Tabloid India
When the Bollywood superstar Sridevi Kapoor drowned last month, at age 54, in a bathtub in a Dubai hotel, coverage of her tragic death once again showcased all that is wrong with Indian media. Sridevi – who, after a 15-year hiatus, had made a spectacularly successful return to the silver screen in t…
Are Trump’s Moves a Springtime for Neoconservatism?
With his firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and appointment of the hawkish CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace him, Donald Trump has remained true to form. Chaos, not predictability, is what he promised during the campaign and it is what he is delivering, especially in foreign policy. The Br…
There’s a new secretary of state. Who cares?
Rex Tillerson’s sudden departure as secretary of state — alongside that of Gary Cohn last week as head of the National Economic Council — removes from the White House two of the only remaining pragmatists trusted by the rest of the world. With their departure, America’s credibility has taken another…
Moldova’s Conflict: Unfreezing, In a Good Way?
The word “frozen” is applied misleadingly to the series of half-dozen unresolved conflicts in the post-Soviet space. None of them are properly frozen, especially in eastern Ukraine and Nagorny Karabakh, where people continue to be killed. There was a literal deep freeze last week on both sides of th…
For Trump, a meeting with Kim is the ultimate test
President Trump, popping unannounced into the White House briefing room late Thursday, apparently just couldn’t contain himself — and with good reason. A senior South Korean delegation had just spent the afternoon with the President and his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, carrying a remar…
The Trap of Empire and Authoritarianism
For thousands of years the tragedy of politics has been that empire affords the answer to chaos. Imperialism, as the Oxford historian John Darwin says, “has been the default mode of political organization throughout most of history,” as the capabilities needed to build strong states, owing to the pa…
How populist uprisings could bring down liberal democracy
There are long decades in which history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars born and legends carried to their graves. But for all the ordinary business of time passing, the lodestars of culture, society and politics remain the same. Then there a…
After the Olympics, the Chinese Reach Out
Before the Pyeongchang Olympics began, there were fears that North Korea would do something provocative during the games. Instead, the opposite happened. North Korea still stole the show, but it did so by using the Olympics to signal its openness to reconciliation with South Korea. With the closing …
Afghanistan ready to play connector role in Eurasian integration
One of the top roller-coaster sagas in what, some years ago, I christened Pipelineistan, has yielded a definitive twist. The US$8 billion,1,814-kilometer Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI) was officially inaugurated on Friday, in full pomp, and with proceedings broadca…
The Munich Conference Grapples with America’s ‘Burden Shedding’
Those with experience of attending previous Munich Security Conferences have described the mood of the 2018 conclave with terms like “retrenchment” and “hunkering down” and “waiting out the uncertainty.” A theme constantly repeated during the three-day gathering was that of the liberal world order u…