The Donald Trump-JD Vance victory marks a repudiation of the post-Cold War neoconservative Washington playbook of militarised responses to foreign policy challenges. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence-designate, shares their anxiety over America’s addiction to intervening in foreign conflicts not of vital interest to the US, whose net effect has been to destabilise countries and entire regions.
The United Nations is the biggest incubator of global norms to govern the world and the vital core of the rules-based global multilateral order. Four parts of the UN system have complementary roles in efforts to regulate and eliminate nuclear weapons. (more…)
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Russia on 8 and 9 July and embraced President Vladimir Putin. The outcome of the visit included mutually beneficial substantive agreements, but damaged India’s reputation in the West at a time when President Joe Biden hosted the NATO summit in Washington. The BBC featured an analysis under the title “Modi’s balancing act as he meets Putin in Moscow”. On 23 August Modi went to Kyiv, the first visit to independent Ukraine by an Indian PM. The BBC headlined it as ‘“Diplomatic tightrope for Modi as he visits Kyiv after Moscow”. (more…)
Stronger treaties are needed more than ever as Hiroshima marks A-bomb anniversary. (more…)
The biggest takeaway from India’s eighteenth general election is that the death of Indian democracy has been much exaggerated. The exercise was a resounding win for the election machinery of the world’s most populous democracy. The entire exercise and the outcome affirm once again the competence, professionalism, and integrity of the country’s election machinery. ‘India is starting to look like a Central Asian dictatorship,’ said an article in the Australian Financial Review on 7 May. Really? That particular analyst will not be the only one with egg on their face. (more…)
Veterans of Middle East affairs say wryly that anyone who claims to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict has been misinformed. This paper reviews the complex and emotionally fraught history of the Conflict; looks at 10/7 and Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza in retaliation, and then speculates on possible pathways to the conflict’s resolution that could amount to more than another truce in the endless cycle of violence. (more…)
On 14 October, my attention will wander between three unconnected stories as they unfold in real time. I will be in New Zealand on that general election date. Polls indicate the Labour government will be replaced by a centre-right coalition. But the peculiarities of the electoral system make election results and the outcome of post-election negotiations between the major parties and potential allies teasingly uncertain. (more…)
Seemingly out of nowhere, Canada and India are embroiled in an escalating diplomatic crisis after PM Justin Trudeau implicated India in the June 18 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent British Columbia (BC) Sikh leader. India has strongly rejected the ‘unsubstantiated’ charge as ‘absurd’. (more…)
At the G20 summit in Bali last year, most of the world’s most influential leaders had strongly deplored ‘the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine’. By contrast, the joint declaration from the just concluded summit in New Delhi does not mention Russia by name. Instead, it talks about ‘the human suffering and negative added impacts of the war in Ukraine with regard to global food and energy security’. It calls on states to ‘refrain from the threat or use of force to seek territorial acquisition’ and notes ‘different views and assessments of the situation’. Not surprisingly, Russia hailed the unexpectedly soft outcome but Ukraine dismissed it as ‘nothing to be proud of’. This consolidates Russia’s diplomatic gains in China, the Middle East and Africa as noted by Walter Russel Mead in The Wall Street Journal. (more…)
Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general (SG), famously said the purpose of NATO was to ‘keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down’. (more…)
The Wagner coup equation doesn’t compute. It just doesn’t add up. Herbert Wulf gave us a concise summary of the surreal 24 hours that gripped the world. But there are missing pieces of the puzzle that we haven’t been given. And now we learn that the Wagner boss is back in St Petersburg, Russia. (more…)
America and the West are more isolated from the rest of the world than at any time since WWII. (more…)
The hubris and arrogance of the nuclear-armed states leaves the world exposed to the risk of sleepwalking into a nuclear disaster. The case for nuclear weapons rests on a superstitious magical Realism that puts faith in the utility of the bomb and the theory of deterrence. Here are four myths about the utility of nuclear weapons. (more…)
Going nuclear would likely hurt rather than enhance South Korea’s global prestige. (more…)
In September 2014, in the aftermath of the Maidan coup that saw yet another in the distressingly long list of US-engineered regime change coups in foreign lands where the government proved insufficiently deferential to the ruling Washington foreign policy elite, I argued that NATO’s mission creep had become a threat to European and world peace. The article was published in The Japan Times on 9 September 2014 and reprinted in Pearls and Irritations on 29 October 2016. (more…)
The most consequential aspect of AUKUS is it embeds the UK and the US firmly into Australia’s Indo-Pacific strategy. But what if the secret US calculation behind AUKUS is to goad China into war before China’s superiority outpaces US and allied capabilities? A war that China does not want and will likely lose? (more…)
Despite flourishing relations, Australia is governed by a ruling elite whose commitment to a rules based order is suspect, selective and risks dragging India into a catastrophic conflict with China. (more…)
Prudent nations would do well to prepare for peace even in the midst of an armed conflict. (more…)
On Dec. 20, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the appointment of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as his country’s next ambassador to the U.S. (more…)
On 26 September, the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines were badly damaged in a deliberate act of sabotage that released huge amounts of methane gas. Almost all the Western media has pointed the finger at Russia but Moscow blames actors hostile to it. There are four plausible suspects: Russia, the US, Poland and Ukraine. Given the actors involved, the issues at stake and the impotence of the UN system caught in the crossfire of great power rivalry, an impartial independent investigation is extremely unlikely. In classic thrillers style, it’s worth looking at means, opportunity and, most revealingly, motive. (more…)
Most people have modest aspirations of being able to feed, house, clothe and educate their families, assist their children to climb one rung higher on the social ladder and spend their autumn years in comfortable retirement. Some aim a little higher and strive to make a mark in a chosen field of human activity. There are very few of whom it can be said: they changed the world. (more…)
The Hiroshima gathering affirms the importance of nuclear arms control and disarmament. (more…)
Modi must reverse the sectarian polarisation, rein in the hate-spewing Hindutva mobs and practice as well as preach inclusion. (more…)
This is the text of the address delivered by Ramesh Thakur at the launch of The Nuclear Ban Treaty: A Transformational Reframing of the Global Nuclear Order (Routledge, 2022) at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation on Friday, 24 June 2022. (more…)
Wars are complex issues with blame shared albeit not equally distributed among all sides. They are unpredictable and can lead to perverse, including lose-lose outcomes. In a war with the world’s biggest nuclear power, a dispassionate analysis of costs (of victory and defeat), risks and constraints is especially advisable. Yet this is mostly missing in the one-eyed mainstream media (MSM) framing of the Ukraine war: Russia bad, West good; Putin evil, Zelensky superhero. Almost all coverage falls into one of three categories: the heroism and valour of Ukrainians; a Russian column, tank or ship destroyed; and Russian atrocities. Although all true, this is not the whole truth. There is a Russian side to the story, and it is wrong in principle and risky in practice to insist otherwise. (more…)
Biden escaped rigorous critical scrutiny that is the normal lot of presidential campaigns with the help of major media and Big Tech platforms that despised Trump. The world is now discovering just how grave the real-world consequences can be when reality bites back. (more…)
While in Iranian territorial waters, USS Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles to bring down the Iranian plane with the loss of all 290 on board on 3 July 1988. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were later awarded medals. Vice President George H W Bush insisted he would ‘never apologise for the United States – I don’t care what the facts are’. (more…)
The moral outrage insisting on retaliation over the invasion of Ukraine ennobles the American war machine. (more…)
Three overarching goals have informed the Asia Pacific Leadership Network’s (APLN) approach to nuclear threats since its inception a decade ago: the imperative to hold firm against proliferation, the matching importance of credible steps toward disarmament, and defusing geopolitical tensions that heighten nuclear risks. All three are at play in Ukraine. (more…)
God Created war so the Americans could learn geography (more…)