Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are each other’s wild cards. Each is the other’s out-of-region game-changer, a factor that must play into the calculations of all other players in the Middle East and South Asia alike. Think you’ve got the complex equation sorted out of Arabs vs. Persians, Sunnis vs. Shi’a, Ba’athists vs. Islamists? Well, if […]
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the sun famously never set on the British empire. A commanding navy enforced its will, yet all would have been lost if it were not for ports, roads, and railroads. The infrastructure that the British built everywhere they went embedded and enabled their power like bones and veins in a body. Now it’s […]
In expanding maritime connectivity and cooperation with Dhaka, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has begun to devote the kind of strategic attention the Bay of Bengal has long deserved. While the waters to India’s east have steadily gained salience in China’s calculus, New Delhi’s interest in the bay has tended to be limited and episodic. Read […]
Since 1998, the Franco-Indian relationship has become increasingly strategic, even as one could argue that it has yet to realize its full economic potential. The Indo-French strategic dialogue is now broad and wide-ranging, and the annual joint military exercises have each year grown more elaborate. When Modi and French President Francois Hollande met earlier this […]
The unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been converted into a global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight. Read Here – The New York Times
China isn’t an enemy of the U.S. But coercive diplomacy with China today is arguably more complicated than it was with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, at least after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Read Here – Bloomberg
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent comparison of the boundary settlement with Bangladesh to the fall of the Berlin wall a quarter century ago might be surprising for many. The PM, who spent much political capital to get Parliament to approve the Land Boundary Agreement (LBA) with Dhaka, was reacting to the insufficient public appreciation of […]
In my view, viewing national and foreign affairs through a communal prism is one of the most pernicious, destructive and self-defeating features of the Indian scene. It would be far more useful to see the proposed visit to the Holy Land as the commencement of Modi’s engagement with the complex politics, economics and culture of West […]
A startling number of Chinese students are getting kicked out of American colleges. According to a white paper published by WholeRen, a Pittsburgh-based consultancy, an estimated 8,000 students from China were expelled from universities and colleges across the United States in 2013-4. The vast majority of these students—around 80 percent—were removed due to cheating or […]
May 21, Russia and China concluded ten days of joint naval exercises in the eastern Mediterranean, which included live-fire drills. Although the militaries of the two countries claimed that the naval exercise was meant only to improve interoperability, their presence in the sea has far broader political implications. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
looking beyond borders 