When a friend behaves badly, it’s easy to take a time out. Stop taking their phones calls, pretend to be out when they come to apologise. But responsible nations don’t have the luxury of ignoring each other. That is why diplomacy can be a messy business, as India and Italy are learning this week. Read Here […]
Instead of continuing their endless battling, the United States and Pakistan should acknowledge that their interests simply do not converge enough to make them strong partners. Giving up the fiction of an alliance would free up Washington to explore new ways of achieving its goals in South Asia. And it would allow Islamabad to finally […]
For the past several weeks, thousands have rallied around a single issue: bringing to justice the collaborators who, in early 1971, helped the Pakistani military put down the Bengali nationalist movement. The timing might seem strange, since the demands for justice are coming well over four decades after the tragic events. But they are part […]
Nations that want to be taken seriously must match their actions with that aspiration. The refusal to send back Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone — the Marines aboard the merchant ship Enrica Lexie accused of shooting and killing two fishermen off the Kerala coast after mistaking them for pirates — may win the new Italian government brownie […]
As China, Japan and many other nations face an aging demographic profile, the youth segment of India’s population is growing rapidly, and is projected to continue to do so for the next 30 years. Provided India can act quickly on health, education and employment, this demographic dividend has the potential to inject new dynamism into its flagging economy. […]
When Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari travels to Iran on Monday to oversee the formal inauguration of an ambitious gas pipeline project from Iran to Pakistan, his gesture of defying US pressure on this issue will be seen broadly as a hollow one. With just days before the tenure of his elected government ends, Zardari […]
When President Pranab Mukherjee lands in Mauritius on Monday, he will be buttressing a relationship with an Indian Ocean nation that is so central to India’s security interests that it went to the extent of planning military intervention to ensure an Indian-origin Prime Minister remained in power there. The Top Secret ‘Operation Lal Dora’ — […]
It is a shift as momentous as the U.S. eclipse of Britain’s Royal Navy or the American economy’s surpassing of the British economy in the late 19th century. According to preliminary figures reported this week, China has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest net oil importer. Nearly 6 million barrels per day flowed into the United […]
In its rush to fete Myanmar‘s president, Thein Sein, and capitalize on the country’s tentative opening, the international community has turned a blind eye toward the ongoing repression of minorities and the continued political dominance of the military. In doing so, it has given up much of its leverage over Sein at the very time […]
Russia is resuming the supply of advanced weapon platforms to China in a move that may have implications for India. At the end of last year, Russia concluded a framework agreement with China for the sale of four Amur-1650 diesel submarines. In January it signed another intergovernmental agreement for the supply of Russia’s latest Su-35 long-range […]
looking beyond borders 