NEW DELHI: As it prepares to hold its latest annual summit in New Delhi on March 28-29, the BRICS grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — remains a concept in search of a common identity and institutionalized cooperation. That is (...)
NEW DELHI: From the armed coup that recently ousted the Maldives' first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, to the Pakistani Supreme Court's current effort to undermine a toothless but elected government by indicting Prime Minister (...)
NEW DELHI: With the stage set for secret talks in Qatar between the United States and the Taliban, US President Barack Obama's strategy for a phased exit from war-ravaged Afghanistan is now being couched in nice-sounding terms that hide more than (...)
NEW DELHI: The launch of trilateral strategic consultations among the United States, India, and Japan, and their decision to hold joint naval exercises this year, signals efforts to form an entente among the Asia-Pacific region's three leading (...)
NEW DELHI: At a time when China's economic, diplomatic, and military rise casts the shadow of a power disequilibrium over Asia, the just-concluded visit of Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to India cemented a fast-growing relationship between (...)
NEW DELHI: China's frenzied dam-building hit a wall recently in Burma (Myanmar), where the government's bold decision to halt a controversial Chinese-led dam project helped to ease the path to the first visit by a US secretary of state to that (...)
NEW DELHI: Following the death of Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, Libya's interim government announced the “liberation” of the country. It also declared that a system based on sharia (Islamic law), including polygamy, would replace the secular dictatorship (...)
NEW DELHI: In the face of spreading civil unrest among China's Uighur population, the Chinese government's love-fest with its all-weather ally, Pakistan, may be starting to sour. Indeed, the authorities in China's Xinjiang province are charging that (...)
NEW DELHI: The killing of Osama bin Laden by United States special forces in a helicopter assault on a sprawling luxury mansion near Islamabad recalls the capture of other Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistani cities. Once again, we see that the real (...)
NEW DELHI: Will “mission creep” in the West's intervention in Libya end up creating, inadvertently, a jihadist citadel at Europe's southern doorstep?
Of course, the Western powers must be applauded for their efforts, with the support of Qatar and (...)
NEW DELHI: The troubles of the Fukushima nuclear-power plant — and other reactors — in northeast Japan have dealt a severe blow to the global nuclear industry, a powerful cartel of less than a dozen major state-owned or state-guided firms that have (...)
NEW DELHI: The agreement at the NATO summit meeting in Lisbon on a transition plan to help end the war in Afghanistan within the next four years raises troubling questions about regional security and the global fight against transnational terrorism. (...)
NEW DELHI: US President Barack Obama's 10-day Asian tour and the consecutive summit meetings of the East Asian Summit (EAS), the G-20, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) have helped shine a spotlight on Asia's challenges at a time when (...)
NEW DELHI: Asia's festering Cold War-era territorial and maritime disputes highlight the fact that securing long-term region-wide peace depends on respect for existing borders. Attempts to disturb Asia's territorial status quo are an invitation to (...)
NEW DELHI: Leading members of the governments of India and South Korea recently met to begin a new “strategic partnership.” They are not alone in doing so, for across Asia, a new security architecture is being constructed, seemingly (...)
NEW DELHI: China has devised a novel strategy to relieve pressure on its overcrowded prisons: employ convicts as laborers on overseas projects in the developing world. The practice has exposed another facet of China's egregious human-rights record, (...)
NEW DELHI: Success breeds confidence, and rapid success produces arrogance. That, in a nutshell, is the problem that both Asia and the West face in China, and which has been demonstrated once again at the G20 summit in Canada.
Rising economic and (...)
NEW DELHI: At a time when Asia is in transition, with the specter of a power imbalance looming large, it has become imperative to invest in institutionalized cooperation to reinforce the region's strategic stability. After all, not only is Asia (...)
NEW DELHI: By marking the Cold War's end and the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago transformed global geopolitics. But no continent benefited more than Asia, whose dramatic economic rise since 1989 has (...)
NEW DELHI: America's war in Afghanistan is approaching a tipping point, with doubts about President Barack Obama's strategy growing. Yet, after dispatching 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, Obama is considering sending another (...)
NEW DELHI: As China and India gain economic heft, they are drawing ever more international attention at the time of an ongoing global shift of power to Asia. Their underlying strategic dissonance and rivalry, however, usually attracts less (...)