The Strategist by Vijay Shankar
Vijay Shankar
 Vice Admiral (Retd.)
  • Political-Military-Mercenary Triangulation: A Look at the Wagner Group
    Vijay Shankar   ·    21 Sep, 2023   ·    5859
    Armed interventions often demand the deployment of light forces over a short duration. Mercenaries have been used in such circumstances. If the state-employed mercenaries fail to achieve the desired end, the event is denied. The Russian Wag ...
  • The Shanghai Communiqué and China’s Road to a Not-So-Harmonious Rise
    Vijay Shankar   ·    13 Jul, 2023   ·    5855
    With the landmark 1972 US-China Shanghai Communiqué, the world expected China to transform from a repressive communist state to a benign, capitalist one. However, half-century later, we find a rich, expansionist, and militaristic Beijing ...
  • The Nord Stream Affair: A Coup de Grâce to Perpetuate Proxy War?
    Vijay Shankar   ·    27 Apr, 2023   ·    5846
    On 26 September 2022, a Norwegian Navy Long Range Maritime Patrol (LRMP) aircraft, on routine surveillance mission, laid a sonar buoy field south of the Danish Island of Bornholm. This was seemingly to surveil the underwater space in the ...
  • Saudi Arabia’s Quest for the Ultimate Political Play-Off
    Vijay Shankar   ·    28 Feb, 2023   ·    5843
    The Saudi strategic gambit continues to face challenges. There are obstacles in the withdrawal of American interests from the region and ramifications from the USS Quincy Memorandum, the resultant power vacuum, and power play between sta ...
  • Pushing the Doomsday Clock
    Vijay Shankar   ·    07 Dec, 2022   ·    5839
    The Doomsday Clock is symbolic of the vulnerability of human existence. Set every year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it is intended to warn of the imminence of humanity’s annihilation due to nuclear war or climate change. ...
  • The Looming Winter of Discontent: Who is Winning the War in Ukraine?
    Vijay Shankar   ·    26 Oct, 2022   ·    5837
    Impact and Veracity of Social MediaThe widespread popularity of social media, despite its loud and frequently boorish content, has made the study of events that form historical processes a disarrayed function of the common, rather than t ...
  • Counterforce Strategies are a Threat to Nuclear Deterrence Stability
    Vijay Shankar   ·    15 Sep, 2022   ·    5829
    Early atomic bombs were crude city-annihilators. Their ability to bring enormous and horrific civilian destruction was demonstrated by the US in 1945. The two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused 2,14,000 primary fatalities to ...
  • Russia in the Black Sea: What Happened to the Moskva?
    Vijay Shankar   ·    04 Jul, 2022   ·    5822
    The flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, the ‘Slava’ class missile cruiser, Moskva, sank at on 14 April 2022 in position 45°10′43.39″N  30°55′30.54″E,  after being "damaged." That is as far as one can establ ...
  • The Challenge of a Multi-Polar Nuclear Age
    Vijay Shankar   ·    03 Jun, 2022   ·    5819
    Of Parity, Assured Destruction, & Mistrust For the last 77 years, since the US first detonated nuclear weapons and annihilated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an eerie ambivalence has prevailed on the subject of nu ...
  • Power Paradigms and the Vexed Path to Peace in Ukraine
    Vijay Shankar   ·    31 Mar, 2022   ·    5811
    The multi-polar distribution of power that marks contemporary geopolitics has spawned   security imbalances on account of economic inequities, geography, demographics, the military, and the nature of government. It has incited a jos ...
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