India’s foreign minister on ties with America, China and Russia

In a recent interview with this paper, Henry Kissinger, a former American secretary of state, gave a troubling assessment of a world in which old powers are fading, new ones are rising and superpower conflict threatens. Yet he offered, alongside few other hopeful notes, this accolade: “I have very high regard for the way the Indians conduct their foreign policy now, because it shows balance.”

Among the ways this was striking was the fact that Mr Kissinger is known in India as the former enabler of a viscerally anti-Indian president. “The Indians are bastards,” he told Richard Nixon, after the president had hosted India’s prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, at the White House in 1971. “They are the most aggressive goddamn people around.”