According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute, the funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait have a combined $2.8 trillion in assets under management. These governments are using their national wealth as a strategic tool of power projection as never before and blurring the line between economic and political decision-making. Read Here – Foreign Policy
The United States is once again ratcheting up the pressure on Pakistan to fall in line with U.S. policy in Afghanistan by ending the Afghan Taliban’s enjoyment of safe haven. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan is once again pushing back. Amid the mistrust, mutual recrimination, and stale narratives that have increasingly characterised the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in recent years, […]
Israel and Saudi Arabia have many shared interests, but there are also numerous instances where their interests diverge. The latter was evident when MBS forced the resignation of Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri as a means to remove the fig leaf of legitimacy covering Iranian-Hezbollah activity in Lebanon. Israel did not approve of this move, […]
US President Donald Trump’s tougher stance on Iran could push Tehran closer to Beijing, which will defend the Iran nuclear deal whether or not Trump decides to certify it, according to a diplomatic adviser involved in the deal and experts. Read Here – South China Morning Post
As the new year gets underway, and Chinese foreign policy analysts join their counterparts around the world in assessing the events of 2017, the emerging international relations (IR) discourse in Beijing is quite a revelation — at least to the Japanese and Indian strategic affairs community. While most Chinese believe Japan to be the second biggest threat to China’s “peaceful rise,” according […]
For Trump, it may feel good to vent his frustrations about Pakistan, especially now that his administration is desperate to salvage something from the United States’ prolonged and losing conflict in Afghanistan. These new sanctions, however, are unlikely to influence Pakistani behaviour, which is rooted in realities on the ground that the United States has […]
Hand in the Haqqanis or hang on to them? That is the dilemma before the Pakistan Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, so aptly summed by a Pakistani columnist for the Dawn newspaper. In the face of unexpected and significant pressure from the United States to deliver some top militants of the Taliban and the […]
After coming to power, this is the loudest that US President Donald Trump may have shouted at Pakistan, but it all seems to have little effect. In fact, if anything, the import of Trump’s tweet seems to drown in the din of public outrage. The ruling classes and the public in general, especially in mainland […]
The most ominous threats in 2018 — nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula and a spiralling confrontation pitting the United States and its allies against Iran — could both be aggravated by Trump’s actions, inactions, and idiosyncrasies. U.S. demands (in the North Korean case, denuclearisation; in Iran’s, unilateral renegotiation of the nuclear deal or Tehran’s […]
The People’s Liberation Army Air Force of China and its sister branch, the PLA Naval Air Force, operate a huge fleet of around 1,700 combat aircraft—defined here as fighters, bombers and attack planes. This force is exceeded only by the 3,400 active combat aircraft of the U.S. military. Moreover, China operates a lot of different aircraft types that are […]
looking beyond borders 