Bharat China Geopolitics Policy Politics United States USA World

Ice Breaker or Thucydides Trap?

Presidents’ Xi and Donald J Trump see hope in this revolving relationship while contentious issues were swept under the carpet. K.A. Badarinath Did the ice finally break between President Xi Jingping and his US host Donald Trump? Were they able to transact some business at the White House after pomp and show displayed on arrival of President Xi. Diplomatic niceties and cordial atmosphere apart, there was not much in terms of take aways from the meeting held by Presidents’ Xi and Trump. Does that mean they are back to square one squabbling and pointing fingers at each other with military buildup thrown in? This again is a firm no. Huge ambitions and expectations apart, biggest outcome during UN General Assembly engagements in New York and later at bilateral summit in Washington DC is that both are willing to engage honestly and wee bit openly on key issues. They may continue to race with each other. The two may like to avoid direct confrontation. The G2 – USA and China – may open a range of communication points. Is the big billed summit all about just opening communication lines? Or, some baby steps taken? Donald Trump may have signed the Lindsay O Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026. If made operative, its implications are too huge. But Donald Trump may not be in a hurry to apply various provisions of this law on China. In effect, US will not slap 100 per cent tariffs on Chinese goods and services exports. The 100 per cent tariff is tied to China buying oil, gas and other merchandise from Russia and backing its partner Iran. The existing 26 per cent tariff will stay. Well, even the three months pause on application of this one-sided draconian law would mean that Beijing will continue with its merchandise and goods exports to US. Beijing has a whopping US $ one trillion plus trade surpluses in its annual transactions with America. Communist Party of China and its oligarchs’ breath easy next three months as they scramble ways and means to doing business with US without derailing the delicate apple cart with Russia and Iran. The duo has been trusted partners of Beijing. Xi may not be willing to let go of his friendship with both Moscow and Tehran easily. The three months reprieve would give time and enough elbow room to Beijing for readying counter measures and take on the deep state propelled United States that has not logically dealt with either friends or foes. For Trump, these three months would help shore up his dwindling electoral fortunes ahead of the November midterm polls where Republicans may be facing tough time with the electorate. Wall Street Journal polls have reported that Trump’s approval ratings have dropped to 37 per cent, lowest for any incumbent President since 1990s. Inflationary pressure, economic uncertainties due to continued flare up in West Asia is what President Trump may be against while he seeks to campaign for Republican candidates in half a dozen states beginning next week. Both Presidents, Xi and Trump seem to have reconciled that geo-strategic and economic differences will continue to mar their chances of striking a working relationship. For instance, President Xi may not have got any assurance from his American host on withdrawing support to Taiwan which Beijing considers as part of its larger communist empire. Normalization of trade and investment relations in medium to long term may be too early to predict given competing interests, divergence in opinions and strategies. President Xi did not take any of his top business representatives to US. This definitely speaks volumes. On Indo-Pacific also there may be no road map anytime soon given the divergent positions on freedom to navigate as per international maritime pacts without interference from Chinese naval vessels. Reports suggest that there’s no convergence on Artificial Intelligence related framework as well though top AI honchos were lined up by Trump at the dinner with President Xi. Presence of Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang at the state dinner did not un-nerve the Chinese delegation. There was no joint communique at the end of summit level talks between President Xi and Donald Trump. And, this gave enough fodder for the paparazzi to make wild but intelligent guesses on what transpired between the two leaders and their A teams. At the end, the big question was did the two leaders get into Thucydides trap? Or, is it an evolving relationship holding promise? (author is a veteran journalist, Director & Chief Executive of non-partisan, New Delhi based think tank, Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies)

Bharat Business Economy Geopolitics Policy Trade United States USA World

Is US a Trusted Ally?

Bharat has too much at stake with President Trump signing the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act. It is bound to impact free trade deal. N. C. Bipindra President Donald Trump signed Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 into law on September 18, 2026 at a White House ceremony expanding statutory sanctions, tariffs, and prohibitions targeting Russia and extending existing sanctions on Iran. Named after late Republican senator who championed it prior to his death in July, the bill had been a long journey since Graham introduced an earlier version in the Senate in April 2025 and was eventually co-written with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal to secure bipartisan backing. US Senate cleared it 86-11 in August before the House passed it 262-159. The law’s most consequential provision for New Delhi: it allows President Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on goods from each of the top five importers of Russian oil and natural gas, a group in which India figures prominently. Will Trump Pull the Trigger? Crucially, the tariff is discretionary, not automatic. The measure does not automatically impose 100 per cent tariff on any specific country, and legal analysts note the United States may impose a lower rate, providing India with diplomatic space to negotiate a reduced tariff, an exemption, a transition period, or a formal presidential waiver. This is not Trump’s first use of tariffs as coercive leverage against India over Russian crude. He had already raised India tariffs to 50 per cent adding 25 per cent penalty tied to Russian oil purchases, framing India as “directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil” despite calling it a friend with unusually high tariffs. Given that history, most trade analysts expect Trump to use the new authority as a negotiating cudgel rather than a blunt instrument, deploying the threat to extract further concessions in the ongoing Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) rather than triggering an immediate 100 per cent duty that could derail a deal both sides say is nearly finished. While India’s foreign minister Subramanyam Jaishankar flagged the tariff issue with his US counterpart Marc Rubio, Bharat’s Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said that the trade deal with US was a ‘done deal’. If key provisions of US Free Trade Agreement have already been frozen, then the new anti-Russia law may not have a bearing on India. Impact on US-India FTA The timing is delicate. Just days before the Act’s signing, Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said the two countries were “about 99 percent” done with first tranche of a trade deal, with a US delegation led by Assistant USTR Brendan Lynch holding three days of talks in New Delhi. Bharat’s Ministry of External Affairs separately described the latest round as “positive and forward-looking,” covering a broad range of issues aimed at reaching an early agreement, while reaffirming India’s commitment to comprehensive global strategic partnership with Washington. The new sanctions law effectively hangs a sword over that near-final text: New Delhi now has to weigh how any energy-related concession might be legally required to keep the tariff dormant, even as Commerce Secretary-level officials examine how recent legal changes should be reflected in the final agreement text. A prolonged standoff could push the interim deal’s signing further into 2027, jeopardising the two countries’ shared target of boosting bilateral trade to $ 500 billion by 2030. Wider Implications for US-India Ties India’s official response has been measured but firm. Ministry of External Affairs said it had noted the Act’s passage. It reiterated its commitment to ensuring energy security for 1.4 billion people through diversified sourcing, adding that the issue had been discussed at high levels with US interlocutors and that India would take necessary measures to protect its trade and economic interests. That “people-first” framing, echoed in Hindi-language coverage describing India’s insistence that energy security for its citizens is the priority, signals New Delhi will not publicly capitulate, even as it continues quiet diplomacy. The exposure is real: Russia supplied more than 51 per cent of India’s crude-oil imports in July 2026, up sharply from roughly a third of imports before the Ukraine war intensified price arbitrage in Russia’s favour. Analysts warn that repeated coercive tariff threats, layered atop the earlier 50 per cent duties, risk eroding trust in the “Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership,” pushing India to hedge harder towards BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and its own strategic autonomy doctrine, even as defence and technology cooperation, such as iCET and jet-engine co-production, continue on a separate track. Russia-Ukraine Dimension Beyond India, the law is squarely aimed at blocking financing Russia’s war machine. It imposes sanctions on Russian officials, financial institutions, defence-related networks and “shadow fleet” of vessels used to evade Western restrictions, while extending the Iran Sanctions Act for five years. Senator Katie Britt called it a message that “the United States stands unified in our opposition to their acts of aggression against Ukraine”. Democratic senators have taken an even harder line: Richard Blumenthal reportedly warned India to “better clean up your act” on Russian oil purchases. Moscow, for its part, has dismissed the law as an unfriendly act, while Beijing called it “long-arm jurisdiction” lacking authorisation under international law or the UN Security Council, both countries signalling they will not bow to pressure. The standoff between Washington DC and Moscow notwithstanding, US has extended an invite to President Putin to participate in the G-20 summit it would host later in the year. Putin acknowledged the invite but has not yet decided on his participation. Global Implications The law’s five-largest-importer trigger effectively targets China and India simultaneously and the Atlantic Council has noted it could authorise tariffs of up to 100 per cent on Chinese imports on national-security grounds if Beijing continues buying Russian oil. That dual exposure could push Beijing and New Delhi, usually rivals, toward tactical coordination on sanctions-evasion workarounds, alternative payment rails and diversified crude sourcing from the Gulf, West Africa, and the Americas. A blanket 100 per cent tariff

Bharat China Geopolitics Policy Security United States USA

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Wait for Washington Over!

India should evolve its own Indo-Pacific strategy as US turns an unreliable partner in counter balancing China in the region. NC Bipindra For nearly a decade, “Indo-Pacific” was more than a map. It was a promise. When the Pentagon renamed Pacific Command to Indo-Pacific Command in 2018, the message to New Delhi was unmistakable: India mattered, the Indian Ocean mattered, and Washington saw its future security architecture running through Asia’s two oceans, not one. That promise is now being unwound. In June 2026, the Trump administration reverted the command’s name to the original Pacific Command, a decision Pentagon officials framed as return to a “more traditional maritime focus” even as they insisted the mission, deterring China, remains unchanged. Symbolism in geopolitics is rarely so and this one lands at a difficult moment for India’s regional strategy. Quad on Paper with no timelines The name change of US command didn’t happen in isolation. It followed nearly two years in which Trump has treated the Quad, the informal grouping of the US, India, Japan, and Australia, as an afterthought. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise to hold a Quad leaders’ summit in India got derailed as Trump repeatedly deprioritised the meeting, first in 2025 and now with 2026 summit plans clouded by uncertainty. Foreign ministers have kept the format alive through lower-level meetings, and Australia, this year’s rotating chair, is still hoping to host a leaders’ summit. But the pattern is clear: the Quad survives on bureaucratic momentum, not presidential commitment. This drift has coincided with genuine strain in US – India relationship itself. Steep US tariffs on Indian goods, a stalled bilateral trade agreement and Trump’s own description of a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping as ” G-2 ” summit have unsettled Indian policymakers who spent years building the case that Washington saw India as its indispensable Indo-Pacific partner. Why This Matters More Than the Optics Suggest China has not paused while Washington’s attention wandered. Beijing continues to expand naval presence in the Indian Ocean, deepen port and infrastructure footholds from Gwadar to Hambantota, and press territorial claims from the South China Sea to the Line of Actual Control with India itself. People’s Liberation Army Navy now operates the largest fleet in the world by hull count and Chinese research and survey vessels routinely transit waters that India considers its strategic backyard. Nothing changes because Washington swapped a word on a building in Camp H. M. Smith in Aiea on Hawaii’s Oahu Island. But it does change the assumptions India has built its regional posture for the better part of a decade as a muscular, consistently engaged United States would anchor the coalition-building work against Chinese assertiveness. The risk for India isn’t abandonment exactly. Pentagon officials and military commanders have been clear that operational focus on China and Taiwan contingencies persists regardless of the command’s name. The risk is something subtler and arguably more dangerous: a Washington that remains rhetorically committed to countering China while becoming unpredictable and transactional in practice, leaving India to guess, summit by summit, whether American backing will show up when it’s needed. Options before India! India helped popularise the term “Indo-Pacific” as an alternative to the China-centric “Asia-Pacific” framing, precisely to assert its own centrality in the region’s future. It cannot now let that framework be defined, or left undefined, by decisions made in Washington. New Delhi should double down on its own Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative and push it as the organising concept for regional partners, rather than waiting for American validation. Quad’s usefulness was always going to be capped by willingness of its most powerful member to show up. India has other tools: India-France-Australia trilateral, deepening ties with the Philippines and Vietnam on maritime domain awareness, expanded defence cooperation with Japan independent of Quad choreography and closer coordination with European powers like the UK and Germany, who have their own Indo-Pacific tilts. None of these replace US relationship, but together they reduce dependence on any single partner’s political calendar. If US security umbrella is becoming less predictable, India’s own blue-water capability becomes more urgent, not less. That means faster submarine and aircraft carrier programmes, expanded maritime surveillance across the Indian Ocean Region, and continued investment in bases and logistics agreements with Indian Ocean island states like Mauritius, Seychelles, and Sri Lanka, where Chinese influence has been creeping in. Resolving tariff disputes and completing a bilateral trade deal with Washington remains genuinely valuable for India’s economy and does help stabilise ties. But India should pursue this as an economic goal in its own right, not as a precondition for security cooperation it treats as guaranteed. Coupling the two only gives Washington leverage to hold Indo-Pacific security commitments hostage to unrelated trade demands, as arguably already happened around the 2025 summit. None of this means walking away from the US relationship, which remains central to any credible China-balancing strategy given American military capacity in the Pacific. But India should signal clearly, through its own diplomacy and defence posture, that it is building parallel options. Paradoxically, an India less dependent on the US is an India more attractive to Washington as a serious partner, not less. Bigger Picture Pacific Command name change is a small bureaucratic decision that captures a large strategic truth: American Indo-Pacific policy under Trump has become less institutional and more personality-driven, shifting with individual meetings, tariff disputes and summit attendance rather than long-term architecture. That’s a hard environment for allies who built their planning around American constancy. For India, the answer isn’t panic or public rupture with Washington. It’s strategic maturity. The country that once needed the “Indo” in the Indo-Pacific to assert its relevance now has the economic weight, naval ambitions, and regional relationships to define that relevance on its own terms, with or without a matching name on a building in Hawaii. (Author is Chairman, Law and Society Alliance, a New Delhi-based think tank, and guest columnist with CIHS)

Bharat Geopolitics Policy Press Release Trade World

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PRESS NOTE: CIHS Hosted Interactive Session with Ambassador of Poland

New Delhi, August 21, 2026 – The Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies (CIHS), held an engaging and insightful interactive session on “India-Poland People Connect” with H.E. Dr. Piotr Antoni Świtalski, Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to India, at India Habitat Centre (IHC), Maple Room, Lodhi Road, New Delhi The thought-provoking discussion on Indo-Poland civilizational, cultural and people-to-people connection in a rapidly changing global order brought together scholars, policy experts and strategic thinkers to examine multifaceted ties between India and Poland, covering areas such as diplomacy, trade, education, cultural exchange and technology cooperation. In his welcome address K.A. Badarinath, Chief Executive and Director at CIHS, emphasised strong cultural, civilizational and democratic values that bind the Indo-Poland Relationship. He highlighted the necessity of enhancing people-to-people connectivity, cultural and civilizational bonds and strong international associations in shaping a peaceful and prosperous future for global communities. H.E. Piotr Antoni Switalski, in his address, highlighted shared values and historical linkages between India and Poland and called Poland’s economic rise an “economic miracle” powered by human capital, much like modern India. “With trade at $ 5 billion, there is a huge potential to double it, urging India to “use Poland” as a friendly gateway to Europe,” he noted. H.E. Piotr Antoni Świtalski, Ambassador of Poland to India, described India as a highly “effective partner” at a time when the world faces increasing unpredictability and “many disruptive forces.” He emphasised that Poland understands India’s longstanding defence relationship with Russia and believes that “Russia should not stand in the way of our dialogue, our cooperation and our partnership. We leave it aside.” On Poland’s relations with Pakistan, H.E. Świtalski said that while Warsaw maintains diplomatic and economic ties with Islamabad, this should not be interpreted as an anti-India position. During the interactive session, participants raised thought-provoking questions on topics ranging from terrorism to trade, H.E. Switalski responded with openness stating that Poland supports India’s “right to pursue terrorists everywhere they go and his country is on India’s side when it comes to fighting terrorism because “we are a victim” of that too. Delivering a vote of thanks, Rahul Pawa, Director of Research at CIHS, expressed gratitude to H.E. Dr. Piotr Antoni Świtalski for his invaluable insights and openness, to the distinguished scholars for their participation and contributing to a meaningful dialogue that reaffirmed the importance of fostering connections between people. “India and Poland are not new acquaintances. Our connection is centuries old and one can see it everywhere in streets of Warsaw and Łódź that carry the names of Gandhi and Tagore, in a century of Sanskrit scholarship at Warsaw and at Kraków and in yoga schools across Poland that have outlasted several political systems,” he noted. CIHS is committed to strengthening this sacred bond through research, cultural dialogue and by serving as a bridge for sustained discussion and deeper people-to-people connections. At CIHS, we believe that cooperation between states endures only when it rests on connection between people.

250 Years of American Diplomacy: Hidden Blueprint for Today's World Order

Geopolitics United States USA World

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250 Years of American Diplomacy: Hidden Blueprint for Today’s World Order

By N. C. Bipindra Tariff fights with Beijing. Arguments over NATO burden-sharing. Debates about whether the dollar can keep its throne as the world’s reserve currency. None of these are new problems. They’re the latest release of an operating system American diplomats have been building and patching for 250 years. If one wants to understand why the current world order works the way it does, and why it’s now under so much strain, one has to trace the code back to its source: two and a half centuries of US foreign policy decisions that quietly still govern how nations trade, fight, and negotiate today. Founding Doctrines That Still Justify Modern Alliances and Spheres of Influence America’s first diplomatic instinct was survival, not dominance. Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address warned against “entangling alliances”. Yet the Revolution itself had only succeeded because of a French alliance. That contradiction never really resolved; it just evolved. Today’s flexible, purpose-built coalitions, such as AUKUS, the Quad, and ad hoc sanctions coalitions against Russia, are direct descendants of that founding lesson. Alliances are tools of leverage, not sentimental attachments, used only when they serve concrete strategic interests. Then came the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, declaring the Western Hemisphere off-limits to European powers. This was the first American claim to a regional sphere of influence, and it is the exact logic Washington still invokes today when it objects to Chinese naval bases near the Panama Canal, Russian influence in Latin America, or China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea. When commentators debate whether China is building “its own Monroe Doctrine” in Asia, they are explicitly borrowing this 200-year-old American framework to explain 21st-century power politics. Institutions Still Running the World Today Woodrow Wilson’s failed League of Nations and the subsequent horror of World War II taught American diplomats a lesson that shapes the present more than any other. That informal alliances weren’t enough; the world needed durable institutions. Out of this emerged the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Bretton Woods system, which made the US dollar the world’s reserve currency. This is the single most consequential legacy for today’s world order. Every conversation about de-dollarisation by BRICS nations, every IMF bailout negotiation, every UN Security Council veto fight over Ukraine or Gaza: all of it plays out inside institutional walls that American diplomats built in the 1940s. When people ask, ‘Is the US-led world order collapsing?’, what they’re really asking is whether these specific mid-century American institutions can survive a world they were never designed to manage: one with multiple genuine superpowers rather than a single dominant architect. Containment’s Blueprint for Today’s Great-Power Competition The Cold War doctrine of containment, that is, checking Soviet expansion through alliances, foreign aid, and forward military presence, didn’t vanish when the USSR collapsed in 1991. It simply went dormant and is now being reactivated almost line-for-line. NATO’s eastward expansion, US troop deployments in the Baltics, and the current Western strategy of arming Ukraine while avoiding direct conflict are all textbook containment, applied to a resurgent Russia. Meanwhile, the US-Japan and US-South Korea security treaties signed during this era are the exact frameworks now being stress-tested by North Korean missile tests and Chinese pressure on Taiwan. Cold War diplomacy didn’t end. It is the current operating manual for US strategy in both Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Globalisation Bet That Explains Today’s Backlash The “unipolar moment” of the 1990s produced the WTO, NAFTA, and an American-led bet that economic interdependence would guarantee peace and stability. That bet partially paid off and partially explains the world’s current turmoil. China’s WTO accession in 2001, championed by Washington, fuelled the very economic rise that the US now treats as its foremost strategic rival. The populist backlash against globalisation in the US and Europe, the rise of protectionist tariffs, and today’s “friend-shoring” and “de-risking” trade policies are all direct corrections to choices made in this specific window of American diplomacy. Multipolarity and the Diplomacy of Managed Decline Since the 2008 financial crisis, American diplomacy has shifted from managing a unipolar world to managing relative decline in a multipolar one, without triggering catastrophic conflict. This is the direct backdrop to nearly every headline today. Be it economic statecraft over military force, through export controls on semiconductors, sanctions on Russia, and tariff wars with China, which have replaced older tools of coercion, echoing 19th-century economic pressure tactics but at a global scale. Or coalition flexibility over rigid blocks, whether the Quad and AUKUS, reflecting lessons from Cold War alliance-building, adapted for an Indo-Pacific where allies want partnership without full entanglement. Even the institutional strain in the UN Security Council, WTO, and Bretton Woods system (all American creations) is increasingly gridlocked precisely because they were built for a world with one dominant power, not several. Why This History Is the Real Map of Today’s World Order Nearly every current geopolitical flashpoint has a direct ancestor in this 250-year timeline: NATO tension traces to Cold War containment, dollar dominance traces to Bretton Woods, US-China rivalry traces to the globalisation bet of the 1990s, and regional power claims from Ukraine to the South China Sea trace to the logic of the Monroe Doctrine. This isn’t a coincidence. American diplomats built the current system, and its cracks are showing precisely where the original design assumed a world that no longer exists: one where the US faced no serious peer competitor. Reading Tomorrow’s Headlines Through Yesterday’s Decisions The next major shift in the world order, whether it’s a new reserve currency, a redefined NATO, or a rebalanced Pacific, will be shaped by leaders who understand this 250-year pattern of American diplomacy: oscillating between isolation and engagement, unilateralism and institution-building, idealism and realism, containment and selective alliance. Understanding that pattern isn’t just history for its own sake. It’s the clearest available lens for predicting where the current, fraying world order goes next. (Author is Chairman, Law and Society Alliance, a New Delhi-based think tank, and guest columnist with CIHS)

Geopolitics Policy Security United States USA War World

299

Managed Unstable Equilibrium?

After US-Iran Peace Deal, West Asia continues to burn. India has to devise long term tactics to tide over uncertainties in the region. N. C. Bipindra The ink had barely dried on Bürgenstock framework before bombs started falling again. Four months after US and Israel launched their war on Iran on February 29, 2026, and weeks after Washington and Tehran sat across the table in Switzerland to sign a memorandum of understanding meant to end the fighting “on all fronts,” there’s uncertainty all over. Lebanon is still burning, the Strait of Hormuz remains a flashpoint and peace deal that was supposed to calm the region has instead exposed how far apart its core players really are. US – Iran interim agreement was billed as the moment the wider war finally ended. Iran agreed to stop blocking the Strait of Hormuz; Washington lifted its naval blockade of Iranian ports and both sides committed to 60 days of follow-on talks over Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions relief. On paper, it looked like off – ramp the world had been waiting for since oil tankers first started getting stranded in the Gulf back in March 2026. The problem is that MOU’s very first clause calls for a permanent end to hostilities in Lebanon, a country that was never at the table. Iran insisted on this because Hezbollah, its most important regional proxy, has been devastated by months of Israeli ground operations and airstrikes that have killed more than 4,000 people and displaced over a million Lebanese. For Tehran, protecting what’s left of Hezbollah isn’t a side issue; it’s the price of the peace deal itself. Iran has repeatedly said Israeli strikes on Lebanon “blatantly violate” the ceasefire it signed onto. Israel sees it completely differently. Israeli officials have said openly that they view Lebanon’s inclusion in the MOU as a major concession Washington’s envoys’ handed to Iran, one Israel never agreed to. Defence Minister Israel Katz has said Israeli forces would keep operating in what he calls the “security zone” regardless of what any memorandum says and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has separately negotiated a bilateral framework with the Lebanese government, bypassing Hezbollah entirely. That bilateral Israel-Lebanon framework signed in Washington just days ago, ties an Israeli troop withdrawal to Hezbollah’s disarmament, something Hezbollah has rejected outright. Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem called the agreement “humiliating, shameful, and a surrender of sovereignty,” and his supporters have taken to the streets of Beirut, burning tyres in protest. Even as the ink dried on that deal, an Israeli strike killed a civilian in southern Lebanon, the first casualty since the signing. This is the trap Lebanon is caught in: its own government wants out of a war it never chose, but doing so on Israel’s terms means publicly disarming Hezbollah which Hezbollah says it will never accept “unconditionally” without an Israeli withdrawal first. Meanwhile, Israel says it won’t withdraw until Hezbollah disarms. It’s a circular standoff, and Lebanese civilians are paying for it with airstrikes that haven’t actually stopped despite three rounds of declared ceasefires since April this year. Fragility of all this became impossible to ignore over past few days. An Iranian attack on a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz triggered fresh US airstrikes on Iranian targets. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard responded by hitting American sites in the Gulf, warning that “if the aggression is repeated, our response will be broader.” Vice President JD Vance, who had just left Switzerland after peace talks, declared bluntly that “violence will be met with violence.” Israeli drones continued striking southern Lebanon’s Nabatieh area even as Netanyahu was publicly hailing his Lebanon framework as “a historic achievement.” In other words: the deal exists, the signing ceremonies happened and the shooting never really stopped. For countries like India, this war was never an abstract geopolitical drama; it hit the fuel pumps and the kitchen stoves directly. Roughly 41per cent of India’s crude oil imports, 55 per cent of LNG and an extraordinary 88 per cent of its LPG normally transit the Strait of Hormuz. When Iran effectively shut the strait in late February, India’s oil flow through that route collapsed from 2.8 million barrels a day to under 250,000, forcing New Delhi into a frantic scramble for alternatives. India responded the way it usually does in a crisis: pragmatically, and on multiple tracks at once. It ramped up Russian crude purchases, competing head-to-head with China for cargoes. It diversified toward Angola, Venezuela, Brazil, and the UAE. It even resumed direct oil and LPG purchases from Iran after a seven-year gap, betting that Washington wouldn’t punish it too harshly for doing so. The Indian Navy launched “Operation Urja Suraksha,” escorting Indian-flagged tankers through the Gulf rather than joining US-led naval coalition, a calculated act of strategic non-alignment. The payoff: by June, India’s crude imports had climbed back above 5 million barrels a day, roughly back to pre-war levels, even as the geopolitical map of its suppliers shifted dramatically. But the cost was real: a weaker rupee, an Indian crude basket that spiked from $ 69 to over $113 a barrel at the worst of the crisis and inflationary pressure that touched everything from fertilisers to transport. The deeper lesson for India and other import dependent developing economies is about exposure. A conflict thousands of kilometres away, between countries India does not quarrel with, was enough to threaten cooking gas supplies for hundreds of millions of households. That vulnerability is now feeding into longer-term decisions: faster EV adoption, push for piped natural gas over imported LPG and a renewed urgency around energy diversification that outlasts this particular war. Is peace tenable and everlasting: not yet and maybe not soon. US -Iran deal solved the problem the world cared most about: the global energy chokepoint. But it left the problem the region cares most about — Lebanon and Hezbollah — essentially unresolved. Iran needs Hezbollah alive enough to claim it didn’t abandon its allies; Israel wants Hezbollah disarmed before it ever

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Why Rawalakot Is Burning: Exploitation Dressed as Administration

Seven are dead and an internet blackout has fallen over the hills, but the protesters in Pakistan’s Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir have refused to go home. After seventy-nine years, the territory Islamabad occupied is deciding it will no longer be ruled. Rahul Pawa | X @imrahulpawa The bridge at Khaigala is not the sort of place where states are supposed to lose their grip. It is a modest crossing in a green fold of the Pir Panjal, the kind of spot a traveller passes without noticing. Yet this past weekend the air above Rawalakot filled with tear gas and gunfire. By the time it cleared, seven people were dead, four police personnel and three civilians, with around forty injured, and the people in the road did the one thing an occupier never expects. They stayed. Days before the strike was due, the Joint Awami Action Committee had already been outlawed, dozens arrested, and the internet throttled across the region. To understand why an agitation over flour and electricity has hardened into something Islamabad now answers with bullets, you have to go back to the original sin. In October 1947, Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession that made the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir part of India, the same legal document every other prince signed. Before the ink was dry, Pakistan had already sent tribal raiders and regular soldiers pouring across the western frontier. The invaders brought violence and occupation. In Mirpur, eyewitnesses recorded a massacre so complete that, by some accounts, the overwhelming majority of a town of twenty-five thousand was slaughtered over three days that November. Hundreds of thousands fled. The land those raiders seized and held when the guns fell silent in 1949 became what Pakistan euphemistically calls “Azad” Jammu and Kashmir . There is no azadi there. There never was. What there has been, for nearly eight decades, is exploitation dressed as administration. Consider the rivers. The gorges of this territory carry some of the richest hydropower potential in South Asia, and Pakistan has exploited them relentlessly.. The Mangla reservoir drowned the old town of Mirpur and displaced its people. Pakistan draws much of its electricity from these mountains, yet the power projects sit elsewhere, depriving the region of the royalties that are rightfully its own. The current flows down to the plains of Punjab. The dignity does not flow back up. It is precisely this absurdity, a people sitting in the dark while their rivers light other cities, that has driven crowds into the streets every year since. Then came the corridor. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was sold as a forty-billion-dollar dream, and for the Pakistan’s occupied territories it has been something closer to a second occupation. Ancestral land in Gilgit-Baltistan has been acquired forcibly, without consent or fair compensation, by the provincial government and the Pakistan army. The promised jobs evaporated as Chinese workers arrived to fill them, leaving locals dejected and shut out of the very projects carved through their valleys. Those who dare protest the corridor are booked under anti-terrorism laws and branded anti-state elements. The banks of the world lend against this land; its people are not invited to the counting house. The cost of that closeness with Beijing has reached into the region’s homes. Hundreds of men from Gilgit-Baltistan married Uyghur women from neighbouring Xinjiang, and since 2017 those wives have been swept into China’s mass detention camps, leaving husbands and children stranded on the wrong side of the Khunjerab pass. The Gilgit-Baltistan assembly passed a unanimous resolution demanding their release; the families have protested through sub-zero winters; Islamabad, unwilling to disturb its benefactor, has done effectively nothing. An occupier that will not lift a finger to bring home its subjects’ own wives and mothers has told them precisely where they stand. Nowhere was that indifference starker than in the spring of 2020. As the Wuhan-epicentre pandemic climbed into the mountains, activists described a public-health system that existed mostly on paper. Gilgit-Baltistan, they reported, had two ageing ventilators for a region of millions and had received no meaningful medical aid from Islamabad, even as the same government broke ground on the fourteen-billion-dollar Diamer-Bhasha dam. Hospitals functioned as little more than referral desks, dispatching the seriously ill down the highway to Rawalpindi to fend for themselves. A land rich enough to power a country was not worth two machines that breathe. The people have had enough. The Joint Awami Action Committee, born in 2023 from traders, lawyers, labourers and transporters, learned in 2024 and 2025 they have to voice their rights. But the demand that frightens Rawalpindi was never about groceries. It is the abolition of twelve seats in the local assembly reserved for refugees who settled in mainland Pakistan after 1947, seats the committee says mainstream Pakistani parties use to install governments in Muzaffarabad. Strip away the procedural language and the message is plain: stop rigging the house. On Sunday, 7 June, the territory’s Supreme Court ruled that those seats enjoy constitutional protection and can be altered only by amendment, dealing a blow to the movement that had been pushing against them. And so this weekend the state answered the way it always has here, with proscription, arrests, a blackout and live rounds. This is not a problem Pakistan can solve. What is failing is slower and more fatal: consent. An occupation can outlast oppressive deeds; it cannot outlast the people it claims to govern deciding, town by town, that they were never asked and no longer agree. When British MPs are rising in their own parliament to flag a communications blackout, fielding messages from constituents who cannot reach their families in the region, the cost of holding this land has begun to outrun the reason for holding it. Jinnah’s two-nation theory was an argument for Pakistan. It was never an argument for these territories Pakistan occupied with raiders and regulars, for they belonged to a state that had lawfully acceded to India before the invasion

Bharat Disinformation Hindus Misinformation Security

346

Why Spew Venom Against RSS & Hindus?

Self-styled Christian lobbyists’ campaign against Hindus outreach in US & Europe has not worked even with scaremongering and demonization tactics. Aniket Pingley There is a genre of writing immune to journalistic standards in gathering evidence, retaining balance and complete disclosure. It is the opinion piece. In its honest form, it declares a position and argues it. In its dishonest form, it uses the opinion format as legal exemption, a space where alarming assertions are made, dehumanising imagery deployed and contested allegations stated as settled fact, all under the protective cover of “these are merely my views.” John Dayal’s piece in UCA News, headlined, “The Indian paramilitary organization’s tentacles in the US,” is a distinguished specimen of the dishonest form. It is tactical scaremongering – calibrated to produce a specific emotional and political effect amongst a specific audience at a chosen moment in Washington lobbying calendar. The article makes claims about the RSS, Gujarat, lobbying firms, FCRA and about Indian-origin officials in the US government. I will not engage those claims here. They are matters of public record, available to any reader willing to search. Readers are capable of forming their own opinions about Gujarat 2002, Modi visa episode, Squire Patton Boggs and India’s FCRA regime. They do not need me to defend the RSS against Dayal’s version of events. What I will do is more useful: identify what this article actually is, what it is attempting at and why its final sentence, the most revealing sentence in the piece, tells the reader everything they need to know. Confession in last sentence Dayal ends his article with, “The RSS has money, access, a friendly executive environment, and the weight of geopolitics on its side, and for the moment seems able to counter the evangelical campaign.” Read it slowly. Counter the evangelical campaign. Not “respond to criticism.” Not “defend itself against allegations.” Counter the evangelical campaign. Dayal told his readers, in his own words, what this is actually about. There is an evangelical campaign, organised, funded and directed, targeting RSS in Washington DC. And, what is Dayal lamenting is that this campaign is not working. RSS is successfully countering it. This is the most important fact in the entire article and it appears in the last line, almost as an afterthought. Everything before it, the alarming language, assembled allegations, USCIRF references, lobbying firm drama, is the infrastructure in that evangelical campaign. The article is a dispatch from one side of an active lobbying contest, written by one of its participants, lamenting that the other side is holding ground. And, RSS has every right to hold its ground. USCIRF’s annual report is not scripture. It is not axiomatic truth. It is not a judicial finding. It is the output of an advisory commission whose India recommendations the US State Department has declined to act upon for six consecutive years, a fact Dayal buries in his final paragraph as if it were a footnote, rather than the most consequential sentence in his piece. American foreign policy operates on classified intelligence, diplomatic relationships and a comprehensive picture of the world that an advisory commission does not possess. What’s this Evangelical Campaign? The campaign Dayal laments, RSS is successfully countering, is a coordinated effort to have United States designate India as a Country of Particular Concern on religious freedom, impose targeted sanctions on RSS and restrict its members from entering the US. It runs through USCIRF, Congressional testimony, UN Special Rapporteur submissions and in coordination with International Christian Concern, National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Its substance: Christian organisations in India are being persecuted, FCRA restrictions choke Christian churches and anti-conversion laws are religious oppression. Each of these claims deserves a question Dayal never asks: why are there so many foreign-funded Christian organisations operating in India and what precisely are they doing? The answer is not theoretical. It is on the record. Compassion International (CI), a major US-based Christian child sponsorship charity that operated in India for 48 years, provides the most precise forensic answer available. In 2017, Indian Government placed CI on “prior permission” list under FCRA, requiring explicit case-by-case approval for every financial transaction, effectively halting flow of approximately $50 million annually. The government’s case rested on CBI First Information Report and Income Tax investigation into CI’s primary Indian affiliate, Chennai-based Caruna Bal Vikas (CBV). CBV was registered under FCRA with its legally declared nature of association as “economic, educational and social.” The CBI found it had, in its own documents, “invariably indulged in religious activities.” More precisely, in CBV’s own stated long-term organisational objective, the goal was “converting poor children into fulfilled Christian adults.” That is not a characterisation by the Indian government. It is what the organisation wrote about itself. Furthermore, CI was identified as part of an organised international missionary industry focused on what its own practitioners call “10-40 Window”, a geographic band encompassing majority of the world’s Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, deliberately targeted as a conversion frontier. This is what the FCRA regime was responding to. Not the practice of Christianity, the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala have worshipped in this land since the first century, and nobody has targeted them. What was being regulated is a specific, documented, foreign-funded, institutionally organised project of converting economically vulnerable children using charitable cover. When an organisation tells CBI investigators, through its own documents, that its goal is to convert poor children, it is not a policy concern. That is evidence. India’s state governments have enacted anti-conversion laws through elected legislative assemblies using constitutional procedures with clear majorities. These laws do not prohibit practice of Christianity. They regulate coercive, fraudulent or inducement-based conversions. Twelve states have enacted such legislation. That is Indian democratic federalism functioning as designed. Whether those laws are sound policy is a matter for Indian courts and voters, not for an American advisory commission whose mandate derives from US domestic legislation with no jurisdiction over a sovereign parliament. FCRA regime applies

China Geopolitics Policy Security United States Video War World

445

As Iran Fights the Allies, China Learns from It

China did not start this war and will not finish it. What it will do is walk away with something more valuable than victory; the data, the proof, the blueprint for the confrontation it is quietly rehearsing on the other side of the world in the western Pacific. Rahul PAWA | March 3, 2026 | x- imrahulpawa When three American F-15E Strike Eagles spiralled out of the sky over Kuwait on the night of March 1, the story that dominated headlines was one of tragic friendly fire. Kuwaiti Patriot batteries, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Iranian drones and ballistic missiles crisscrossing the Gulf, misidentified their own side’s aircraft in a chaotic, saturated battlespace. All six aircrew ejected safely. The jets did not survive. CENTCOM was unambiguous: friendly fire in a saturated sky, not Iranian action. Iranian state media claimed otherwise. The Pentagon held its line. But the deeper question remains: why that sky was so saturated in the first place. The answer leads not to Tehran. It leads to Beijing. China has not fired a single shot in this war. It has condemned the strikes on Tehran as violations of international law. And yet the weapons flying over the Gulf, the drones that refused to be jammed, the missiles that found their targets, the internet blackout sealing 93 million Iranians from the outside world, all rest on a technological architecture Beijing spent a decade carefully constructing. Not as charity. As a field test. This is the war behind the war. China using Iran as a live laboratory for systems it will one day need against adversaries whose weapons it is now learning to defeat. Every drone that navigates through Western jamming. Every radar that acquires a stealth aircraft. Every $20,000 drone that forces the expenditure of a $4 million Patriot interceptor. Beijing is watching, logging, and learning. The most operationally significant Chinese technology active in this conflict is BeiDou-3, China’s sovereign alternative to GPS. Following Isreal-Iran’s Twelve-Day War last year, in which GPS spoofing partially blinded Iran’s guided munitions, Iran drew a hard lesson. It formally abandoned the American system and transitioned its military navigation architecture to BeiDou. The encrypted network resists allied electronic warfare; its integrated short-message service sustains command node communication even when terrestrial infrastructure is destroyed. Iran’s 2026 missile campaign has demonstrated navigational resilience its 2025 predecessor lacked, striking targets across all six GCC states simultaneously and forcing the UAE alone to intercept 161 of 174 ballistic missiles fired at it. But BeiDou is not merely Iran’s tool. It is China’s proof of concept, a navigation system battle-hardened against the world’s most sophisticated jamming apparatus, stress-tested under real combat conditions. The telemetry flowing back to Beijing from every Iranian strike package is worth more than any simulation its engineers could run. The same scenario applies to the YLC-8B anti-stealth radar, reportedly transferred to Iran after the 2025 war. Engineered to operate on VHF frequencies that defeat radar-absorbent coatings, it addresses the defining challenge of modern air warfare: how do you acquire what your adversary designed to be invisible? Whether the YLC-8B batteries survived the opening strikes of Operation Epic Fury remains unclear, the IDF claims over 200 Iranian air defence systems destroyed. But even degraded performance data feeds directly into China’s own development cycle. Iran is the test range. The PLA is the end customer. This Chinese pattern of real-world testing was visible long before this war. Last May, during India’s Operation Sindoor strikes on terrorist and Pakistani army infrastructure, Chinese-origin PL-15 beyond-visual-range missiles and HQ-9 surface-to-air systems were active on the Pakistani side. Beijing opportunistically leveraged the conflict to test its weapons in live combat. It did not stop at data collection. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission confirmed that China deployed fake social media accounts to circulate AI-generated imagery purporting to show debris from aircraft destroyed by Chinese weapons. A deliberate campaign to discredit India’s Rafale purchase and advance sales of China’s J-35. Chinese embassy officials reportedly persuaded Indonesia to pause a Rafale procurement already in process. Beijing said nothing publicly. It did not need to. Iran and Pakistan have become China’s two most valuable proving grounds. One tests area-denial and air defence against American and Israeli platforms. The other tests beyond-visual-range air combat against Indian platforms. China supplied roughly 82% of Pakistan’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, it had substantial strategic investment in the outcome. Together, both theatres are delivering what no exercise can replicate: live performance data against real Western hardware. The supply chain completes the picture. On February 25, three days before the strikes began, the US Treasury sanctioned procurement networks supplying precursor chemicals and sensitive machinery to Iran’s IRGC missile and drone programmes, following 2025 designations of six Hong Kong and PRC-based entities feeding Iranian arms production. The $20,000 drones flooding the Gulf, cheap enough to force the expenditure of interceptors costing two hundred times more are products of that chain. A think tank report warned that US high-end interceptors including SM-3, PAC-3 MSE and THAAD could be depleted within days of sustained high-tempo operations. That attrition calculus is now live. Away from the battlefield, Iranian internet connectivity has collapsed to roughly 4% of normal levels. The tools enforcing that blackout bear Chinese brand names: Huawei and ZTE deep-packet-inspection platforms, Tiandy facial-recognition hardware explicitly supplying the IRGC. The function is unambiguous; seal the population off, suppress evidence of military degradation, keep the regime viable long enough to matter. Prima facie, none of this has made Iran invincible. Khamenei is dead. The IDF has conducted over 700 strike missions. What Chinese technology has done, in both theatres, is keep the fight going longer than it otherwise would have, and send data back to Beijing that no laboratory can replicate. The drones are still flying. The missiles are still navigating. The lights inside Iran are still off. And in Beijing, someone is taking very careful notes. Preparing for the western Pacific. (Rahul Pawa is an international criminal lawyer and

Bharat Defence Economy Geopolitics International Policy Politics Security Technology Trade

421

Narendra Modi in Israel: Friendship Reborn

Indian Prime Minister’s visit to Israel goes beyond symbolism. Substantive outcomes may lead to redrawing alliances in West Asia. Paushali Lass For decades, India and Israel were close yet cautious partners, working behind the scenes. This week, that changed. Prime Minister Modi’s visit did more than make history. It marked dawn of “Special Strategic Partnership,” a status Israel reserves for select nations. Historic Embrace: Modi at Knesset During his address to Knesset, Modi spoke with clarity and warmth, praising shared democratic values and civilizational bonds between India and Israel. Members of parliament took selfies, posted on social media, visibly enthusiastic. Modi was not merely welcomed; he was embraced. In recognition of his leadership in deepening India–Israel ties, he was bestowed Speaker of the Knesset Medal, a historic first. The award was not just a personal accolade but public affirmation of renewed strategic friendship, reflecting trust, shared values and civilizational bonds that his visit celebrated[1]. For many Israelis, this was the moment India stepped out from behind diplomatic caution and said simply: we are friends. Modi invoked deep historical ties, highlighting that India has been part of Jewish story for millennia. He reminded the Knesset that Jews found refuge in India long before modern states existed, citing the story of Queen Esther in Bible and mentions of India in Talmudic texts[2]. Modi made a powerful, unequivocal statement condemning barbaric acts of Hamas, supporting Israel without ifs or buts. For many Israelis, this clarity of friendship was unprecedented. Sharp criticism at home from certain quarters questioned how an Indian Prime Minister could visit Israel at a time when allegations of genocide in Gaza loomed large. But, Modi proceeded and made a bold declaration of solidarity. He not only condemned the atrocities committed by Hamas as acts of ‘terror’ but also expressed profound grief over loss of innocent lives on October 7, 2023. Interestingly, Modi highlighted a deeper point that may help explain the particular affinity between India and Israel from perspective of ancient civilization and culture. Although India, a majority-Hindu nation and Israel, a majority-Jewish state, may appear to have fundamentally different faith systems, there exists a philosophical thread that binds the two peoples more closely than one might assume. Modi drew parallels between Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam (repairing and healing the world) and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the ancient Sanskrit declaration that world is one family. These deep-rooted philosophical traditions of both nations should not be underestimated. They offer precisely the kind of moral and spiritual foundation the world needs today as it seeks to promote global security and combat terrorism. After all, the world cannot be made a better place through political and economic deals alone; spiritual dimensions of these ancient civilizations must also be recognized and strengthened. The two-day visit was especially meaningful for Indian Jewish community. Prime Minister Modi met Indian Jewish community, creating a historic and emotional connect. Revital Moses[3], who dedicated herself to strengthening India–Israel cultural ties described the experience as “surreal”, meeting a leader she had grown up watching on television, whose vision she had admired for decades. The visit carried deep symbolic weight. Modi took out time to be at Yad Vashem and paid tributes to Holocaust victims, highlighting shared commitment to humanity. What many may not be aware of is that India gave refuge to Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust during World War II. Modi also held a private meeting with President Herzog who thanked him for India’s unwavering support and friendship towards Israel. Something that surprised many and instantly went viral was Modi’s meeting with immensely popular stars of Israeli TV series Fauda, celebrating creative talent that has become one of Israel’s global cultural exports. He engaged with Israel’s innovation leaders in a special tech forum, reflecting the cutting-edge technological landscape of the country. And then there were visuals that linger: Indian flags waving on Jerusalem streets. This is a profoundly moving sight. Agreements to Action: Strategic Partnership Modi’s visit translated goodwill into action. Together with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he oversaw signing of sixteen major agreements (Memorandum of Understanding) covering defence, technology, trade, agriculture, finance and people-to-people engagement. Highlights include: In short, it was more than a diplomatic exercise. It was roadmap for peace, innovation and prosperity, built on mutual trust, democratic values and complementary capabilities. Beyond MoUs and agreements, the visit signals a strong social and economic agreement: businesses, innovators, cultural leaders and citizens on both sides are invited into the partnership, encouraged to collaborate and recognised as part of the strategic equation. This public acknowledgement of friendship between the two nations also gives fresh momentum for private sector businesses to collaborate more actively, while also encouraging deeper people-to-people engagement, allowing citizens to explore and appreciate each other’s cultures. Geopolitical Implications: New Alignment Indian Prime Minister’s open friendship with Israel, warm reception he received across political spectrum, his huge popularity among Israelis and unequivocal condemnation of Hamas terror, not only deepens strategic and civilisational ties with Israel but invoked anger among adversaries. This partnership indicated a potential broader regional alignment with Greece, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Somaliland as counterweight to Turkey, Pakistan and Iran line up.The latter countries havea proven record of destabilizing Middle East and Indian subcontinent that are now sharpening their capabilities to challenge this emerging alliance. Consolidation of these partnerships is a significant shift in regional geopolitics, reflecting shared security priorities, mutual economic interests and concerted effort to safeguard stability and counter terrorism. Beyond defence and technology deals, what strikes the most is subtle but profound shift in how Israeli society is responding to relationship with India. Modi’s unequivocal acknowledgment of October 7 massacre has touched hearts of Israelis like few other world leaders’ speeches ever have. What truly sets this visit apart is that Modi has won hearts, from top leadership to regular Israelis on the street. (Paushali Lass is an India-born intercultural educator, writer and international speaker based in Germany. She authored Tasting Faith: Jews of India and works to build cultural and business bridges between Israel,

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