Bangladesh is in a straitjacket and its government is embattled. With no sign of a let-up in the killings of liberals and secular writers, the feeling grows that the administration led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is not on top of the situation. Read Here – The Indian Express
A quarter of a century of failure and economic stagnation has built a strong consensus on what ails Japan. All sources of analysis—domestic, foreign, government, corporate and nonprofit—identify two problems: the country’s aging demographics and its deeply entrenched, top-down approach to economic organization. This analysis is wrong. Read Here – The National Interest
There is in evidence an unspoken theory of “balanced” bilateral state-operated terrorism. Why is India complaining about Mumbai, New Delhi, Pathankot, etc, when it’s doing the same all over Pakistan, from Karachi to Peshawar? Nobody outside Pakistan is willing to accept Pakistan’s binary of “we both do it to each other,” writes Khaled Ahmed. Read […]
When identifying threats to Himalayan ecosystems, China stands out. For years, the People’s Republic has been engaged in frenzied damming of rivers and unbridled exploitation of mineral wealth on the resource-rich Tibetan Plateau. Now it is ramping up efforts to spur its bottled-water industry – the world’s largest and fastest-growing – to siphon off glacier […]
Geopolitically, most states in the Asia-Pacific region are embracing closer security and economic ties with the United States. At the same time, however, states across the region have become more sensitive to China’s growing political, economic, and military power, and are potentially vulnerable to Beijing’s increasingly coercive behavior. The U.S. relationship with China is complex, […]
The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 brought the world close to a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But the Kennedy-Khrushchev drama eclipsed another momentous event that occurred at the same time: a border war between the world’s most populous countries, China and India. A new book by Bruce Riedel, JFK’s Forgotten […]
The U.N. Security Council plans to convene an emergency meeting Wednesday morning to discuss what North Korea says is its first successful hydrogen bomb test. Read Here – Nikkei Asian Review
The nationalist premiers of Japan and India — Shinzo Abe and Narendra Modi — who are meeting this weekend in Delhi have a very different set of ideas. They are betting that Japan and India can influence Asia’s strategic future by reclaiming regional leadership. Translating this ambition into reality, Abe and Modi know, will depend […]
The early Sunday executions of two politicians convicted of war crimes in Bangladesh’s liberation war of 1971 are, for Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League government, a major challenge overcome. These executions are not the first on Hasina’s watch. Two other convicted war criminals, both belonging to the fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, were executed earlier. The difference […]
Leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations unveiled with fanfare another road map to a common community for the next decade even as the bloc missed targets for economic integration this year. Read Here – Bloomberg
looking beyond borders 