The drawdown of US military presence in the Middle East, especially from Saudi Arabia, may not be an automatic open sesame — to borrow the magical phrase in the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”— leading to the hidden treasure of regional peace and stability, but it does open up a tantalising vista …
Pompeo and the capricious virus
Sanitising the shrine of Hazrat Masoumeh against the coronavirus in the holy city of Qom, Iran, February 25, 2020. File photo Iran has delivered a devastating blow to the ego of the Trump administration, puncturing it beyond repair, by its announcement Sunday that mosques will start reopening in low-risk areas of the country from May …
Trump’s vacillation on China is well-grounded
China cast the five-day Labour Day holidays as opportunity to ease pent-up travel demand within the country, May 1, 2020 The US President Donald Trump has tied himself and onlookers in knots by his alternating encomiums and diatribes against China over Covid-19 in the recent weeks. Only he can cut the Gordian knot and …
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Russia-China entente deepens in the shadow of the pandemic
Richard Lugar Public Health Centre in Georgia, which Russia alleges to be a Pentagon laboratory for biological weapon development. Beijing has called on the US to respond to Russian concerns. The Russian-Chinese entente emerged as one of the most significant templates of international politics in the recent period since the hugely consequential developments in Ukraine …
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There is no exit from coronavirus, only containment
France bringing an end to lockdown on May 11 but it will not mean instant return to normal life. A woman, wearing a protective face mask, walks past Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, Paris, France, April 27, 2020. From this point, the buck stops with the Modi government, as the country trudges along the Covid highway. The …
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US return to JCPOA can end impasse over Iran
In business transactions and international diplomacy alike, there could be constant variables and dependent variables. Constant variable is where the value cannot be changed once it has been assigned a value. But it becomes a dependent variable if it is susceptible or open to the effect of an associated factor or phenomenon. Then, there is …
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Trump and Putin revisit the “Spirit of the Elbe”
Soviet officers and American soldiers met up at the Elbe River near Torgau, Germany, 25th April, 1945 Unusual for a Saturday evening, the White House and the Kremlin upgraded their websites simultaneously to feature a joint statement by the two presidents on “Commemorating the 75th Anniversary of the Meeting on the Elbe” (here and …
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Trump’s threat to Iran has a hollow ring. It betrays angst.
Afghan President Asraf Ghani (C) received Iran’s special envoy Mohammad Ebrahim Taherian at the presidential palace, Kabul, April 20, 2020 A tweet by the US President Donald Trump on April 22 said, “I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at …
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Covid-19 has a grandma, grandpa and great grandpa. Where are they?
The 76-day Covid-19 shutdown in Wuhan, China, was lifted on April 7, 2020. The search for the genesis of Covid-19 is developing into an epic story. Thanks to the insinuations by the US President Donald Trump — ‘China virus’, ‘Wuhan virus’, etc. — that were explosive in their political and strategic content, Beijing is now …
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Kerala’s Covid story is hard to replicate
The Times of India featured a tantalising commentary last week titled Kerala shows the way: Decades of investment in public health is helping the state control Covid-19. The title is self-explanatory. The commentary showered fulsome praise, rightly so, on Kerala’s success in controlling the coronavirus outbreak. It attributed Kerala’s success story to three factors: the …
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