Book Review - That Used To Be US by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. The book spells out succintly where the US is slipping up, says Kanwal Sibal As the title suggests, this book deals with the reality of the United States’ slow decline, the
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
Pakistan’s future is raising concerns internationally. Can this nuclear-armed country step back from the brink by radically changing its internal and external outlook? Pakistan cannot break its Islamic links as it came into being because of Islam.
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
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
Our policy towards Pakistan, as the SAARC summit at Maldives last week showed, is stuck in the double grooves of hope and good faith. We think that India and Pakistan can turn a 'new chapter' in their relationship and believe in the good faith of Pak
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
How stealthy China’s gigantic river projects will create strategic conflicts in a region suffering from growing water scarcity Brahma Chellaney’s new book examines the water scenario in Asia in the context of the increasing use and decreasing