…but outside the corridors of power
Ashley J Tellis’s testimony before the US House of Representatives subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia is one of the most clear-headed assessments in Washington.
The only lasting solution to this danger is to press Pakistan to target groups such as LeT conclusively. Many in the United States imagine [...]
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 [...]
Getting Saudi Arabia to take responsibility for Pakistan’s actions is in India’s interests
At a recent conference in Abu Dhabi on emerging powers and the Middle East, one of the arguments I made was that a stable Afghanistan requires a balance of two distinct sets of powers—India-Iran-Russia on the one hand, and China-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia on the [...]
Would you co-operate with a mere regional power if you feel you have beaten two superpowers?
Kanti Bajpai is one of India’s best academic experts on international relations—and one who this blog holds in high regard. His op-ed in the Times of India today (linkthanks Raja Karthikeya Gundu), however, overlooks something big.
Arguing that India must stop [...]
More unrealism from Brzezinski
As we have noted earlier, a Brzezinskian world is a world where there is a tidy bipolar world, where the United States and China sit together and make The Big Decisions. It differs from the real world in that the real world is real, and the Brzezinskian world lies in the domain [...]
And can we not get distracted please!
At a time when the astute businessmen running the Times of India are exploiting (via Oh, Teri!) the quintessentially Indian tendency to allow hope to triumph over experience, it is all the more important not to lose sight of reality. At the core of one of the most significant [...]
First check if there is better than here
The professor has set the question paper. And it’s not an easy exam.
The desirability of a world without nuclear weapons, Thomas Schelling argues in a brilliant essay in Daedalus, is being treated as axiomatic, and “hardly any of the analyses or policy statements that I have come across [...]
The world doesn’t become bipolar by wishing that it is
Zbigniew Brzezinski, like many others who came of age during the Cold War, believes that a bipolar world is much easier for the United States to ‘manage’ than a multipolar one. That might even be correct. The problem is—the world is not bipolar—even in the face [...]
A realist appraisal of the trans-Himalayan context
In today’s Mint Sushant and I argue that more than worrying about an unlikely Chinese invasion, India ought to focus on managing the armed co-existence along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between India and China. Excerpts:
Chinese scholars have suggested that this is due to Beijing’s assessment that no [...]
Beyond a realistic appreciation of the situation
“Common sense” according to Admiral Sureesh Mehta, “that cooperation with China would be preferable to competition or conflict, as it would be foolhardy to compare India and China as equals. China’s GDP is more than thrice that of ours and its per capita GDP is 2.2 times our own.” [...]
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