Indian Strategic Studies

21 February 2026

Understanding the Indian Air Force’s Strengths—and Weaknesses

Harrison Kass

Though the Indian Air Force has enormous combat strength on paper, many of its aircraft are legacy platforms that would not fare well against a cutting-edge modern air force.

The Indian Air Force (IAF) is one of the world’s largest air forces and operates in one of the most complex security environments on earth. The IAF faces a two-front challenge: China to its north and east, and Pakistan to its west. And unlike many Western air forces focused on expeditionary operations, the IAF is built primarily for continental deterrence and high-altitude combat. Though modernizing aggressively, the IAF remains caught between legacy platforms, procurement delays, and ambitious great-power aspirations.

The IAF’s main objectives are to maintain air superiority against Pakistan, and to deter China along the Line of Actual Control (LAC). The IAF is also committed to providing nuclear delivery capability, as the air leg of India’s nuclear triad, and protecting Indian Ocean interests through maritime strike and ISR.

India’s Game-Changing Digital Money Model

RISHI SURI

Over the past decade, India has built the world’s largest real-time payments system. By using public infrastructure to expand financial inclusion, it offers a model for other developing countries that want to modernize payments without being dependent on a few multinational corporations.

On most days, India quietly does something that no other country has ever done at such a scale: it moves money instantly, billions of times, for free. The country’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has unleashed a financial revolution that now runs silently in the background of chai stalls, small shops, and cabs. And this success story is no longer just about fintech. It signals India’s arrival as a global economic and high-tech superpower.

If We Can’t Name China’s Cyberattacks, We Lose Trust in Ourselves

Justin Bassi

In the space of just a few days, two big U.S. tech companies took different approaches to China’s cyberattacks. Palo Alto Networks generically referred to a global cyber espionage operation by unnamed actors while Google specifically named China as the globe’s leading cyber security threat.

That inconsistency hurts everyone but China.

A refusal to name and shame China incentivises Beijing to carry on, leaves our public underinformed, and places little pressure on governments to tackle the problem.

The West won Cold War competition against the Soviet Union through the combined power of government policy and private sector innovation. Today, China has taken the upper hand because we do not have that same alignment.

China unfazed as US rallies global critical minerals bloc

Jeff Pao

The Trump administration is pushing to build a 55-country critical minerals alliance to coordinate supply and pricing for niche metals vital to technology and defense. The initiative aims to reduce reliance on China, but Beijing remains confident that it will still dominate the market for years to come.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on allies to form a coordinated framework to secure supplies of rare earths and other strategic minerals, claiming some nations used subsidies to undercut Western producers.

He argued that the end of the Cold War in 1991 created a “dangerous delusion” that Western-style liberal democracy was inevitable worldwide.

Why is the Strait of Hormuz off Iran so crucial?

Srinivas Mazumdaru, Nik Martin

Iran on Tuesday announced it would partially close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, a critical waterway for the world's oil trade.

Iranian state television framed the closure as a "security" measure due to military drills by the country's Revolutionary Guards, which began a day earlier.

It was unclear how long the partial closure would last. The Associated Press reported that the curbs would last several hours.

Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the strait, signalling that it can disrupt the key maritime artery that carries a fifth of the world’s oil.

The curbs come as Iranian and US negotiators on Tuesday hold their second round of talks about Iran’s nuclear program in Geneva.

The US has ramped up its military presence in the Middle East in recent weeks to pressure the Islamic Republic over its nuclear ambitions and the bloody crackdown on anti-government protests.

The Age of Kleptocracy Geopolitical Power, Private Gain

Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon

Analysts have long struggled to characterize U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Because Trump pointedly rejects liberal-internationalist sensibilities, many have associated him with some form of realism, understood as the pursuit of the national interest defined entirely in terms of power. During his first term, after his 2017 National Security Strategy invoked “great-power competition,” the foreign policy community treated the phrase as the decoder ring by which they could rationalize his maneuvers. More recently, many have claimed that, to the contrary, Trump clearly favors a world in which great powers collude to carve up the world into spheres of influence. Throughout, the only constant interpretation has been that Trump has a “transactional” approach to international politics—the “art of the deal” as grand strategy.

But these assessments all rest on a category error. They begin from the premise that the Trump administration’s primary goal is, as its 2025 National Security Strategy insists, to advance the United States’ “core national interests.” Indeed, U.S. debates about foreign policy, national security, and grand strategy take it for granted that leaders design policy to serve the public good—even if those leaders’ view of the public interest is flawed—rather than to enrich themselves or inflate their personal glory. This is why so many foreign policy analyses argue that the “United States” or “Washington” ought to adopt a particular policy. They assume that the United States has interests that transcend party and that officials occupy their positions as a public trust.

The Predatory Hegemon How Trump Wields American Power

Stephen M. Walt

Ever since Donald Trump first became U.S. president, in 2017, commentators have searched for an adequate label to describe his approach to U.S. foreign relations. Writing in these pages, the political scientist Barry Posen suggested in 2018 that Trump’s grand strategy was “illiberal hegemony,” and the analyst Oren Cass argued last fall that its defining essence was a demand for “reciprocity.” Trump has been called a realist, a nationalist, an old-fashioned mercantilist, an imperialist, and an isolationist. Each of these terms captures some aspects of his approach, but the grand strategy of his second presidential term is perhaps best

Women’s Rights Are Democratic Rights

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Autocracies now outnumber democracies, and nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule. Over the past decade, dictators in China and Russia consolidated their control. Hungary, Turkey, and other fragile democracies tipped further into illiberalism. A wave of coups in Africa toppled legitimately elected leaders. Even in the United States, a democracy since its founding, the rule of law weakened and the threat of authoritarianism surged. This trend has crushed hopes that blossomed after the end of the Cold War about the permanent triumph of liberal democracy and has spurred much debate about what went wrong.

These developments can’t be understood, let alone reversed, without grasping a crucial element at the heart of the authoritarian wave: the persecution of women. Across cultures and continents, women champion democracy, and tyrants target them as part of their playbook for amassing power. Failing to treat the repression of women as the crisis it is all but guarantees that democratic erosion will continue unchecked.

Ukraine and the New Way of War

Rebecca Lissner and John Kawika Warden

In the nearly four years since Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has repeatedly confounded expectations. A conflict that many analysts anticipated would be short and devastating for Kyiv has proved prolonged and costly for both sides. Ukraine’s ability to defend its territory, innovate militarily, and rally the United States, European countries, and others to its cause has far exceeded most projections. Russia, for its part, has underperformed militarily but regenerated its forces, improved its tactics over time, and sustained its economy at levels that have surprised even the keenest observers. As the largest land war

Venezuela operation relied on little-known cyber center, official says

Mark Pomerleau

SAN DIEGO — A little-known joint center for integrating cyber operations proved instrumental during the operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, a top Navy cyber official said this week.

The Joint Integrated Fire Center (JIFC) acts as a combined air operations center that coordinates all the aircraft in an area of operations, Vice Adm. Hedi Berg, commander of 10th Fleet/Fleet Cyber Command, said at the annual WEST conference. The organization encompasses all the headquarters elements and teams for cyber operations — as well as space counterparts, intelligence community and interagency — to help build out an understanding of cyber fires and work with kinetic and maneuver forces to layer those in at the timing and tempo of the commander.

AI Agents Are Taking America by Storm

Lila Shroff

Americans are living in parallel AI universes. For much of the country, AI has come to mean ChatGPT, Google’s AI overviews, and the slop that now clogs social-media feeds. Meanwhile, tech hobbyists are becoming radicalized by bots that can work for hours on end, collapsing months of work into weeks, or weeks into an afternoon.

Recently, more people have started to play around with tools such as Claude Code. The product, made by the start-up Anthropic, is “agentic,” meaning it can do all sorts of work a human might do on a computer. Some academics are testing Claude Code’s ability to autonomously generate papers; others are using agents for biology research. Journalists have been experimenting with Claude Code to write data -driven articles from scratch, and earlier this month, a pair used the bot to create a mock competitor to Monday.com, a public software company worth billions. In under an hour, they had a working prototype. Although the actual quality of all of these AI-generated papers and analyses remains unclear, the progress is both stunning and alarming. “Once a computer can use computers, you’re off to the races,” Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, told me.

Elon Musk bids to build swarms of drones for US military

Matthew Field

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is bidding for a secretive contract to build swarms of voice-controlled drones for the US military.

The Pentagon has launched a $100m (£74m) competition to develop an AI bot that can be used to translate voice or written commands from soldiers to a fleet of drones.

Mr Musk’s SpaceX is one of the companies pitching for a share of the work, Bloomberg reported.

OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is also said to be working with US autonomous vehicles business, Applied Intuition, on a rival bid.

The US military’s Defence Innovation Unit last month confirmed it was seeking bidders to develop an “autonomous vehicle orchestrator”, an AI system that can be used by ordinary soldiers in the field to command “autonomous systems at the fleet level” that can be used to “overwhelm our adversaries”.

Emerging Trends in the Trump Approach to Security Cooperation

Elias Yousif, Rachel Stohl

President Trump has made dominating global trade a centerpiece of both his domestic and foreign policy agendas. While much of the public focus has been on the liberal use of tariffs to upend international commerce, the President has also extended his zeal for market share to the global arms trade. President Trump was quick to tout a nine-figure arms deal with Saudi Arabia during the first foreign trip of his second term, later signing an April 2025 executive order that both reinstated his 2018 Conventional Arms Transfer Policy and directed the executive branch to accelerate arms transfer processes. More recently, the administration’s latest National Security Strategy stressed a reduction in overseas burdens, giving little attention to security cooperation while positioning arms sales as the go-to instrument for offsetting the United States’ relinquishment of foreign security commitments. In sum, President Trump has made a new, more commercial, transactional, and liberal approach to arms transfers a fixture of U.S. foreign policy. Though there is only a year’s worth of data in the Trump administration’s second term, emerging trends and changing transfer policies allow preliminary forecasts about future aspects of U.S. security cooperation.

Donald J. Trump Versus the Think Tanks

Mark Albrecht

Since President Donald J Trump first formally proposed a strategic defense of America in December of 2017, opponents have mounted a public campaign against it. It is a well-trod path of resistance. They first claim it “can’t possibly work.” Then, “even if it COULD work, it will be prohibitively expense and unaffordable.” Finally, “even if it could work and even if the Congress were foolish enough to pay for it, it can be easily overwhelmed, defeated and spoofed.”

How do I know this? Because this is exactly the trajectory of reasoning the opponents of the Strategic Defense Initiative adopted in the 1980s.

Many have debunked and rebutted these anti strategic defense chestnuts since the 1980s, but the Gold Standard of why Strategic Defenses make sense and should be developed and deployed and why the chain of criticism doesn’t hold water still stands. It is an article in Commentary Magazine from 1985 by noted physicist Professor Robert Jastrow entitled, “Ronald Reagan Versus the Scientists.” At that time SDI opponents included scientific notables like Carl Sagan and Richard Garwin, and members of congress like Les Aspin, John Kerrry and Al Gore. Today opponents largely come from researchers at think tanks. It is time to revive Bob Jastrow’s dominating analysis, it doesn’t need much updating as the arguments against are always the same.

Why Chevron Is Betting Big on Venezuela’s Heavy Crude

Robert Rapier

The headlines in early 2026 have been dominated by political upheaval in Caracas. Following the dramatic events of early January and the overhaul of Venezuela’s Hydrocarbons Law on January 29, analysts have rushed to debate the morality of renewed American involvement in the Orinoco Belt.

But while the world focuses on the politics, the real story is unfolding thousands of miles away, inside the distillation towers along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

To understand why Chevron is moving aggressively to ramp Venezuelan production, you have to look past diplomacy and into refinery chemistry.

The Multipolar Delusion

C. Raja Mohan

From Washington to Beijing and Moscow to New Delhi, a consensus is emerging that the world has entered a multipolar era. Political leaders, diplomats, and analysts routinely declare that unrivaled American dominance has ended and global power is now dispersed across multiple centers. The assertion has become so commonplace that it is often treated as a self-evident fact rather than a proposition to be examined. Even officials in the United States, long the principal beneficiary of the unipolar post–Cold War order, have adopted this language. At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, Secretary of State Marco Rubio observed that Washington’s moment as the sole superpower was historically “not normal” and that the international system would inevitably tend toward multipolarity. Rubio’s statement appeared to echo the growing belief in China, Russia, and much of the developing world that the United States’ power is declining and its long-standing global primacy is unsustainable.

Russia And Ukraine Adopt New Tactics And Weapons To Defeat Hedgehog Tanks

Vikram Mittal,

Although drones have shaped the Russia-Ukraine War, the backbone of both militaries is still their armored vehicles, including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and self-propelled howitzers. Indeed, armored vehicles are central to assaulting or defending terrain, while drones play a supporting role in these operations.

The effectiveness of drone strikes has limited the employment of armored vehicles, contributing to the current battlefield stalemate. In response, Russia and Ukraine have modified their armored vehicles to protect against drone strikes. The most recent adaptations, known as hedgehog tanks, use large numbers of protruding wires extending from the vehicle to disrupt FPV drones as they approach. This method has shown some success, prompting both sides to develop new drone tactics and specialized munitions to defeat these vehicles.

Three American Speeches at Munich, and Plenty of Confusion

Steven Erlanger and David E. Sanger

In the space of just a year, European leaders have heard three descriptions of how the Trump administration is reimagining the American relationship with its allies. Each strikes a bit of a different tone, but all are intended to push them into a new era in which Washington’s commitment to defend them faces new limits.

One was delivered by Vice President JD Vance last year, a blistering condemnation of European-style democracy, arguing that waves of immigrants and Europe’s restrictions on its own far-right parties pose a greater threat to the continent than Russia’s aggression.

The second was a far easier-to-swallow version of a similar message from Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday. He described a hazy and sometimes idealized cultural history shared by Europe and the United States and argued that each faced “civilizational erasure” unless it figured out a way to control its borders.

Working with Ukrainian troops convinced this elite British Army infantry battalion to go all in on drones

Sinéad Baker

An elite British Army battalion is going all in on drones after working closely with Ukrainian soldiers and seeing how central these systems have become in modern warfare.

The 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards now has 78 of its 300 members qualified as drone operators, its commanding officer, Lt. Col. Ben Irwin-Clark, told Business Insider. The unit has big plans to increase its training and work with drones further.

"That just gives you an idea of how important this is," he said.

The battalion has built a training facility with drone warfare in mind, and its soldiers are heavily invested, he said, sharing that he's got soldiers asking if they can get in on the weekends and log some flying hours.

AI Summit: Somebody who has worked at Cisco for 15-20 years is considered unemployable, says Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American tech billionaire and venture capitalist, who has been a sharp skeptic of legacy IT services companies, has sparked another debate. This time by taking on Cisco.

“If somebody has worked at Cisco for 15-20 years, I consider them unemployable in the real economy,” Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, a venture capital fund in the US, said while speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in Delhi.

The fireside chat was being moderated by Mohit Bhatnagar, Managing Director, Peak XV Partners, a venture capital firm in India.

Instead, he underscored that people should be learning the technologies of tomorrow, including AI and more.

Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity—and it has economists resurrecting a paradox from 40 years ago

Sasha Rogelberg

In 1987, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stalling evolution of the Information Age: Following the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips of the 1960s, economists and companies expected these new technologies to disrupt workplaces and result in a surge of productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, dropping from 2.9% from 1948 to 1973, to 1.1% after 1973.

Newfangled computers were actually at times producing too much information, generating agonizingly detailed reports and printing them on reams of paper. What had promised to be a boom to workplace productivity was for several years a bust. This unexpected outcome became known as Solow’s productivity paradox, thanks to the economist’s observation of the phenomenon.

Race for AI is making Hindenburg-style disaster ‘a real risk’, says leading expert

Ian Sample

The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned.

Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products’ capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood.

The surge in AI chatbots with guardrails that are easily bypassed showed how commercial incentives were prioritised over more cautious development and safety testing, he said.

British troops were wiped out by Ukrainian drones in exercises. Defence spending must rise

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

At a moment when Europe faces the prospect of a major war, when UK and US forces may soon be in action in the Middle East, and when nuclear-armed strongmen are rattling their sabres in our direction, it beggars belief that we are still debating whether to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP in the near future, rather than in some comfortable era that may never arrive.

The results of Nato’s Exercise Hedgehog 2025 in Eastern Europe, only now quietly circulated from nearly a year ago, should have settled the argument. In that simulation, a British brigade was effectively destroyed by Ukrainian drone operators. That was not an indictment of our soldiers. It was a warning about the nature of modern warfare. If a British brigade goes into action against a Russian formation on Nato’s eastern flank, we must ensure it does not suffer the same fate.

Limited Nuclear War Over Taiwan: An Initial Exercise

Leo Keay and Robert Peters

The Heritage Foundation facilitated the tabletop exercise (TTX) TIDALWAVE II: Azure Dragon, designed to introduce nuclear escalation between the United States and China three weeks into a high-intensity conflict over Taiwan in 2030. The TTX demonstrated that a non-strategic nuclear weapons advantage, as China had in this scenario, limits the options of the opponent. Conversely, if both sides have rough parity and symmetry in their arsenals, that advantage optionality is neutralized. The TTX provided useful insights, and game data will be used to inform further large language model (LLM) simulations. Ultimately, the LLM will provide a sense of how a limited theater nuclear war might start, which nuclear thresholds might exist in similar crises, and how policymakers and defense planners can craft conflict-termination scenarios.

The Special Forces Identity Crisis and Rethinking All of Special Operations

Retired Lt. Col. Greg Banner

Several articles and rebuttals—written by retired Col. Edward Croot, retired Sgt. Maj. David Shell, and others—talk about an Army Special Forces (SF) “identity crisis,” or confusion and morale problems among that force. While a lot of valid comments have been made, there have only been some passing comments about the “elephant in the room” and what is really the main problem. That issue comes from the emergence of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and its component units which have monopolized many parts of U.S. special operations missions to the detriment of the remaining Special Operations Forces (SOF), primarily SF. This is, however, not just an SF issue as it impacts other forces and in fact has resulted in a less organized and less capable SOF as a whole. In addressing the topic, there is the hope that changes could benefit the entire force and our national capabilities.

20 February 2026

Civilian Authority Over The Army In China And India

P. K. Balachandran

Xi Jinping asserts it through purges while India’s leadership appears to dither

Except in military dictatorships, it is understood that a country’s civilian leadership must have strategic control or supremacy over the armed forces.

While China’s President Xi Jinping has been enforcing that principle through periodic purges in the top echelons of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), India seemed to have veered from the principle during the landmark clash with the PLA in Eastern Ladakh in May-June 2020.

When faced with the prospect of a Chinese intrusion and attack in Galwan in May 2020, the then Indian army chief, Gen. M.M.Naravane, desperately tried to get orders from the top political leadership but in vain. Governmental prevarication ended with Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying, “Do what you think is appropriate”.

A deeply frustrated Naravane wrote in his yet-unpublished book, “Four Stars of Destiny,” that he felt very lonely at the top at that time. He had to take a decision to fight China when India was facing a dire situation with COVID pandemic being at its height. In the Sino-Indian clash which took place in June 2020, 20 Indian soldiers were beaten to death.

In Pakistan, BLA Is Much Worse Than a Separatist Movement

Joe Buccino

For decades, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has been miscast as a “separatist insurgent group,” a label that is now outdated and misleading. What began as a movement propelled by political grievances and Cold War intrigue has been hijacked by something far more dangerous. Today, the group operates according to the methods of modern terrorism. It deliberately targets civilians and infrastructure, as illustrated once again by the coordinated attacks in Balochistan on 31 January that killed dozens of civilians and security personnel. Cut off from the aspirations of ordinary Baloch citizens and far removed from any genuine liberation struggle, the BLA now functions as a force of destabilization, systematically undermining peace, development, and regional connectivity. In doing so, it has become a force-multiplier for hostile external agendas seeking to cripple Pakistan and derail major strategic projects.

Gen Z Got Fair Elections in Bangladesh—but Got Crushed at the Ballot Box

Joshua Kurlantzick

In June and July 2024, massive protests broke out in Bangladesh, led mostly by students demanding an end to the increasingly authoritarian regime of then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League, and to the corruption that led to job quotas in many government agencies. The protests swelled and, while Hasina’s government had crushed previous dissent, these demonstrations eventually succeeded in forcing Hasina to flee (as the army refused to back her), leading to an interim government, advised by many of the students and led by Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus.

That interim government, following the celebrations in Dhaka and other places after Hasina fled, was supposed to usher in an era of reform in Bangladesh, creating a path to reduce violent political polarization, rebuild the state, reduce corruption, and end the two-party duopoly that had dominated politics for decades. That duopoly, consisting of the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, had in recent years been dominated by the Awami League, but in the past, the BNP, when in power, also had acted in corrupt, nepotistic, and authoritarian ways.

Shifting Balances in South Asia

Nicola Missaglia, Jagannath Panda and Michele Danesi

South Asia is undergoing a period of profound transformation, driven by climate stress, political instability, social unrest, and unresolved conflicts. Yet to what extent are these domestic turbulences shaped by the region’s shifting geopolitical environment? And how are South Asian states navigating an increasingly competitive regional order?

This Dossier explores how rivalry between India and China is redefining South Asia’s strategic landscape, from the stalled Himalayan border dispute to growing competition for influence through political backing, infrastructure, and energy investments. It examines the strategies of New Delhi and Beijing and the ways in which key countries in the region balance their relationships with both powers. The analysis also looks beyond regional dynamics, assessing the role of external actors such as the European Union and Japan. The signing today of the long-awaited EU-India trade agreement underscores South Asia’s rising relevance: not only as a theatre of regional competition, but as a central node in wider global economic and strategic networks.

After Bangladesh Votes: Stability Will Be Earned Through Delivery, Not Declarations

Anjali Kaur

Bangladesh’s February 12, 2026, election has resolved one question: who will be responsible for governing Bangladesh next. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its allies have won a decisive majority, securing 211 of 299 constituency seats according to provisional results. BNP Chairman Tarique Rahman, who won both constituencies he contested, will form the next government. But the harder question remains: whether the political system can now actually deliver stability, legitimacy, and tangible improvements in daily life. As with most elections held under strain, the real test begins after ballots are cast.

Tarique Rahman faces the dual challenge of consolidating authority within his own coalition while signaling restraint beyond it. Having spent nearly 17 years in exile and outside formal executive office, his early governing posture—toward institutions, security forces, minorities, and political rivals—will shape whether this transition is perceived as a reset or as the beginning of another cycle of confrontation. His immediate call for supporters to refrain from victory rallies and instead offer nationwide prayers signals awareness of this fragility. But winning an election is different from earning public trust, reducing polarization, or stabilizing people’s daily lives. In Bangladesh’s case, those challenges remain acute.

Why Sri Lanka Needs To Preserve Culture To Survive Post De-Globalized World?

Indika Hettiarachchi

Recent geopolitical, security and trade tensions between powerful nations accelerated the “de-globalization” momentum marked by a shift from rapid trade integration toward protectionism, economic nationalism, and fragmented supply chains. Global trade and investment are being reorganized around national security and resilience, regionalization and “friend-shoring”, rather than cost-driven integration.

Small and developing countries like Sri Lanka face significant and disproportionate challenges from de-globalization. These challenges include suppressed economic growth, increased vulnerability to external shocks, and reduced influence in global decision-making. Sri Lanka’s trade dependency, stagnant foreign inflows, small domestic markets, limited export product basket make Sri Lanka a highly vulnerable country.

The World Economic Forum, the world’s leading pro-globalization think tank calls de-globalization as “re-globalization” and forecasts the outcome of currently ongoing changes will be “a multi-nodal, regionally and politically clustered world that still operates on a global scale, but with resilience and security prioritized alongside cost and efficiency”.

Why a resurgent Japan is good for Asia

Ben Bland

Last weekend’s landslide election victory by Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s prime minister, prompted China to warn Tokyo to ‘follow the path of peaceful development rather than return to militarism’. Beijing is wary of Takaichi’s right-wing, nationalist credentials, and had already launched a round of military provocations and coercive economic measures in response to comments she made about Taiwan in November.

But many Asian governments will welcome Takaichi’s victory – if she can use her unprecedented parliamentary majority to strengthen Japan’s economy, security and global role. Asia’s leaders do not want to see their region dominated by Beijing or at the mercy of Washington’s will. They see a resurgent Japan as a key partner to bring balance to the world’s most consequential continent.

China’s military reveals future air warfare plans

Bill Gertz

An internal Chinese military report has revealed that the People’s Liberation Army is placing a heavy emphasis on waging advanced air war using stealth, drones and high-technology weapons.

The report, “How Will the Form of Air Warfare Change in the Future?” was published in September in the Liberation Army News, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Military Commission.

It was translated by the U.S. Air Force think tank China Aerospace Studies Institute, which described the report as having “the imprimatur of orthodoxy.”

The Chinese report was written by Chai Shan, a military author who has previously written about PLA air power control.

“The future form of air warfare is ultimately and inevitably intelligentized aerial combat,” the report stated.

China’s Green Energy Advantage Unravels

J.T. Young

China’s two-fold climate advantage over the West is unraveling. The Trump administration’s revocation of the 2009 climate endangerment finding, the UN’s COP30 failure in Brazil, the reappraisals of Jamie Dimon and Bill Gates, and the frank admissions by some in Europe all point to an overdue shift in the West’s position. Beijing must be devastated because China has benefited absolutely from selling the West green energy technology and benefitted relatively as this technology has reduced the competitiveness of Western nations.

On February 12, the Trump administration revoked the EPA’s 2009 climate “endangerment finding” that classified CO-2 and five other greenhouse gases as public health threats. In contrast to his second-term’s first-day withdrawal (for the second time) from the 2015 Paris Agreement, this action had real teeth. The 2009 finding underpins a host of administration regulations (on vehicles, power facilities, and oil and gas operations). With the finding revoked, the regulations that relied on it could come down as well. Lawsuits are certain to follow from blue states and environmental groups.

Saudi Arabia vs. the UAE: The Other Gulf Crisis

Mohammed Ayoob

While the chances of direct conflict between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are slim, the emerging rivalry is reshaping the Middle East.

With a massive American armada in the Persian Gulf and defiant rhetoric pouring out of Tehran, strategic analysts are obsessed with assessing the possibility of an American attack on Iran and mapping its potential consequences. However, another crisis in the Gulf is brewing that is likely to erupt sooner rather than later. Although this crisis may not have the apocalyptic connotations of a US-Iranian standoff, it could still destabilize the energy-rich region and have major consequences for American policy.

This impending crisis concerns the fraying relationship between two of America’s closest allies in the Gulf—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The effects of this crisis will be felt not only in the region but also much farther afield and will affect US security concerns in the energy-rich region, its strategic interests in the broader Middle East, and oil prices across the globe.

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