The Ultimate Goal: A Former R&AW Chief Deconstructs How Nations Construct Narratives

Why is it that ‘500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5 North Korean nuclear weapons,’ posits Alexander Wendt (1995), a prominent theorist of the constructivist school of international relations. He ripostes, ‘the British are friends and the North Koreans are not.’ The constructivists argue that threat emanates not from nuclear weapons or their volumes but from the perception of those who possess them. In other words, the threat attribution hinges on how the bearer of nuclear weapons is perceived by the adversary. Vikram Sood’s The Ultimate Goal: A Former R&AW Chief Deconstructs How Nations Construct Narratives is an excellent primer to understanding how such perceptions are generated and sustained in international politics.