Defence expenditure is the premium paid to insure against the failure of foreign policy
A good defence strategy is one that manages the risks of foreign policy going wrong for one reason or the other. It might turn out that foreign policy was based on the wrong presumptions, or unexpected events might upset the geopolitical balance [...]
A fisking of Barbara Crossette’s piece in Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy’s online editors invited me to rebut Barbara Crossette’s piece on India being the baddest boy of global governance. You can see the published version on their website. This is the original draft.
Making room for India
Contrary to Barbara Crossette, India does the global governance thing
According to [...]
Okay, it’s a strong prod
In his opening remarks at the first Takshashila Executive Programme on Strategic Affairs, hosted by the National Maritime Foundation yesterday (wire report) (pic), K Subrahmanyam noted that the India media has ignored reports of how the Obama administration has put the squeeze on Pakistan asking it to jettison its duplicitousness with [...]
Nuclear weapons are doing what high mountains once did
As K M Panikkar noted, while India developed a sophisticated framework of inter-state relations within the natural frontiers of the subcontinent it “lacked interest in the balance of power outside its own national frontiers”. Arrian, the ancient Greek writer, contended that Indian kings refrained from expanding their [...]
The costly refusal to see beyond itself and the subcontinent
An extract from Sardar K M Panikkar’s Annual Day address to the Indian School of International Studies on 13 February 1961:
The study of international relations is fundamentally a study of power relationships. This, of course, has to be interpreted in terms not only of military power [...]
US power is bound to decline if it continues to rely on a trans-Atlantic alliance
Henry Kissinger injects a strong dose of strategic wisdom into the squabbly-wobble that is being passed off as an Afghanistan policy review on by the Obama adminstration.
Concurrently, a serious diplomatic effort is needed to address the major anomaly of the Afghan [...]
Despite a strong beginning in the years after Independence, the study of international affairs in India, according to Muthiah Alagappa, the author of an in-depth essay in this month’s issue of Pragati, “(has) not kept pace with the changing scope and content of India’s international relations that must now address new challenges, problems, threats, and [...]
The Indian prime minister is going to places he shouldn’t. And not going to places he should.
It’s becoming a pattern. First, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attends a summit of an international grouping that has little relevance to India’s foreign policy priorities. Then, at the “sidelines”, he meets the Pakistani leader who happens to be there [...]
China’s ‘institutes for strategic studies’
The website that first published the provocative article had the domain name www.iiss.cn—when that site was up it redirected to chinaiiss.org. In addition there is chinaiiss.com and at least one other site with IISS in it. They do not have anything remotely to do with the London-based International Institute of Strategic [...]
Reinforcing the Denial in Pakistani society is setback for India
Mirror-imaging is not uncommon in popular conceptions that Indians and Pakistanis have of each other. You hear it from Indian lofty-softies when they declare that Pakistanis are “people like us”. But while Indian mirror-imaging generally stops with an innocent notion of the nature of Pakistani society, [...]
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