Nepal’s post-1990 foreign policy
Since 1990, Nepal's foreign policy has mustered little innovation, confidence, or drive. Nor has it even had to try. Notwithstanding their social democratic pedigree, the new ruling elite from the Nepali Congress party enjoyed little room for maneuver or fallback. With Moscow in decline, Europe preoccupied with reintegrating its eastern flank, Beijing struggling to reclaim legitimacy after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, and New Delhi vigorously embracing IMF-prescribed reforms during the 1991 peak of a humiliating balance of payments crisis, the new government was left with few options but to sing along to the song-sheet of liberal universalism eulogized suchlike in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. And as ideological lines blurred in the West and the ‘globalists’ made their big, international push for neoliberalism through bilateral diplomacy and multilateral aid, Kathmandu soon became an early adopter of the Washington Consensus.
Three decades on and several experiments later, Nepal finds herself back in the clutches of clientelist politics, firmly in the grip of special interests. While the rest of the world resets its goals to reflect new and emerging realities, Nepal's priorities appear increasingly inchoate. Between a citizenry inured to circumstance, a ruling class impervious to outrage, and friends abroad prone to conflating failures so conspicuous with ‘resilience’, Nepalis, by and large, find their life choices reduced to a sad binary: escape Nepal or be thankful for small mercies.
Nepal-India-China Triangulation
India-China relations matter deeply to Nepal, for they determine the potential triangulation of interests and our ultimate path to scale. Take it from a Nepali—a neighbor adjacent to both; landlocked and dwarfed by geography and demography alike: India and China bring different strengths to the table. More of India should not have to mean less of China. And more of China should not have to mean less of India.
Be that as it may, our border regions are having to serve as unspoken cordons sanitaires and undeclared spheres of influence, not because of our compatriots' rightful stations there, but owing to the ‘security first’ disposition of our neighbors. To be fair, much of this is of our own doing too. If only we were to approach our neighbors as co-creators rather than inhibitors. If only we were to treat our geolocation as a pride of place rather than a bad hand dealt by nature. And if only we were to bring three-way value proposition to the tremendous upsides of civilizational overlap. It may very well take the thick skin of a Nelson Mandela and the clever brains of a Lee Kuan Yew, but a meaningful trifecta could still be within generational reach should we put our hearts and minds to it.
Not that Kathmandu can effect a rapprochement between New Delhi and Beijing on its own. But we can do more than just moan on the sidelines. The onus still lies on our diplomatic machinery to promote strategic convergences. And in doing so, we should not miss any opportunity to assert that Nepal's interests do not deserve to be held hostage to an uneasy peace between our estranged neighbors.
A neighboring superpower
While the story of China's rise to global superpower is awe-inspiring, its prescriptions for prosperity are frustratingly tangential to Nepal. China’s political economy and her institutions of governance are decidedly unique. That said, Nepalis should still find many levels of developmental learning. But to take advantage, Nepal must invest in sharpening our faculties and cultivating curiosity to experience China firsthand. All too often, we subject our understanding of the Chinese civilizational mindset, cultural DNA, and contemporary worldview to hackneyed accounts recycled from the West.
If the outgoing unipolar order is to be replaced with an incoming multipolar one, someone might as well take a crack at articulating it. And who better than the Chinese? But any depiction of Beijing as a force for good seems to fly in the face of closet ‘cold warriors’ and their credo that security is zero-sum; all or nothing.
A rising neighbor
India’s development choices still bedevil an influential section of her professional class. As bizarre as it may sound, this disquiet is actually more salient and intelligible to a similarly challenged Nepal. By sheer size and spread, India’s predicaments appear enormous. Yet they are also instinctively relatable on a human scale, for India and Nepal share many of the same exigencies that our political, administrative, and economic practices commonly demand. Shared antecedents and belief systems, cultural familiarity, and even a partiality for contemporary regional pop culture help anchor the construct of an ‘imagined community’ between large swathes of our peoples.
While there is little to doubt in the vast reservoirs of fellowship that prevails between our peoples, one must also acknowledge the presence of loose cannons and poison pills. Unfortunately, when signaling is indistinguishable from noise and spats spill outside of the realm of coded, restrained diplomacy, bilateral cooperation tends to take the hardest hit. Our recent diplomatic history bears witness to several dark moments when red lines were trampled, oblivious to potential consequences. All too often, we take inconsiderate liberties with each other nowadays. After all, red lines exist for good reasons. They mark the boundaries of vital interests and sovereign sensitivities that nation-states hold sacrosanct.
Few would doubt that the Nepal-India relationship is unique if not ‘special’. But not in ways that the policy hawks in New Delhi tend to constrain it to reductionist and outworn Nehruvian ideas. The adjective ‘special’ is highly loaded to Nepali ears when applied to ‘relationship’, as prime minister Nehru was once fond of describing India’s relations with Bhutan and pre-annexation Sikkim as ‘special’ as well. Nepalis like to believe that ours is a far more nuanced one. Yet we must also acknowledge that our relationship is by no means exclusive, lest we find ourselves fulminating endlessly over schoolyard issues. Striking that sweet spot and maintaining a delicate balance is crucial—our history stands testimony to the likelihood of mishaps occurring when we sway too far.
China, India and the West
Having aided and abetted China’s phenomenal rise for a heady four decades, the West is now experiencing a severe bout of buyer’s remorse. It rides roughshod over Beijing at every opportunity because the reigning superpower, the US, has trained the challenger in its crosshairs as a ‘pacing’ peer-competitor. India, on the other hand, has long been handled with kid gloves. If anything, the rise of China has concomitantly elevated India’s profile as a regional counterweight; a ‘doorstop’ to Beijing's ambitions. In this calculus, the US and its allies often pitch India as a ‘pro-West bulwark’ in Asia—a stamp that New Delhi sometimes welcomes with a wink and a nod but, at others, stridently protests. After all, ‘strategic ambiguity’ is a valid practice in the conduct of foreign policy.
India is today where China was in 2008: a $4 trillion economy with a per capita nominal GDP of $2600. With thirty million people entering the middle class every year, there is little reason to doubt that India will be close to where China is today by the 2040s: an $18 trillion economy with a GDP per capita of $13,500. Barring the unforeseen, New Delhi would also likely be asserting its economic, diplomatic, and military heft in the direction of cementing the multipolar order—moves that could be further misread in the West as India having also grown too big for its britches. 2026 will be an interesting year to witness the reshaping of global power relations, especially as India chairs the BRICS as the voice of the Global South and the US leads the G20 as the presiding deity of the Western-led order.
Nepal’s case for climate justice
Climate .. is both our identity and our destiny. It is central to understanding how we have evolved as a people, a society, a nation, and a civilization. To the extent we rally fitting stewardship, climate will determine the security of our future. Meanwhile, in Kathmandu, the response to our climate dilemmas has been dumbed down to a mere ‘development’ problem, bureaucratized as one more check-box for surly Singha Durbar to tick off. Something as core to our essence deserves a far higher, heavier lift in our national consciousness, one would think. Merely updating Nationally Determined Commitment (NDC) documents and costing them upward at every Conference of Parties (CoP) to mirror the latest pie-in-the-sky funding assumptions will simply not cut it.
Nepal risks losing far more in climate loss and damage every year than it can ever hope to redeem through poverty alleviation programs, social investments, economic growth, and development. Yet the last things we need are corporate greenwashing, donor double-dipping, and myriad ‘green-collar’ hustles masquerading as climate finance.
The nuclear threat to Nepal
Deterrence and diplomacy are two legs on which the nuclear security regime has stood since the Cold War. But neither approach holds reliably in today's world where the number of nuclear-armed states has expanded; technical information is imperfect and harder to acquire; threat perceptions and command-and-control structures are trickier to read; ‘no first use’ principles and second-strike capabilities are compromised by technological advances in cyber-warfare, low-yield tactical nuclear weaponry and hypersonic glide vehicles; and arms limitation treaties and inspection and verification regimes have broken down.
