’s views with dexterity. He notes how Caroe felt that American criticism of the Raj, and pressure to decolonize, was a thinly veiled attempt to replace British with American power, but the means to secure Britain’s interests in Asia in the future was to appeal to America’s perspective on geopolitics in the region, that is, to support Britain against the threats posed by Russia and China. Caroe often complained that in the vital matters of foreign policy, insufficient attention was being paid to Asia, but his study group of like-minded officials was criticized as being anachronistic, even diplomatically embarrassing. Few shared their belief that Asia should be viewed as one, unified strategic problem – Britain’s leaders were busy facing the realities of decolonization and were more concerned with shoring up British influence elsewhere.

 

Brobst quickly sets the record straight about Caroe’s views on Partition, so long misrepresented in Indian historiography. Like almost all British officials, the original objective was to keep India intact. However, it was soon clear to Caroe that Partition was inevitable because of the strong centrifugal tendencies in nationalist groups, and when it happened he strongly advocated backing Pakistan as the means to secure Britain’s interests in Asia, without sacrificing support for India – the ‘Center of the Asian system’. Caroe felt that cohesion in South Asia was vital in order to maintain stability at the heart of the continent and he envisaged an ‘interdependence’ with Britain rather than a full ‘independence’. This would give Britain the chance to keep South Asia in a partnership so as to pursue more effectively resistance to Soviet, and perhaps Chinese bids to dominate the Eurasian landmass: in other words, to continue the agenda of the so-called Great Game. The problem was that, at least initially, India seemed reluctant to acknowledge what Caroe regarded as vital: control or influence over the ‘outer rim’ of buffer states around South Asia.

 

Despite the common criticisms of the alarmist tendencies of British officials, Brobst suggest that the Soviet threat to south and south west Asia was not entirely chimerical. Persia (Iran) was, to Soviet planners, the ‘Suez Canal of Revolution’ and the Soviet Command Study group anticipated operations against India. Caroe had hoped that America would assist Britain to contest the Middle East, Persia and Afghanistan, economically as much as politically, against Soviet aggrandizement, a hope he expressed most clearly in his Wells of Power (1951). Similar assessments were made about China and an expansionist agenda in the future, which posed a threat to India via Burma, Tibet, and the small states on India’s immediate border. The method of control of this ‘inner ring’ was not to be military intervention however, rather it was a case of ‘maximum vigilance with minimum interference from the Center’ (100).

 

However, the problem with using Caroe’s views to show similarities in the key facets of the geopolitics of Asia is that the criteria of comparison are barely applicable at all. Brobst believes that South Asia ‘remains the central strategic space’ of the continent (147) with distinct resonances for ‘the Pacific century’. Yet, in its ability to influence the region, India has been consistently overestimated. True, India has vast potential, but it is a potential which its leaders have struggled to realize. Despite several conflicts with Pakistan, it has failed to resolve long running disputes such as Kashmir and failed to project its power beyond South Asia. It was soundly defeated in the 1962 border war with China in small scale operations. Even its Non-Aligned stance failed to offer freedom of action for itself or any real influence over developing nations globally, despite the hopes of its architects. Indeed, in relative terms, it was the junior partner in all the alignments it did have – from the UN to the Treaty of Friendship with the USSR from 1971.

 

For the Soviet Union too, its power was far more apparent than real and this calls into question the validity of Caroe’s futurology. The Soviet Union failed to gain a foothold in the Persian Gulf, despite its ability to reach the Straits of Hormuz with aircraft stationed in Afghanistan, it struggled to secure its southern flank in the Middle East and it ultimately foundered over the ten year war in Afghanistan. There is not a straightforward resumption of older confrontations, but entirely new issues, problems and pressures overlaying old fault lines. Brobst rightly points out the many flaws in Caroe’s views and highlights the opposition he faced from contemporaries. Caroe believed, for example, that the USSR would collapse because it could not hold together and suppress the peoples of Central Asia indefinitely. Seductive though this view appears to be in light of Afghanistan, the demise of the Soviet Union had far more to do with the failure of its economic policy, and the loss of its political capital, than events in Central Asia. It is worth recalling that the Central Asian republics all backed the brief attempt by communist hardliners to retake power in Moscow in 1991, and it is those regimes which still use Soviet practices in their government. Nevertheless, Brobst’s study of a British official’s thinking at the transition of empire to Commonwealth has much to commend it, not least for a better insight into the grand strategy of the period.