The Strategist by Vijay Shankar
Vijay Shankar
 Vice Admiral (Retd.)
  • 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 ...
  • The Islamic State Caliphate: A Mirage of Resurrection
    Vijay Shankar   ·    01 Sep, 2014   ·    4638
    The Universal State: The Last-Gasp Opportunism of Power Belief in the immortality of a ‘Universal State’ has in history periodically evoked those very ghosts that had established the State’s mortality causing their ...
  • A Covenant Sans Sword
    Vijay Shankar   ·    11 Aug, 2014   ·    4600
    Power and Self-Preservation Hobbes underscored the need to establish an aura of awe and visible power in order that men do not degenerate to their natural anarchic passions. He said, “And covenants without the sword are but words ...
  • Strife on the Global Commons
    Vijay Shankar   ·    14 Jul, 2014   ·    4556
    The run up to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) was marked by a  debate held in Sparta amongst the Peloponnesian allies to determine whether war against the aggressive seapower Athens and the maritime Delian League was to be waged. ...
  • The Perils of Strategic Narcissism
    Vijay Shankar   ·    09 Jun, 2014   ·    4498
    China’s rise has powered an impulse to military growth and unilateral intervention which in turn evokes anxieties and resistance by players in the same strategic milieu. The paradoxical effect is to undermine its own strategic stand ...
  • The Chilling Prospects of Nuclear Devices at Large
    Vijay Shankar   ·    12 May, 2014   ·    4431
    During the Cold War, the Soviet Union produced over one thousand tons of weapon grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium. By 1986 its stockpile numbered 45,000 warheads; it was poorly inventoried; spread across the Republics with fissi ...
  • MH370 and China's Anti-Access Area Denial Strategy
    Vijay Shankar   ·    14 Apr, 2014   ·    4385
    fThe mystery of the missing Malaysian Airlines MH 370 continues to confound. Was it a sudden catastrophic end to an ill-fated flight or was it a failure of surveillance that led to a controlled and purposeful disappearance of a marked com ...
  • India-Pakistan-China: Nuclear Policy and Deterrence Stability
    Vijay Shankar   ·    10 Mar, 2014   ·    4331
    “Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call life:………behind, lurk Fear And Hope…” Percy Bysshe Shelley Cold War Mantra In September 1950, responding to a directive from the Presid ...
  • India-Pakistan: Nuclear Risk Reduction Measures
    Vijay Shankar   ·    10 Feb, 2014   ·    4301
    The Problem The problem with nuclear weapons is the complexity of convincing decision-makers that no conceivable advantage can be achieved from a nuclear exchange. As long as one side believes that there is some value to be had through t ...
  • Strategic Non-Nuclear Weapons: An Essential Consort to a Doctrine of No First Use
    Vijay Shankar   ·    13 Jan, 2014   ·    4256
    Politico-Military thought often harbours a puzzling phenomenon when it organises concepts and institutions in a mosaic of sometimes antithetical notions. Contrary ideas are indeed intrinsic to the art of political sagacity, but when form ...
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