Global Politics

Last year I criticized some of the hawk-like voices, including that of David Brooks of the NYT, which were calling for Barack Obama to increase the fear factor in dealing with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. I should point out that I am decidedly not a fan of Putin, whose actions in Crimea and Ukraine have been reprehensible. However, we need […]

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Sun Tzu, in his seminal book The Art of War, argued that all warfare is fundamentally based on deception. “When able to attack, we must seem unable; When using our forces, we must seem inactive; When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; When far away, we must make […]

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As anyone who has spent any length of time travelling in India will attest, it is a country of stark contrasts. In few ways is this more obvious than the vast disparities in wealth between 500 million of India’s total 1.27 billion citizens living on less than $1.25 per day and a small but increasingly wealthy elite […]

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The main source of hostility in the modern world is the widening gap between the most and least developed segments of human civilization. While some societies are exploring potential life on other planets, life has not changed much for others over the past millennium. Unlike in previous centuries, the permeation of modern day technologies makes […]

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The futility and danger of nuclear weapons in the post-9/11 world is indisputable The 2003 Oscar-Winning documentary The Fog of War, containing Robert McNamara’s post-Vietnam mea culpa, also highlighted one of the former US Defence Secretary’s greatest concerns – nuclear weapons. “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations,” McNamara maintained. […]

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