Kant and Kautilya: Dual Grammar of Power Between the US and India

There is a persistent illusion in international relations that states choose, once and for all, between idealism and realism. The foreign policies of India and the United States both demolish this illusion as these countries speak the language of universal values while simultaneously practising something far older and far less sentimental.

Illustration by The Geostrata

TWO FRAMEWORKS, ONE WORLD

Let’s first explore the world of realism and idealism quickly. Immanuel Kant, in his writing Perpetual Peace (1795), argued that everlasting international stability could only be achieved through a federation of republics which is bound by law, mutual respect, and cosmopolitan rights. In his vision, states were not simply engines of self-interest but moral actors capable of transcending the logic of war. The United Nations, in its current avatar, represents this promise, but as we know its state at the moment, particularly when it comes to ensuring peace, it exists in a spectrum which ranges from ineffective to failing. 

Chanakya, also known as Kautilya, had no patience for such horizons. In the Arthashastra, composed around the 4th century BCE, he mapped a world of relentless competition where the state's first obligation was survival and expansion. According to his Mandala theory, which covers the ancient Indian geopolitical framework, the summary of inter-state relations can be drawn in one clean statement - “The neighbour is always a potential threat; the neighbour's neighbour is always a potential ally”. Look at Iran and its West Asian counterparts in the current context, for instance.

CASE -1 INDIA - SIMULTANEOUSLY BALANCING TWO PHILOSOPHIES AND NATIONAL INTEREST

Independent India's foreign policy was born in paradox. Jawaharlal Nehru launched Non-Alignment while using terms from Kantian language, such as sovereignty, self-determination, the equality of nations, etc.

He understood that this newly decolonised state needed strategic room to manoeuvre. The rhetoric was moral; the architecture was Kautilyan.

This double logic has deepened rather than become simplified over time. At the United Nations, India championed the Global South while refusing to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the year 2022. This was simple common sense disguised as sovereignty. Russia not only supplies the nation with oil but with something far more crucial - the S-400 air defence system, famously used in Operation Sindoor. The key statement here is that you don't lecture your arms dealer.

Moreover, its anxiety about Chinese encirclement and its wariness of being absorbed into any bloc made neutrality not just convenient but philosophically consistent with Kautilya's doctrine.

However, at the same time India deploys Kantian language with genuine conviction in certain domains. Its insistence on multipolarity, followed by investment in institutions like BRICS and the Global South coalition, its framing of climate justice and reform of the UN Security Council. All of these are not merely decorative. 

The key to understanding India's foreign policy, now, is this: it uses Kantian language when the rules in question are ones it helped write or ones that constrain the powerful. It uses Kautilyan logic when the immediate interests of the state, like territorial integrity, economic sovereignty, and great-power relations, are at stake. The philosophical frameworks are not in contradiction; they operate at different registers of statecraft.

CASE -2 THE US SUBTLY MANEUVERING THE IDEA OF UNIVERSAL AMERICAN ORDER THROUGH THESE POLITICAL THINKERS

The United States foreign policy follows the Kantian philosophy through means that enhance the belief in liberal democracy and place it as the universal destination of human political development, while actively deploying the  Kautilya method on the ground using power that disrupts and restructures areas of interest, all in the honourable service of an American-defined order.

Washington, by sincerely speaking the vocabulary of human rights, democratic governance, and rules-based international order - not just as a performance, goes through convictionally stronger methods to deploy its narrative of the same.

The Marshall Plan, the construction of Bretton Woods institutions, and the promotion of international law all reflect this genuine Kantian impulse, the belief that a stable international system built on shared norms benefits everyone, including the United States.

However, the contradictions become hard to ignore as one analyses the US’s present war with Iran and other notoriously famous past ventures, for eg, the present US president threatening Denmark with higher tariffs to acquire Greenland in the year 2025 or when sanctions were imposed on the International Criminal Court over the investigation of his ally, Benjamin Netanyahu.

It partnered up with authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere as strategic interests demanded it. Followed by the Iraq invasion in 2003 without United Nations Security Council authorisation, a unilateral act that violated the very rules-based order it nominally champions, or even using economic sanctions as an instrument of coercion while openly denouncing such tactics when deployed by rivals. The analysis of the trajectory these actions form speaks a lot.

Mainly it highlights a critical point, which is that India alone does not foster the gap between principle and practice; both nations do. But the line is drawn in the intentions and values each of these countries follows when taking actions catering to their national interests. 

WHAT THE COMPARISON REVEALS

Placed side by side, these nations illuminate something important about the relationship between political philosophy and behaviour. Neither Kant nor Chanakya describe what any state actually does. Instead, they represent two poles of a permanent tension, which is between the world as it ought to be and the world as it is. 

India deals with this contrast by subtly crossing toward Kautilya and loudly towards Kant. The United States, on the other hand, loudly opts for Kautilya while subtly speaking Kant.

Both approaches have costs. India's strategic ambiguity can be read as moral evasion. America's universalism can be read as selective enforcement, but in a world increasingly sceptical of both ideologies, the more balanced foreign policy may be the one that is honest about this tension rather than the one that pretends it does not exist.

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BY SAANVI

TEAM GEOSTRATA

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