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China may have reasons to be relieved if a Cold War-like situation re-emerges in Europe and American attention is drawn away from Asia. As America plunged into two prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, China had the time and Space to build its comprehensive national power.

The late-first millennium BCE Arthaśāstra is popularly known for its vile recommendations—a perception that tends to overshadow its far more comprehensive and holistic message on state-building. While the treatise itself gives no geographical or chronological pointers, this paper takes a historicist approach to contextualise it in time and space to show that it was not a one-off product but the result of an entrenched tradition of enlightened