Faith And Diplomacy

From a seeming personal fad of the PM, Buddhism has begun to acquire an unprecedented weight in India’s Asian policy. In his address to the parliament of Mongolia in June this year, Modi went beyond the notion of promoting India’s soft power to highlight the importance of Buddhism in dealing with the contemporary political challenges […]

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Mongolia And Its Elections

Observers say he is a sure thing. His party hopes he is. In what is a three-way competition, Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj will be seeking to retain power in the presidential election scheduled for June 26, keeping his Democratic Party the dominant force in government at least until the next legislative election. Read Here – […]

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Mongolia’s Economic Challenge

Mongolia has repeatedly insisted that it wants to open its doors for business to all countries with a genuine interest in participating in the country’s sustainable growth. How much of this policy is lip service though and how fair is the bidding process for prospective foreign investors? Mongolia’s long awaited initial public offering (IPO) for its lucrative […]

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Genghis Khan – A Conqueror, Re-maker Of The World

In the eight hundred years since his death, people have sought in vain for the grave of Genhis Khan, the 13th-century conqueror and imperial ruler who, at the time of his death, occupied the largest contiguous empire, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific. In capturing most of central Asia and China, his armies […]

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Mongolia in Globalization’s Chokehold

It’s been 20 years since I’ve been in Mongolia, the large country of high desert plains sandwiched between China and Russia, and much has changed. Some, education and food supply, is for the better, and a lot – including urban sprawl and rising inequality – is for the worse. Much of the change has to […]

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Mongolia’s Strategic Calculus

Mongolia has featured prominently in Western media over the past several months as an important strategic partner for the U.S. “pivot” to Asia.  Much of the analysis on U.S.-Mongolian relations has been truncated in that it fails to consider the two states’ relations through the prism of Mongolia’s strategic interests.  The end result is an overly […]

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Asia Knows How to Get Along With a Bigger China

Preparing for a recent trip to Indonesia last week, I came across an article by Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, the editor of the feisty Indonesian daily Jakarta Post, protesting that the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia seemed too much like an attempt to start a cold war against China, with the help of its neighbors. America’s “economic intentions and wherewithal” in […]

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