There can’t be adequate soft power without hard power and to be able to project soft power, we need to concurrently develop our hard power capabilities, Indian Air Force (IAF) Chief Air Chief Marshal (ACM) V.R. Chaudhari said on Tuesday while stating that there were important lessons from the war in Ukraine and highlighted some of them including achieving self-sufficiency in manufacturing arms.
“Irrespective of the international treaties be it North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Quad, Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) whatever friendship between countries will also come second to a nations security and self-interests amply evidenced by the way European countries have taken a stance in the ongoing conflict. There is definitely a lesser appetite for the international rules-based order,” ACM Chaudhari said speaking at a seminar organised by United Services Institution of India.
“Self-sufficiency in arms manufacture is an absolute necessity… we cannot be dependent on any other nation forever to defend our country. We need to promote and support our indigenous industry and indigenous technologies,” he said.
More importantly, ACM Chaudhari said anything can be weaponised. As we see today, the financial protocol, SWIFT transaction, has prevented us from transferring money into Russian accounts, he noted.
Officials had said that since Russia was shunted out of the SWIFT system, it has become tougher to do payments. While smaller payments have resumed, larger payments are still an issue and efforts are on to work a way out.
Civilian airspace being controlled, social media-based businesses being controlled, and even international sporting bodies are getting weaponsied in some form or the other, he said highlighting other ways of impact. What we need to understand from all this is that strong narratives can build influence globally. And narratives that we see emanating from the conflict has changed the world order as we see it, as we saw it in the last two decades or more,” he added.
