It’s not the ranking, it’s the change in the score In 2005, when Foreign Policy magazine first published a failed state index, The Acorn argued that “rankings by themselves do not convey as much information as the direction of their change. How countries change their position, even by this imperfect measure, will be the thing ...
Brinkmanship does not work beyond the brink. “Either a nuclear-equipped DPRK or a collapsed DPRK,” Wu Chaofan concludes, “would cause disastrous interruption of the process of China’s peaceful development.” As long as the North Korean regime was playing inside these boundaries it was possible for China to use the situation to apply strategic pressure on ...
From the Proceedings of the Centre for Soft Power Studies At lunch yesterday, the man who returned from Kazakhstan informed two “hawkish Indian strategists” that Mithun Chakraborty was (still) big in Almaty. Jimmy continues to be an inspiration there (as the following music video shows). No, it’s not only the Central Asian steppes that Mithunda ...
India should do business with whoever is in power Why, many readers ask, has this blog been silent on the extraordinary events in Iran. Vacations and workloads aside, shouldn’t we be discussing the biggest stirring in Iran in three decades? Yes we should. For whatever might be the immediate political outcome of the May-June 2009 ...
A less self-centred perspective In today’s Mint I argue that at the margin, more warheads do not provide more security for Pakistan vis-à-vis India. So, an analysis of Pakistan’s motives must consider alternative explanations. Bruce Riedel, who chaired US President Barack Obama’s policy review for Afghanistan-Pakistan, points out in a recent essay in The Wall ...
How do you say “some faecal matter has hit an air circulation device” in French? From Paris come reports of an allegation that the real motive for the terrorist attack on French submarine engineers in Karachi in 2002 was non-payment of kickbacks to Pakistani officials. At the time (1994), such commissions would have been legal: ...
It’s not funny, actually Richard Rhodes writes in Arsenals of Folly—The making of the nuclear arms race: …during years of the high Cold War, there was always political capital to be earned from exaggerating the dangers or benefits of any particular nuclear strategy or weapons system. But even for those within the two governments with ...
A chastened but sanctimoniously aggressive dragon Qin Gang, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, made some eminently reasonable and sensible points yesterday. The Asian Development Bank’s approval of a loan package to India—which includes financing of a project in India’s Arunachal Pradesh state (which China calls ‘Southern Tibet’ and claims as its own)—he said, “can neither change ...
But it’s likely to go downhill for him from here One of the primary tasks Ashfaq Pervez Kayani set for himself when he took over from Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan’s army chief was to restore the image of the Pakistani army at home and abroad. It was in November 2007 when the popularity of the ...
China must act forcefully to stop North Korea and Pakistan from expanding their nuclear arsenals The Obama administration tasted its first—and crunching—diplomatic defeat at the hands of the North Korean regime last week. After threatening to interdict North Korean ships, just about the only action the US government will take in response to North Korea’s ...