INTRODUCTION The Chabahar Agreement signed between the Indian Prime Minister Modi and Iranian President Rouhani in May of this year will enable India to develop the Chabahar Port in Iranian Baluchistan as a major economic and strategic corridor linking India to Afghanistan and Central Asian markets. The Agreement is seen as India’s strategic response to…
Reconceptualizing the Indian Ocean as an African one can help to craft creative strategies for maximizing Pakistan’s strategic significance in the emerging Multipolar World Order through a reinvigorated naval strategy that capitalizes on China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s “Global South” connectivity potential via the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden (ASGA). There’s been a lot of talk…
Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hassan Rouhani will hold a summit this Wednesday in Sochi to discuss Syria. Russia, Turkey and Iran are the three power players at the Astana negotiations – where multiple cease-fires, as hard to implement as they are, at least evolve, slowly but surely, towards the ultimate target – a…
The world is changing, but the west is clinging on to a unipolar vision of the world that has passed. It’s attempts to discard this changing reality in exchange for a western worldview expressed in their politics and media are so ungrounded, it’s comical as it is dangerous. This western bubble of reality laid down…
Donald Trump has gone to China amid what is being called a “state visit +”. All of the trappings of a grand welcome have been on display and like just about everything in modern China, it has gone off without a hitch. By contrast, Barack Obama’s last Presidential visit to China became emblematic for a…
The US received a major blow to its global hegemony, and one which is sure to trigger more fighting talk from hawks in Washington. This week it was announced that China has established a ‘payment versus payment‘ (PVP) system to clear Chinese yuan and Russian ruble transactions. The aim, we’re told, is to to “reduce…
