Articles

The new strategic guidance for the US Department of Defence, issued on January 5^th 2012, in an eight page document entitled “Sustaining US Leadership: Priorities for 21^th Century Defense”, merits careful study. It not only provides insights into the emerging global security challenges as envisaged by the US and its projected response thereto but also enumerates the primary missions for the US Armed Forces.It may be recalled that the last occasion on which a similar document was prepared was in 1992, in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

The Russian Constitution allows a president only two consecutive terms in power. Vladimir Putin was President from 2000 to 2008. Highly popular for having restored the political and economic authority of the state as well as national self-respect after the disarray of the Yeltsin years, he could have obtained another term through a constitutional amendment with wide public support.

Book Review - That Used To Be US by Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum. The book spells out succintly where the US is slipping up, says Kanwal Sibal

As the title suggests, this book deals with the reality of the United States’ slow decline, the reasons for it, and how the country can recover its global pre-eminence.

The state visit to India of Japanese Prime Minister Noda for the annual Prime Ministerial Summit on December 27-28, 2011 has placed India-Japan ties on a firm upward spiral. Following the dip in relations as a result of adverse Japanese reactions to our nuclear tests in 1998 there has in the last decade been a steady improvement in links.

The US intent to draw down its forces from Afghanistan beginning July 2011 has been articulated on several occasions since President Barack Obama’s address at West Point on 1 December 2009. In this address he had justified the 30,000 US troop surge in Afghanistan, scheduled for the first half of 2010, on the grounds that it would allow the US to “begin the transfer” of its forces “out of Afghanistan in July of 2011”. He also dwelt upon the importance of capacity building in Afghanistan in order to enable a “responsible transition of US forces” out of the country.

The challenges facing Indian diplomacy do not change from one calendar year to the next. The opportunities and problems of 2011 will spill over into 2012 as they are not defined by calendar years. The end of the year provides, nonetheless, an occasion to reflect on some general and specific issues of our foreign policy.

Western criticism of the results of the December 4 parliamentary elections in Russia is not surprising. The West’s fued with Russia’s democracy goes back to Putin’s ascendancy to power in 2000. It is Russia’s veering away under him from global standards of democracy set up by the West that has spawned acrimony between it and the US all these years.

It is more practical to limit the review of India’s security mainly to the classic concept of a nations’s security, not its extended definition given today that includes energy, food, water etc. With the end of the Cold War and the lowering of the threat of a military conflict between the big powers, attention has shifted to economic competition. With depletion of fossil fuel resources and the search for viable alternatives, the focus is on energy security. Climate change and prospects of water scarcity has brought the issue of food security to the fore.

Non-Traditional Security (NTS), and threats to NTS, have gained much greater visibility. While NTS threats definitely qualify as a major component of security research, the scope of the term, and consequent analysis and prescriptions, are extremely wide-ranging and often nebulous. Since NTS is very closely aligned to the stages of development of a state, a society and a region, discussion of NTS and formulation of policy prescriptions may be an exercise in futility unless the term is properly defined and discussed with reference to an analytical framework.