Overall, India’s diplomacy with Iran has been rooted in economic interests and buttressed by civilizational links. New Delhi’s contemporary cooperation with Tehran is mainly premised on India’s energy security, access to Afghanistan and Central Asia, and its enduring rivalry with Islamabad. It is worth emphasizing that India’s interests in Central Asia are substantial, and it […]
Sequels rarely match up to the original, most film buffs will tell you. But judging by the trailers and the blitz publicity campaign, Suez Canal II will be every bit as significant as its predecessor. Dubbed as Egypt’s “gift to the world“, today’s inaugural ceremony promises to “dazzle the world“. The spectacle will include an air […]
What is this culture that everyone in Java speaks of? In the nation’s most populous island, syncretism is locked into the DNA. It is bizarre for the Javanese to think of their religion and their cultural history as incompatible; Hindu stories are part of their legacy, even though their religious affiliation might lie elsewhere. Read […]
Today Nigeria, with a population of some 174 million people, is the world’s tenth-largest oil producer, pumping 2.4 million barrels a day, and has the highest gross national product in Africa. But the riches have brought neither stability nor prosperity. A series of military dictatorships siphoned off billions of dollars of oil revenue over Nigeria’s […]
The fall of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, was both the culmination of a blitzkrieg campaign IS had started in winter 2013 in Iraq and in Syria, seizing the city of Raqqa in May of that year, and the prelude to a wider strategic phase to deepen and expand the group’s dominance. Over the […]
Historians will likely look back at Obama’s policy toward Islam with a combination of curiosity and incredulousness. While some may credit the president for his good intentions, others might fault him for being naïve and detached from a complex and increasingly lethal reality. For the Middle East continues to fracture and pose multiple threats to […]
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 […]
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 […]
Voters struck back at the ruling AK Party in parliamentary elections Sunday, depriving it of a majority and likely stopping the president’s latest power grab. Read Here – The Atlantic
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 […]
looking beyond borders 