Context The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) held its 20th anniversary conference in Dushanbe, Tajikistan on September 17. The conference took place in the backdrop of the collapse of Ashraf Ghani government in Afghanistan as the Taliban took over. This was accompanied by the complete withdrawal of US and coalition troops that has raised alarm bells…
Context As a direct result of the industrial revolution and emerging capitalist system, a number of powerful businesses and entrepreneurs come to the scene in the 18th,19th, and the early part of the 20thcentury. These names included giants like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J P Morgan and Marcus Goldman. They…
Context Now that US is withdrawing from Afghanistan and that ambiguity is out of the equation the attention is naturally shifting how will the balance the power be achieved. There are obviously several competitors battling it out. In this the critical aspect is the influence of players that have been historically and culturally more engaged…
Context Now that the Biden administration has definitively announced plans to withdraw militarily from Afghanistan by September 11, the focus has shifted to the post withdrawal scenarios and what that would look like for the US and other key stakeholders. The most important determinant of that is the status of Afghan reconciliation and US-China ties….
Context The great power rivalries are back and this will be the focus of the American foreign policy, as declared by Trump previously, and President Biden recently. As opposed to continued concentrating on fighting the ‘unending wars’ and war against extremists the concentration will now be on global adversaries like China and Russia. According to…
Context Politact has consistently maintained that the longer the Afghan imbroglio continues it is bound to intersect with the other regional and global flash-points and the larger balance of power tussles. Not that it had not been in the past, but to a lesser degree. Since 9/11, and the subsequent war against extremism, the global…
Biden And The Future of Us-Pakistan relations Context As the Biden administration formulates its Pakistan policy and reviews the Afghan peace deal reached in February last year a debate is raging in both US and Pakistan based think tanks on the future of US-Pakistan relations. It is like a new season of an exciting Netflix…
PoliTact periodically invites leading regional and global experts to understand the changing geopolitical situations and significant emerging themes. One such theme is the budding China-Iran economic and security partnership. China and Iran are entering a $400 billion 25 year economic and security deal that would lead to enhanced military and trade relations. The agreement ensures…
Context India has formally invited Australia to join the large-scale naval exercises to be conducted in the Bay of Bengal (3-6 November) and the Arabian Sea (17-20 November), involving in addition to the navies of India and Australia, naval assets of the US and Japan. This is a very significant development if not militarily, certainly…
Context With the normalization of ties between UAE, Bahrain and Israel, the so-called ‘Outside-In Approach’ to the Middle East Peace Process is now in full swing. Most GCC and Arab nations are on the way to normalizing their ties with Israel. This was predicted as the regional situation dramatically shifted during the war against extremism,…
