The Russian Constitution allows a president only two consecutive terms in power. Vladimir Putin was President from 2000 to 2008. Highly popular for having restored the political and economic authority of the state as well as national self-respect aft
The state visit to India of Japanese Prime Minister Noda for the annual Prime Ministerial Summit on December 27-28, 2011 has placed India-Japan ties on a firm upward spiral. Following the dip in relations as a result of adverse Japanese reactions to
The US intent to draw down its forces from Afghanistan beginning July 2011 has been articulated on several occasions since President Barack Obama’s address at West Point on 1 December 2009. In this address he had justified the 30,000 US troop surge
The challenges facing Indian diplomacy do not change from one calendar year to the next. The opportunities and problems of 2011 will spill over into 2012 as they are not defined by calendar years. The end of the year provides, nonetheless, an occasio
Western criticism of the results of the December 4 parliamentary elections in Russia is not surprising. The West’s fued with Russia’s democracy goes back to Putin’s ascendancy to power in 2000. It is Russia’s veering away under him from globa
It is more practical to limit the review of India’s security mainly to the classic concept of a nations’s security, not its extended definition given today that includes energy, food, water etc. With the end of the Cold War and the lowering of t
For China, which joined the global space league in a modest way with a launch of a lightweight satellite in 1970, the year 2011 is all set to stand out as both “eventful and exciting”. Indeed, for this Asian communist giant, which has set its eye
Public readings of the temperature of the India-US relationship keep fluctuating depending on assessments of the moment. Doubts are being raised again whether the relationship has reached a plateau and enthusiasm has waned on both sides. Lack of deli
The West is describing the current situation in Afghanistan as one of transition. This assumes that the situation is moving from one state of things to another in a planned and controlled manner. It is clear that US and NATO want to reduce their mili
India, on Pakistan’s insistence, was excluded from the International Conference on Afghanistan in Istanbul in January 2010. For the “Process on Regional Security and Cooperation for a Secure and Stable Afghanistan”, the second such conference