Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (R) received US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (L), Colombo, October 28, 2020 Third-country cooperation is highly complex, unpredictable phenomenon. Not even the closest allies can pull it off easily. Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, denied that oil interests influenced policy in Iraq, but archives show that the British …
India’s remains of the day in Ladakh
India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh (R) and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (L) at media briefing, New Delhi, October 27, 2020 The ‘2+2’ Ministerial Dialogue with the United States has ended leaving a trail of uncertainties. In substantive terms, there has been no real outcome. Words, words — that’s all we have, words that …
Quad won’t fly. This is why.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar (L) in conversation with Australian counterpart Marise Payne at Quad ministerial, Tokyo, October 6, 2020 The expectations were that the visiting US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun would expand from a public platform in Delhi on October 12 on a theme he had audaciously expounded some six weeks ago …
Europe marks distance from Indo-Pacific strategy
German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives for the special meeting of the European Council, Brussels, October 1, 2020 The European Council special meeting in Brussels on 1st October had Turkey, Belarus, Russia and China on its agenda. The foreign-policy decisions of the summit — comprising the heads of state or government of all EU countries, the …
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Geopolitics of Sri Lankan Tamil Problem
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) and Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa (L) held a virtual summit on September 26, 2020 The virtual summit between the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Sri Lankan counterpart Mahinda Rajapaksa turned out to be somewhat surreal. The summit was the first of its kind Modi has had …
TikTok, Sing a Song of Sixpence, A pocket Full of Rye, Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked in an American Pie
TikTok logo on display, Culver City, California, Aug 27, 2020 The US president Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Saturday that he backs the deal between TikTok owner China’s ByteDance, Oracle Corp, and Walmart to create a new company known as TikTok Global. It conflicts with Trump’s own earlier order for …
India’s Quad Dilemma in Sri Lanka
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (R) greeting the newly-elected Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa (L) at the swearing-in ceremony at Kelaniya Buddhist temple in Colombo, Aug 9, 2020 There are three categories of statesmen: those addicted to Twitter (Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Javad Zarif, et al); those who shun it (Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, Xi Jinping, …
The Sino-Russian Alliance Comes of age — Part 1
Yevgeny Khaldei’s iconic photo of the Red Army soldiers raising the Soviet flag on top of the Reichstag building in Berlin, May 1945. The joint statements between two countries are usually riveted on a particular event but in extraordinary circumstances involving great powers, it could assume an epochal character and can be viewed as diplomatic …
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Russia blasts US’ Indo-Pacific strategy
Vietnam’s Dy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh chairs a video meeting with ministers from member countries of Association of Southeast Nations, Hanoi, Sept 9, 2020. The meeting between the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow on September 11 took place at a particularly delicate juncture …
India needs to adapt to the world of tomorrow
Pangong Tso Lake in eastern Ladakh: snapshot from 1962 India-China war. Jawaharlal Nehru began his historic “Tryst with Destiny” speech on August 15, 1947 heralding India’s independence, which is considered to be one of the greatest speeches of the twentieth century, with an immortal line, “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world …
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