What's the most (ab)used word in foreign policy?

During the third week of May, while India and China were working on building their “strategic trust”, Mongolia and India issued a joint statement about their “strategic partnership”, and as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi concluded his tri-nation tour in South Korea, the countries agreed on upgrading their relationship status to “special strategic partnership”. 

Modi became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Mongolia. Before visiting the land of Genghis Khan, he was seen inspecting the terracotta warriors in China. A day later, he was in South Korea. About a month before, he flew over the Atlantic to visit Canada, stopping by France and Germany. He was then in Russia after a visit to some Central Asian states. There were many visits before, and many more will follow.

Modi, even before the end of his first year in office, had visited 18 countries, engaging and re-engaging with the world and its leaders – he may even have ended up topping a global list of politicians with most selfies. However, the chorus on all these foreign trips has a common word that’s sung, repeatedly, and sometimes out of tune. Strategic. And while he may have, as many claim, revitalised Indian ties with world, that s-word has remained.

From strategic focus to strategic convergences and strategic dimensions to strategic perspectives, the s-word had over 500 mentions in a document outlining India’s foreign relations for the year 2006. By 2012, the Indian government had found more words as suffixes, including strategic co-operative dialogue and strategic priority. And as Modi and his government ride the wave, the word refused to give way as Modi’s speech on the India-Germany strategic partnership showed.

Talk about stating the obvious. Nobody doubts the emphasis on strategy when it comes to diplomacy, but haven’t we got enough of the word? Or have all government decisions, before we stumbled upon the s-word, not been strategic?

Well, whatever the answer to that question is, strategic is a part of almost all global bilateral, trilateral or even multilateral arrangements. From the US-Poland strategic dialogue to the China-Chile strategic partnership. So, is it not the most abused word in foreign policy or can we wait for the coronation?

The Oxford English Dictionary describes strategic as a word relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests. Some of its synonyms are calculated and deliberate. So then again, did diplomacy that pre-dated the love affair with the s-word not take a long-term view or do we just don’t want to keep it simple enough?

Reinforcing realism?

The context the word is always used in also reinforces a global worldview. It tends to tilt towards realism – a theory that broadly says that, in terms of international relations, the world is anarchic and states or countries will take selfish approaches for survival. Certainly, diplomacy involves hard politics, but the s-word leaves little space for constructive approaches by ensuring that the state’s interests are defined by default – ‘strategically’. While agreements may be mutually beneficial, they appear to be made in a realist world. And realism, arguably, tends to pollute the debate around climate change while constructivism struggles to liberate it. Perhaps, we should sometime discuss the vocabulary of a realist and a liberal among others.

If you search for images for the word 'strategic' on Google, chess boards and the game is what shows up the most. And chess is a zero-sum game. There can be draws, but it's never win-win. Doesn't that backfire on a constructive approach then, reinforcing realism?

If we consider the history of the word, strategic appears to be a relatively new find. At the cost of being termed an armchair historian, it’s still apt to follow the graph on the popularity or usage of the word as plotted by Google Ngram. Most web information needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, but even with that this curve is rather steep – and for all you know government statements and media reports that followed contributed heavily to that climb. Plot that graph against big global events and you find that the word appears to have really taken off around the time of World War II. A post-war realist attitude to diplomacy, especially in a world that saw two poles of power – the US and the Soviet Union – seems to have given it a boost. And then perhaps, it trickled in elsewhere too; jargon, it appears, crosses borders quite fast, like ideas that it can further cement. 

What the excessive usage of the word does – apart from reducing its meaning to zilch – is that it also keeps international relations from reaching the masses. Yes, foreign policy, more or less, continues to be largely informed by an elitist argument, but what ensures that it fails to be discussed about by many who could contribute to the debate, is the usage of words like strategic that add complexity to statements, but little meaning. Strategic to foreign policy may be what, by many standards, development is to some Indian politicians. Not asking for a ban on the words, but why not keep it a little simpler, silly?