The tunnel vision of Indian strategic analysts with regard to China’s Belt and Road Initiative has become the mainstream opinion in the country, inevitably. This is unfortunate because it is a flawed assumption basically to conclude that the tiny slice one sees through the tunnel is the whole world. The Indian analysts have made Sri…
Once upon a time, deep into the night in selected campfires across the deserts of Southwest Asia, I used to tell a fable about the eagle, the bear and the dragon – much to the amusement of my Arab and Persian interlocutors. It was about how, in the young 21stcentury, the eagle, the bear and…
The small wooden boats slowly make their way down the brown waters of the Mekong at sunset. Flowing meditation – just enjoying the silence, watching the river flow. Then, suddenly, in the distance, an apparition – a row of cement Ts. Like a high-tech divinity, the 21st century irrupts across the immemorial Mekong, which in…
Whether the Arctic will become a platform for cooperation or warfare has been a question often posed throughout the past 150 years. As early as 1875, a vision for Eurasian-American cooperation was becoming realized as leading Americans and Russians alike foresaw the construction of telegraph and even rail lines across the 100 km Bering Strait…
For its reconstruction, Syria can only count on itself, because not one of the powers that spent hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy it is prepared to spend the first cent to help rebuild it. In these conditions, the future of the country depends on reconnecting with its past – the time at which…
Relentless reports that the New Silk Roads, or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), are a perfidious neo-imperial debt trap set up by Yellow Peril 2.0 are vastly exaggerated. With less than one week to go before the next BRI forum in Beijing, a quick overview of what’s been happening in Europe and Southwest Asia…
