Soft power may seem an odd topic to speak about in a lecture that memorialises a famous intelligence chief. Intelligence is thought of as the job of hard men: What has softness of any sort to do with it? But before we can even get to that, what do we mean by “global security’’? National security is something we can more easily understand — keeping a country and its people safe behind defensible borders. What is global security?

The assault on the World Trade Centre in New York on 9/11 has already made clear the old cliché about our global village — for it showed that a fire that starts in a remote thatched hut or dusty tent in one corner of that village can melt the steel girders of the tallest skyscrapers at the other end of our global village. Yet that is not all. Some 2600 people died in the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. But some 26,000 people also died on that same day around the world — from starvation, unclean water and preventable disease. We cannot afford to exclude them from our idea of global security.

India is already an important player in global institutions, and inevitably will be even more so in the future, as its economic and political power grows. But of course it also has to look to its national security. The perfect Kantian world of altruistic states ready to look beyond their self-interest does not yet exist. States operate in an era of competition with others, seeking to promote their security by leveraging their assets. And this is where “soft power’’ comes in.

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