What is it about some Westerners that makes them so singularly lacking in self-awareness as they assume a position of moral and intellectual superiority to issue condescending pronouncements on non-Westerners? In their chapter in the …
Articles by: "Ramesh Thakur"
Last Friday, the United Nations Security Council voted on a draft resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling on it to stop the attack and withdraw its troops. Sponsored jointly by the US and …
Every great power needs an organising principle of foreign policy; great powers rise and fall on the tide of history and no power remains great forever; no great power retreats forever; there’s no way to …
Proving that history does irony, banks that once feared masked robbers now fear mask-free customers. But does history also do mockery? The 1984 Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu passed away on Boxing Day in …
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is embroiled in a tussle with both French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Joe Biden which, given the power asymmetries, risks leaving Australia exposed and vulnerable in a major-power league …
In its first comment on the new AUKUS partnership, The Economist said it represents the shifting of geopolitical tectonic plates. The defence implications for Australia and the regional and global geopolitical ramifications have been extensively …
A common intellectual parlour game is to rank American presidents in order of greatness. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt have long reigned supreme in the top four slots in C-SPAN’s …
On the 76th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the first time, a global treaty is in force outlawing the bomb. Last month, I completed and dispatched to the publisher an …
On 15 June, the always tenuous ceasefire was broken with incendiary balloons launched from the Palestinian territory and Israeli airstrikes on Gaza in retaliation. The Middle East has probably yielded more Nobel Peace Prizes than …
The arrival of the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, which has killed 3.5 million people and counting, should have been the moment when the World Health Organization came into its own. This is its primary …
In 2009, as I gazed at the gaping hillside holes in Bamiyan where once two imposing Buddha statues had stood as silent sentinels for more than 1,500 years, two emotions were dominant. The first was …
This is not an article I had expected, intended or wanted to write. I have politely declined requests to write on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in relation to the current crisis in Myanmar and …