I've been reading a series of books that started in Afghanistan then led to Pakistan and finally to India. One of these is Ramchandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. It's a big book on a subject I know a little but not a lot on. There's an interesting chapter on Nehru's foreign policy, which was determinedly neutral in the Cold War, which is to say it completely failed the then-current version of Bush's "you're either with us or against us" test. We learn that Dean Acheson despised Nehru, and John Foster Dulles regarded him as yet another enemy. Then the following Nehru quote pops up, from a letter to industrialist G.D. Birla in May 1954 (p. 169):

I do not think that there are many examples in history of a succession of wrong policies being followed by a country as by the United States in the Far East during the past five or six years. They have taken one wrong step after another. . . . They think that they can solve any problem with money and arms. They forget the human element. They forget the nationalistic urges of people. They forget the strong resentment of people in Asia against impositions.

The only thing wrong with that statement today is that you need to adjust the timespan out to about sixty years, although the last five or six (or eight) are easily the worst. What's striking here is not the judgment but the reasoning. We're still trying to settle everything with money and arms. We still can't understand why people resent doing our bidding, and resent our attitude that the only concerns that matter are ours. Nehru was a smart guy, but he didn't figure that out because he was smart. He recognized the pattern from coming of age under the British Empire.

One curious thing is that more often than not the Americans didn't have a clue what they really wanted, nor any idea what would come as a consequence of their actions. The US had already made fateful moves in Vietnam, in Iran, and in Pakistan, but who in the US had any idea how those moves would blowback? Nehru may not have understood that far in the future either, but he was completely right that what we were doing was wrong.