South East Asia

Recent talks in New Delhi between the two countries’ leaders highlight the pragmatic nature of India’s dealings with Russia. The significance of the official visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu to New Delhi on 6 December should be seen in relation …

India grappled with serious security and domestic challenges this year. Military tensions with China showed no signs of easing, a deadly second wave of the coronavirus pandemic devastated India and the biggest farmers protest in decades challenged Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s authority. The Asian giants, India and China, ended their …

Beijing Isn’t Just Building Roads—It’s Making Friends When U.S. policymakers consider China’s influence in Africa, they often think of big-ticket infrastructure development programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over the past two decades, Beijing has spent billions building dams, highways, railways, and ports in countries from Egypt …

NATO’s Weakness Invites Russian Aggression “Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.” -Artistotle In September, we ran a story about the think tank, RAND, and their war game after an action that essentially proved NATO, like a pearl of wisdom in Congress, is …

It is sometimes said that when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined NATO in 2004 each still harbored some lingering regret that they were not joining the NATO of 1949 — an alliance with a resolute and single-track focus to deter any territorial threat that Moscow could contemplate. The alliance that …

While much of the bandwidth of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC) summit in Islamabad this month was reserved for the Afghanistan crisis, with the Taliban attending, another window of diplomatic restart was achieved within the Arab Gulf narrative as Syria’s heavily-sanctioned private airline, started direct flights between Damascus and …

Military flyovers from China and tough talk in Washington have made a possible conflict over Taiwan feel more real over the past month. That is true for Chen Yi-guang, a retired finance professional. The Taipei dweller and his family have casually deliberated overstocking on food and water. They could flee …

Russian President Vladimir Putin had been isolated on Ukraine in a series of major summits throughout December, but that changed significantly on Wednesday when his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping offered his strong support, strengthening an emerging Moscow-Beijing axis. The Chinese premier’s alliance with Putin — one of the key factors …

Cognizant of India’s growing strategic denouement with Russia, visibly so in 2021, in wake of Russia’s outsized priority to China and pivot to Pakistan in its South Asian policy formulations, Russian President Putin made a significant six-hour dash to India, to rebalance Russia’s fraying strategic partnership with India on December …

The crown jewel of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) increasingly looks like a powder keg that has exploded. Mass protests have for the past month swept Gwadar, a Chinese-dominated Pakistani port city 90 kilometres from the border with Iran that has long been plagued by intermittent protests and Baloch …