As India looks east, it is losing influence to its west to China and Pakistan. India’s inability to consolidate space in South Asia should induce greater caution in assessments of its rise as a global power given its inability to establish dominance in its periphery. India has experienced a flurry of setbacks to its west as […]
The importance of Modi’s visit to Israel cannot be underestimated. Modi will become the first sitting Indian Prime Minister to visit the country. His visit will also come after a decade of relative political neglect from the Congress-led UPA government. Various UPA ministers visited Israel over the last decade, including a very symbolic visit in […]
Now that the Corker-Cardin legislation has been adopted without poison pills attached, it is virtually certain that Congress will be unable to block President Obama’s ability to conclude and begin implementing a nuclear agreement with Iran that he believes meets U.S. requirements. The main domestic impediment to a deal lies in Iran. If negotiations are […]
Saudi nationalism can be defined as the idea of a single identity that acts as the social glue across the divisions within the kingdom. The Saudi historian Abd Allah Al Uthayman said it best: “In the first circle, I am a son of the Arabian peninsula. The regions of the peninsula were united under the […]
U.S. policy debates about the Middle East suffer from the fallacy that there is an American solution to every problem. Washington does not have a silver bullet for the region, but it can preserve its core interests there Read Here – cfr.org
The appointment of a former Director, Intelligence Bureau as envoy for Af-Pak and West Asia indicates that the Modi government is looking at the entire Islamic world to India’s West through an intelligence-security prism and not a diplomatic-cultural construct. Modi’s Pakistan policy is conditioned by a similar mind-set of talking but not negotiating, while building […]
Two years ago, during Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel’s contentiousseven-and-a-half-hour grilling by the Armed Services Committee, senators mentioned Israel 178 times and Iran 171 times. The number of references to China? Five. The emphasis is odd because it’s likely that the “biggest threat” to America’s national security is neither Iran nor “radical Islam” writ large. […]
It’s certainly not for lack of power. From 1846 to 1945, the United States had a minuscule peacetime army, but won almost every major campaign. After World War II, Washington constructed the most expensive military machine that ever existed and endured seven decades of martial frustration. Indeed, power is part of the reason the United States […]
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 […]
As the June 30 deadline for a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 approaches, the world is eagerly following the fortunes of political moderate figures in Tehran. Can the Cabinet of President Hassan Rouhani overcome any last-minute roadblocks put up by hardliners in either Tehran or in Washington? One member of Rouhani’s cabinet, Minister […]
looking beyond borders 