New Delhi (RT) November 10,India’s defense minister has said that international security should be a joint effort, not a ‘zero-sum game’. A truly stable and just world order will only be established when countries stop trying to secure their own security at the expense of others, said Indian defense minister Rajnath Singh while speaking at the National Defense Academy on Thursday. Singh argued that the world needs to develop a collective approach to security. “India does not believe in a world order in which the few are considered superior to others,” he said, adding that India’s own strategic policies should be “moral.”
If security becomes a truly collective enterprise, the world can “start creating a global order that benefits us all,” Singh added. He stressed that national security should not be seen as a ‘zero-sum game’, adding that countries should instead try to find ‘win-win’ solutions that benefit everyone.
“We should not be guided by narrow self-interest which is not beneficial in the long run,” the defense minister warned, calling for leaders to adopt a principle of “enlightened self-interest” that would make their nations more sustainable and resilient to shocks.
A “strong and prosperous” India should not be built at the expense of others, he said. Instead, New Delhi would prefer to “help other nations realize their full potential.” The minister also warned about the growing impact of “information warfare” and fake news campaigns on political stability, which he said was used for “engineering the opinion or perspective of the masses.” This information war is “most evident in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine” where both sides use social media to “spread competing narratives about the war and portray the conflict on their own terms.” The ideas expressed by Singh resemble the arguments made by Russia in early 2022 when it sought an agreement with the US and NATO to reduce the risk of a conflict on the European continent. At the time, Moscow similarly argued that the security of one nation could not be enhanced at the expense of others.
Moscow requested that NATO refrain from any military activity on the territory of former Warsaw Pact states that joined after 1997. He also called on NATO to pledge to stop its expansion eastwards. However, their proposal for long-term European security his architecture was rejected.
