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•ANUBHUTI VISHNOI: There are three growing powers in Asia and then you have a Pakistan and an Afghanistan which have been identified as the hotbed of Islamic jihad. How do you see Asia in such a situation?

You have in Pakistan and Afghanistan, states that are either failing or not succeeding at all. There is a great deal of concern that in Pakistan we are increasingly seeing an awful lot of intellectual vigour behind the current international Islamic Jihadist sentiment. The Al Qaeda’s Internet operation in Pakistan Al-Sahab is sophisticated, post-modern, effective and itself is testament to the reality that in today’s Internet world, cyberspace chat rooms can affect the radicalisation of Islamic youth far beyond the territory of the place from which they come. In the West, people see some form of stabilization in Pakistan and Afghanistan as probably the top international security priority now — higher even than the stabilisation of Iraq itself.

•ZEENAT NAZIR: In that context, what do you think of Washington’s desire to increase its oversight on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

I think that, by and large, there still is enough confidence that the Pakistani military has sufficient control of its nuclear arsenal. Therefore, going in and grabbing it is an option that remains at the extreme end of military and diplomatic opinion in the United States. You’ll always hear this flutter of concern at uncertain times but I don’t think it’s THE established policy of US to go and try to secure them themselves.

•SANDEEP SINGH: How has diplomacy changed in the last 2-3 decades? Does international business now decide diplomacy?

There is one basic change in foreign policy over the last three decades: foreign policy was mainly about affecting the foreign policy of other states. So when states met at summit meetings, they would try and convince the foreign ministers of other states to adjust their foreign policy to make it more aligned to the states that were seeking that accommodation. The main purpose now is quite often to influence other governments to change domestic politics. When we talk to Russia or to China or Venezuela, it tends to be much more about their domestic politics than about their former foreign policy position.

•SHEKHAR GUPTA: So what was earlier internal is now becoming global?

What is happening is that domestic politics are commutable. The politics of one country can spill over into the politics of another country. So it is the responsibility of good foreign policy partly to be interventionist because that is the diplomatic equivalent of military pre-emption. It’s to discuss with other states how their domestic arrangements, good or ill, might have malign or benign effects outside. It’s an antiquated thought that one can engage in foreign policy without interfering in the internal affairs of other states. Any intervention of any kind, economic or otherwise, is an intervention in the domestic politics of that state.

•SUMN JHA: In the days, years and decades to come, how important do you think soft powers would be in defining great powers?

I think states now have less power than they used to because of the growing power of business, NGOs and the media, just as the monopoly of military powers is no longer uniquely held by states because there has been privatisation of violence — non-state groups have power, terrorist groups have power. Churchill’s famous phrase when asked what troubled him — ‘Events, dear, events’ — is all the more true now when events across the world are reported instantly. Soft power is most useful when there’s already a magnetic attraction to that soft power. For example, the Europeans are fond of talking about their soft power approach to eastern Europe, how the attractions to the EU made it possible for them to help the democratisation, modernisation of eastern European countries. But when your soft power isn’t attractive, then it isn’t a useful element of power. It’s not an easy distinction to make that military power is bad and soft power is good. You can use military power for humanitarian purposes as India has in helping tsunami hit areas and in many peace-keeping operations worldwide. Much of the power used by Islamic jihadists is in its first, second and third instances soft power: it’s influencing the minds of people to think in a certain way.

•MINI KAPOOR: How do you see Russia — as a diminishing power, as a more and more unpredictable power?

The person who has just been elected as the president of Russia is an English-speaking lawyer who has liberal economic tendencies with no special link to the Communist Party or the KGB. In theory, he should be the ideal president of Russia from the outsiders’ point of view and yet his arrival to power is being treated with the lowest of possible expectations by the outside world. The new president will be obliged to reform the Russian economy and to find ways to diversify it and to make certain that the economy does not persist well into the future as a petrol-economy which is genuinely unhealthy.

There has been a very great difficulty between the west and Russia over the last four years and a good deal of blame needs to be laid at the door of the west. Western policy has been to invite Russia to accept the enlargement of NATO, to accept its deployment of missiles in eastern European countries, to accept the sovereignty of Kosovo. This has emphasised the Russian sense of disappointment, the Russian sense of humiliation and therefore, the Russians’ emerging sense of nationalism that Putin has incarnated so well.

•PRANAB DHAL SAMANTA: The revival of nuclear disarmament is once again a major issue. Do you think it is one of those periodic things that come up before the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review?

I think it is a genuine view that the stockpiles of the current nuclear powers go way beyond what the strategy underlining those stockpiles requires. There’s no need for the enormously large stockpiles that the US and Russia has even now. At the IISS, we are publishing a volume in September on the nuclear abolition debate and also on the technical question of how one actually moves to lower nuke holdings and eventual abolition. Eventual abolition is hard because people hold weapons for a wide variety of reasons, most of them political and resolving those political issues is not something that can be done around an NPT review conference.