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Sunday, June 28, 2026

Russia's 3 strategic mistakes: Empire, retreat and the energy trap

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History rarely punishes nations for a single decision. Great powers decline not because of one battlefield defeat or one failed policy, but ...
Sunday, June 14, 2026

The Great Indian Swadeshi Paradox: Why India remains dependent despite decades of swadeshi sloganeering & activism

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The Gulf war crisis has exposed a vulnerability that should unsettle every Indian policymaker. For decades, the prevailing assumption in New...
Sunday, May 24, 2026

Marco Rubio claims $500 billion trade commitment amid official silence in New Delhi


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The complex terrain of India-US trade negotiations took a dramatic turn during US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's visit to New Delhi in...
Sunday, May 3, 2026

Mani Shankar Aiyar and the secular creed: When ideology and intellectualism outpaced politics

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I had the opportunity to meet Mani Shankar Aiyar at the King’s Day celebration hosted by the Dutch Embassy—an encounter that prompted a refl...
Friday, April 3, 2026

Vali Nasr’s Iran’s Grand Strategy: The logic of power & the illusion of regime collapse

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Vali Nasr’s Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History reads less like a conventional history book and more like a conversation with a cou...
Sunday, March 29, 2026

Fuel, finance and force: How oil and dollars sustained America’s global supremacy

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The American narrative is constructed with remarkable elegance: a republic born in defiance of tyranny, consecrated to liberty, animated by ...
Saturday, March 14, 2026

The petrodollar trembles in the Iran war

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The wars of great powers rarely produce only one battlefield. Beneath the thunder of missiles and the rhetoric of retaliation, another conte...
Sunday, March 8, 2026

The limits of power: Why diplomacy and moral authority sustain empires

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Empires do not fall merely because their armies weaken or their treasuries empty. They collapse when the world ceases to believe in their au...
Wednesday, March 4, 2026

Holi and the pagan tradition: Why we still celebrate nature as sacred

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Civilizations are often remembered through their monuments, their wars, and their scriptures. Yet the deeper measure of a civilization lies ...
Sunday, March 1, 2026

Sacred soil, shared blood: The implacable logic of Middle Eastern wars

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Of all wars, the most relentless are civil wars; of all civil wars, the most implacable are those between brothers. History does not merely ...
Sunday, February 22, 2026

Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine: Strength as the currency of American support

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History has a paradoxical affection for small nations that refuse to behave like small nations.  In the shadow of vast empires and continent...
Sunday, February 15, 2026

Survival with dignity: India’s place in a mercurial American strategy

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India does not occupy a permanent seat in America’s grand strategy; it occupies a fluctuating utility. That is the uncomfortable truth benea...
Sunday, February 8, 2026

The end of elite journalism: Why The Washington Post’s reckoning was inevitable

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The early-February 2026 layoffs at The Washington Post , reportedly affecting more than 300 journalists, have been read by many as a tragedy...
Saturday, February 7, 2026

The geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence: How India, the US and China compete

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Artificial intelligence has moved decisively from being a technology domain to becoming an instrument of statecraft.  For India, the United ...
Sunday, February 1, 2026

Thinking like a state in an age of cautious budgets

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To think like a state is not to think expansively, but integratively. It is to see policy not as a collection of announcements, incentives, ...
Sunday, January 25, 2026

At the hinge of history: R. Venkataraman and the Republic in turbulent times

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Yesterday’s meeting and conversation with Ms. Lakshmi V. Venkatesan, Founder and Managing Trustee of the Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust, unfold...
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