Scare stories have been an integral part of the global warming narrative for a long time. Back in 1997, Al Gore told us that global warming was making the El Niño winds stronger and more severe. That has not happened. Greenpeace and many others have told us for years that we will see more violent […]
A shy boy with filthy hands and a shabby tunic approached the great man, bowed and tried to kiss his hand. Gen. Matiullah Khan was seated like a sultan on a cushion in his hojra, his airy receiving room. He barely looked at the boy. He nodded to an aide, who withdrew a thick wad of Pakistani […]
The world’s food crisis, where 1 billion people are already going hungry and a further 2 billion people will be affected by 2050, is set to worsen as increasing heatwaves reverse the rising crop yields seen over the last 50 years, according to new research. Severe heatwaves, such as those currently seen in Australia, are expected to […]
China recently opened its domestic satellite navigation network to commercial use across the Asia-Pacific region. The move underscored China’s emergence as an independent space power challenging the primacy of the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan. The network offers a still-to-be-proven alternative in the region to the well-established and highly accurate U.S. global positioning system (GPS), […]
Shinzo Abe is known to be staunchly pro-Indian. Not only did he describe strengthening bilateral ties as extremely important to Japan’s interests in his 2006 book Utsukushii Kuni E (Towards a Beautiful Country), but one of his major foreign policy initiatives during his previous tenure as PM was establishing a new vision for bilateral ties with India. […]
As the 2014 date for the withdrawal of most foreign troops from Afghanistan approaches, the country faces two starkly different futures. One is a return to the civil war conditions of the 1990s that brought disaster and disunity. In this scenario Afghanistan is abandoned by the international community before falling prey to the machinations of […]
When a 70-year-old Indian grandmother decided she wanted to spend the rest of her days living with her sons in the disputed province of Kashmir, she probably had no idea that she was about to spark a potentially catastrophic clash between two of the world’s most implacable nuclear foes. For it now appears that an […]
In his new book, “The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World,” Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, at last rises to the challenge. In a way, it is no surprise that a former UN ambassador from one of the smallest countries in Asia has the largest vision. […]
Diplomatic historians may mark the 1962 war as the beginning of India’s slow ascent to great power status and a force to be reckoned with in 21st century Asian power politics. Yet, to this day, India’s foreign policy is – more than most other emerging titans – constrained by a quest for internal security and […]
2012 was a year of success on the battlefield for the US/ NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF), with significant militant retreat. There was decrease in Taliban activities in the hotbed of insurgency in the south — Helmand, Zabul and Kandahar provinces. We saw calm in the region as […]
