The Strategist by Vijay Shankar
Vijay Shankar
 Vice Admiral (Retd.)
  • No Responsible Steward of Nuclear Weapons, This
    Vijay Shankar   ·    01 Jan, 2018   ·    5413
    Two seemingly disparate incidents in recent days hold the portents for unsettling times. The first was the 'absconder General' and erstwhile Pakistan President Musharraf’s declaration on 5 December 2017, of not only his cosy ...
  • “Taking Centre Stage in the World”
    Vijay Shankar   ·    28 Nov, 2017   ·    5399
    When Chairman Xi declared at the opening of the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of China, “It is time for us to take centre stage in the world,” he may have drawn this deduction from two perceived shifts in the global str ...
  • The Curious Case of USS McCain
    Vijay Shankar   ·    04 Oct, 2017   ·    5376
    On 21 August 2017, in the darkness of astronomical twilight, USS John S McCain, a destroyer bound for Singapore after a sensitive ‘freedom-of-navigation’ operation off one of China’s illegal man-made islands in the South C ...
  • "The World is Not Peaceful"
    Vijay Shankar   ·    31 Aug, 2017   ·    5351
    Addressing senior Communist Party and government officials in Beijing at an event to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Premier Xi Jinping declared, “We do not allow any indiv ...
  • A Pug, a Terrier and the Doklam Stand Off
    Vijay Shankar   ·    07 Aug, 2017   ·    5335
    William Moorcroft, a British veterinary surgeon of the East India Company, set off in 1816 on an expedition to the Kailas region of Tibet to search for that breed of Central Asian horses that would revitalise the blood stock of the Compan ...
  • Nuclear Crises in the Time of Orwellian Wars
    Vijay Shankar   ·    28 Jun, 2017   ·    5314
    "…the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival." George Orwell, 1984      ...
  • The Value of a Declared No First Use Nuclear Policy
    Vijay Shankar   ·    01 May, 2017   ·    5278
    "Can it be a nation’s case to destroy the very purpose that polity sets out to attain; or as Milton put it “Our Cure, To Be No More; Sad Cure!” The sensibility of negotiated agreements to assuage friction betw ...
  • The CPEC: Corridor to Chinese Coffers
    Vijay Shankar   ·    28 Mar, 2017   ·    5256
    Misshapen Marshall Analogy  Deceptive arguments are current that the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) finds historic equivalence in the ‘Marshall Plan’. The Plan was an American Congressional Act legislated on ...
  • Forecast 2017: Carnage Ahead?
    Vijay Shankar   ·    15 Feb, 2017   ·    5235
    Donald Trump in his inaugural speech, vowed “…this American carnage must stop here.” What preceded his vow suggested, with more intensity and less clarity, what the “carnage” was. Presumably he implied a hos ...
  • Perils of Nuclear Paranoia
    Vijay Shankar   ·    31 Dec, 2016   ·    5215
    If armed hostilities, for the initiator, has very little to do with military balance both conventional and nuclear; then it raises the prospect that balance may indeed be skewed against gravity. Nuclear Brinkmanship Plus The late T ...
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