The Strategist by Vijay Shankar
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The Blight of Ambiguity
Vijay Shankar · 14 Jul, 2015 · 4899
Is ambiguity in Pakistan’s nuclear policy a deliberate drama being played out by a strutting military to legitimise its vision of the Pakistani nation?
A prevalent position in the Pakistani military establishment, particularly ...
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Falun Gong: The Fear Within
Vijay Shankar · 09 Jun, 2015 · 4886
In April 1999, a decade after the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, an encore of the 1989 tragedy unfolded at the same venue. The scale of proportions was the same and so were State anxieties that unleashed mass persecution. In the even ...
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China: The January Storm
Vijay Shankar · 12 May, 2015 · 4872
Mao launched his ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ on 16 May 1966. It unleashed furious and complex internal armed struggles driven essentially by a struggle for power between Mao’s status quoists and Liu Shaoqi&rs ...
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Why ‘Global Zero’ is Less of an Illusion
Vijay Shankar · 13 Apr, 2015 · 4861
Since August 1945 when two nuclear weapons destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and unimaginable horrors visited over 199,000 of its inhabitants, the world has lived with the implicit fear of widespread annihilation. Du ...
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State of Play: Non-Proliferation, Fissile Material Cut-Offs and Nuclear Transparency
Vijay Shankar · 09 Mar, 2015 · 4849
Tools that promote a stable nuclear relationship between nations are characterised by a congruence of views on non-proliferation of weapon and vector technologies, fissile material control and strategic transparency; the last makes clear ...
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Swabbing the Bleakness of Subcontinental Nuclear Instability
Vijay Shankar · 10 Feb, 2015 · 4828
Nuclear Stability: Where does it Begin?
After the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, it dawned upon President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev how catastrophically close to nuclear war they had blundered due to a misshapen military-led ...
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The Af-Pak Entity: Seduction to Armageddon?
Vijay Shankar · 12 Jan, 2015 · 4802
Armageddon is the mythical site of gathering of armies for battle that will end all. Its geographical location is shrouded in biblical lore and considerable controversy exists of its mercatorial coordinates, but its implications of the ev ...
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Maritime Combat Power in the Indo-Pacific
Vijay Shankar · 08 Dec, 2014 · 4766
Instantaneous Intimidation
Both Julian Corbett and Admiral of the Fleet Sergei Goroshkov had an astute perspective of the importance of a theory for the application of Combat Power. Theory, as Julian Corbett put it, “…be ...
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Of Lawrence, Sykes-Picot and al-Baghdadi
Vijay Shankar · 10 Nov, 2014 · 4732
Islamic State's Caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a July 2014 speech at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul vowed that "this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.&quo ...
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Strategic Estrangement: An Odd Bedfellow to Economic Engagement
Vijay Shankar · 13 Oct, 2014 · 4690
The inextricable interdependence of survival of China’s despotic leadership, its economic growth and stability of State-controlled Capitalism poses a curious dilemma when large democratic economies choose to expand and boost economi ...
