The first thing you need to understand about the building that, until very recently, housed the Russian Consulate in San Francisco — a city where topography is destiny, where wealth and power concentrate, quite literally, at the top — is its sense of elevation. Brick-fronted, sentinel-like, and six stories high, it sits on a hill […]
Sales of arms and military services by the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies—the SIPRI Top 100—totalled $374.8 billion in 2016. The total for the SIPRI Top 100 in 2016 is 1.9 per cent higher compared with 2015 and represents an increase of 38 per cent since 2002 (when SIPRI began reporting corporate arms […]
Over the last two decades, Chinese relations with North Korea have deteriorated drastically behind the scenes, as China has tired of North Korea’s insolent behaviour and reassessed its own interests on the peninsula. Today, China is no longer wedded to North Korea’s survival. In the event of a conflict or the regime’s collapse, Chinese forces […]
From 1945 to 2016, the United States used its economic, military and ideological power to build institutions, alliances and regimes that contributed to global economic growth and the avoidance of great-power war. In doing so, it fostered the rise of a new constellation of powers, China notable among them, with which it must now deal. […]
Controversial private security tycoon Erik Prince has famously pitched an audacious plan to the Trump administration: Hire him to privatise the war in Afghanistan using squads of “security contractors.” Prince, who founded the Blackwater security firm and testified last week to the House Intelligence Committee for its Russia investigation, has deep connections into the current White […]
If you took an introduction to international relations course in college and the instructor never mentioned the “balance of power,” please contact your alma mater for a refund. You can find this idea in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the ancient Indian writer Kautilya’s Arthashastra (“Science of Politics”), and it is central to the work of modern […]
China anticipates more conflict in the Middle East following the United States’ move to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, which in turn would disrupt its investment plans in the region, diplomatic observers said. Read Here – South China Morning Post
It might still be premature to read too much into former military dictator Gen (R) Pervez Musharraf talking about a political alliance with the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and its offshoot Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). Not because these groups are officially banned in Pakistan, but because Musharraf is a largely irrelevant political entity these days. However, events of recent weeks suggest that the […]
Indeed, the drug trade is a crucial part of Afghanistan’s economy, both in regions that the Afghan government controls and in Taliban-dominated regions. The Kabul government estimates that at least three million farmers make their living from that crop. In a desperately poor country, such income is often the difference between a decent lifestyle and destitution. U.S. […]
President Donald Trump on Wednesday recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced he would begin moving the U.S. embassy there, despite warnings from leaders across the globe that the move would undermine peace efforts and spark violence. Read Here – Bloomberg Also Read: A Guide to the Dispute Over Jerusalem and Israel’s Capital
looking beyond borders 