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 …
Articles by: "Ramesh Thakur"
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 …
In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index published in early February, the world’s top five democracies are Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand and Canada. North Korea sits triumphantly at the bottom. India is classified …
On 23 February, India accounted for 11 million of the world’s 112 million Covid-19 cases and 156,498 of 2,848,247 world deaths. Only the US had more cases and the US, Brazil and Mexico have recorded …
Critics of nuclear weapons have long pointed to two sets of risks. First, deterrence stability depends on all fail-safe mechanisms working every single time in every bomb-possessing country. That is an impossibly high bar for …
As President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris prepare to be sworn in on 20 January, there’s an expectation of US re-engagement with multilateralism and a return to some semblance of normality, stability, continuity and …
Amid the nightmare of a global pandemic and the crumbling pillars of nuclear arms control, the leadership of one of the few stars in the nuclear firmament still shining bright is due for vote in …