The following is an edited transcript of the March 4, 2025 EIR interview with Dr. M.K. Bhadrakumar. Dr. Bhadrakumar served for 30 years at the Ministry of External Affairs of India, including diplomatic positions in the Soviet Union, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Türkiye, where he held the rank of Ambassador. A prolific writer on world affairs, he maintains a website called India Punchline where he posts his published material. The interview was conducted by EIR’s Mike Billington. Subheads have been added.
Mike Billington: Greetings. This is Mike Billington with the Executive Intelligence Review and the Schiller Institute. I’m very pleased to be today with Dr. M.K. Bhadrakumar, who had a 30-year diplomatic career for India. He was the Ambassador to the USSR and also held leading positions within the Foreign Ministry. He had positions in Pakistan, in Iran, in Afghanistan. He is a prolific writer on world affairs. His blog is called India Punchline, which I encourage people to go to. Dr. Bhadrakumar, welcome, and thank you very much for agreeing to this discussion.
Dr. M.K. Bhadrakumar: Mike, good evening. It is my privilege, entirely my privilege. I have known and I have read a lot about you in your distinguished career as an activist and a promoter of world peace. But I never had an opportunity to sit face to face with you, so it’s a privilege. I have a small correction. I was not Ambassador to the Soviet Union. At that time in the diplomatic service, I served twice in Moscow, at the time of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, and at the time of President Mikhail Gorbachev. When I finished my second term, I was just becoming a minister counselor. I retired from the Indian Embassy to Türkiye as Ambassador.
Billington: Let me begin by noting that your most recent essay on the India Punchline website was on the extraordinary re-establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia, with the phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and United States President Donald Trump, and then diplomatic meetings between several of their associates. What are your thoughts on how that’s going so far?
Dr. Bhadrakumar: I suppose I can see, in the limited time that President Trump has been in the Oval Office—he’s in the second month into his Presidency—my feeling is that much ground has been covered, though it’s too early to say what the future trajectory is going to be, because there are very many variables in the situation. The Russian-American relations have a long history. If you go back to the time of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, there were very high hopes at that time that he and Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev might work out an understanding for peaceful coexistence. But you know how abruptly it ended. On both sides, there are forces, as far as I can see, who may not be happy with what is happening today. But I trust President Trump will be assertive in his second term. He has a wealth of experience from his first term and would have held a perspective on why he couldn’t achieve what he had wanted in foreign policy—how he got constrained; how he couldn’t proceed with that. I see traces of that already, the way he’s going about his second Presidency. So, I expect him to be assertive.
But a new factor has come in, which is this: that unlike in the Soviet times, the Soviet period, where the variables actually were with regard to the United States primarily, here it is also with regard to the United States and trans-Atlantic allies; it’s a new factor. Britain apart, I think the other European powers were quite inclined to get on with the USSR, especially Germany. The gas pipelines were set up in the 60s, early 70s, despite reservations from the United States.
