One week, Saudi Arabia is perceived to be America’s most-vital Arab ally in a dangerous region torn by conflict, civil war and terrorism. But during the next week, Saudi Arabia is akin to a rogue state that sponsors or creates the very international terrorism that the United States has been fighting against for the last […]
The army action marks a huge shift in India’s posture towards Pakistan and can rightfully be called the Modi doctrine of “strategic action” below the threshold of outright war. This strategy is intended to make Pakistan pay a price for trying to bleed India with “a thousand cuts” using terrorist organisations like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and […]
Saudi Arabia has ended its flirtation with free oil markets. It took the kingdom’s new oil minister, Khalid Al-Falih, just six months to blink, ending the country’s two-year policy of pump-at-will. Read Here – Bloomberg
The PRC propaganda machine manipulates messages by citing a so-called “century of humiliation.” In a self-serving story supposedly speaking for the people, the PRC’s English-language mouth-piece, China Daily, used this convenient definition this past August: “For many Chinese, the ‘century of humiliation’ started with the First Opium War (1840-1842) and lasted until 1949 when the […]
The contrast between the two countries is stark. Iran, never as dependent on oil revenue as its neighbor, has seen prospects boosted by rapprochement with the west. In Saudi Arabia, tentative moves toward economic reform haven’t prevented two years of weak prices causing financial havoc: it’s burning through foreign exchange reserves, government contractors have gone […]
India began a campaign to isolate Pakistan at the United Nations, telling the 193-member General Assembly it was time to identify nations who nurture, peddle and export terrorism and isolate them if they don’t join the global fight.
On the surface, the similarities between 1960s Iran and modern Saudi Arabia seem self-explanatory. Like Saudi Arabia today, Iran in the Pahlavi era was ruled by a monarchy with a close (but complicated) relationship with the United States. Indeed, Tehran and Riyadh would go on to become the “twin pillars” of Nixon’s strategy for keeping the […]
Saudi Arabia doesn’t have the same clout it used to. That’s the message the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee says he has delivered to the Saudi government. Read Here – Bloomberg
Near the beginning of President Barack Obama’s final speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he pointed out something really important about the world today: We are living through the best time in human history, but it feels to a lot of us like anything but. Read Here – Vox
For a problem this profound, it is notable that no theories in the existing international relations literature, or in other states’ practices, offer guidance as to how India and Pakistan could most effectively proceed here. Unlike any other nuclear-armed antagonists, India and Pakistan directly border each other, have unresolved territorial disputes (Kashmir and Sir Creek), […]
looking beyond borders 