@historywithcarter: Bhutan plays chess while the world plays checkers. Bhutan’s foreign policy is one of the strangest and funniest in the modern world. It is a country that genuinely decided peace and privacy were better than popularity. Wedged between two giants, India and China, Bhutan has survived by mastering the ancient art of not getting involved. It only formally recognizes about 50 countries out of nearly 200, and for decades it had no diplomatic relations with anyone except India. It joined the United Nations in 1971, but even that felt like a reluctant move, as if someone had dragged a monk into a nightclub. The reason is not arrogance or hostility, it is strategy and culture. Bhutan has always feared that too much global contact would erode its traditions and independence. So instead of opening dozens of embassies, it built a handful and called it a day. Most foreign leaders have never even visited. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and China all have no official diplomatic ties with Bhutan. Even China, which shares a border and keeps trying to negotiate, still cannot get Bhutan to open an embassy. Bhutan just sends quiet representatives to New Delhi and handles almost everything through India. This minimalism extends to everything. There is no McDonald’s, no Starbucks, no traffic lights in the capital, and barely any advertising. Bhutan measures progress not in GDP but in “Gross National Happiness,” which sums up the entire philosophy. The country’s diplomats rarely make headlines, mostly because they are too polite to start fights. The foreign ministry’s greatest achievement might be that no one is mad at them. So while the rest of the world scrambles for influence and recognition, Bhutan has mastered something far harder: calm irrelevance. It has no enemies, barely any alliances, and a national mood that could best be described as content detachment. In a chaotic century, Bhutan’s foreign policy might be the ultimate flex: staying small, staying happy, and staying out of everyone’s business. #bhutan #geopolitics #History

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Wednesday 29 October 2025 22:07:46 GMT