Hiroshi Hirabayashi, Japan’s former ambassador to India, views India as the next superpower, joining the United States, China, and Russia at the apex of world politics. In India: The Last Super Power, part study of India’s history, culture and domestic politics, part geopolitical analysis, and part memoir, he lays out the case. He believes that India will side with Western-oriented nations in resisting China—indeed, he writes that it is already doing so.
Hirabayashi is particularly well-qualified to discuss India and its growing role in the world. In addition to his ambassadorial duties in India, he held posts in Italy, France, China, Belgium and the United States, worked in Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and served as a Cabinet Councillor for External Affairs for the Prime Minister’s Secretariat. He is currently the President of the Japan-India Association.
The author identifies several “keys” to understanding India: its geographic size and location, its growing economic strength, its growing and better educated population, its democratic form of government, its ethnic and religious diversity, the caste system, and its commitment to secularism. He discusses the evolution of India’s relations with Japan, frequently providing first-hand accounts from his diplomatic experiences. (Although informative and interesting, Hirabayashi’s personal experiences take the form of digressions from the book’s narrative. The book would flow much better if the author had worked his first-hand accounts into the narrative instead of separating them out each time).

Hirabayashi’s geopolitical analysis is first-rate. He recognizes the increasing importance of the Indian Ocean to the global balance of power—Robert Kaplan has called it the new geographical pivot of world politics. Hirabayashi understands China’s Belt and Road Initiative to be a geopolitical strategy for replacing the United States as the world’s leading power. Hirabayashi puts it this way:
The Belt and Road Initiative … is a strategy to develop both land and sea routes up to Europe and along with securing access to Europe, put the countries en route under the influence of China. The land route is the road to Europe via Central Asia along the old Silk Route, while the sea route connects China with Europe and Africa via the Indian Ocean and the Suez Canal.
He concurs with the view that China’s construction of ports in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan—the so-called “String of Pearls”—is a “strategy to put a noose around India’s neck”. China, he notes further, is also “developing land routes to the Indian Ocean” through Myanmar and Pakistan.
China’s increasingly aggressive behavior in the East China and South China Seas and the Indian Ocean, Hirabayashi writes, has caused India to move from a policy of “strategic autonomy” to one of semi-alliance with the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. In other words, India is siding with Western-oriented powers vis-a-vis China, while still maintaining good relations with Russia—an approach that many foreign policy realists believe the United States would be well-advised to follow.
Hirabayashi concludes the book with advice for his countrymen and other nations—based on his personal experiences— about how best to deal with India as it rises to superpower status in the 21st century. He calls it paying attention to the six Ps: product, price, place, person, passion, and patience, with the latter—patience—perhaps being the most important. Written like a true diplomat.
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