Bharat Rakshak

abhischekcc wrote:What's more is that India is expected to become self sufficient (or even surplus) by 2012 in NG. As years progress, there will be a strong push to convert our energy base to NG from oil and coal, with oil giving way first since we have plenty of coal available internally.

This will make Indian energy needs less dependant on West Asia. However, this DOES NOT preclude cooperation with Iran. Remember that Shia Iran does not support any terror groups in India; Sunni Pakistan, KSA, and UAE do. Changing our energy supplier to Iran would help in making our domestic policy less terrorist friendly.

It's still part of conversations, but old partners, India, Iran and Russia, are dusting out an old mechanism to take on the Taliban in Afghanistan.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama will sign a declaration on a new nuclear arms reduction treaty on April 1, a top Kremlin aide said on Saturday, Russian media reported.

At the meeting in London, Medvedev and Obama will also sign a general declaration on U.S.-Russian relations, Medvedev aide Sergei Prikhodko said.

Russian officials have said that signing a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START 1) is a priority in relations with the new U.S. administration, which has pledged to "reset" ties with Russia after they reached post-Cold War lows under former President George W. Bush.

NAYPYIDAW, Myanmar (Reuters) - Myanmar's military junta is open to talks with the United States, its information minister said after a rare visit by a top U.S. diplomat amid a review of Washington's policy toward the regime.

"President Obama has pledged to make changes. I think that visit was just the beginning of the change," Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan told local reporters summoned to the new capital for Friday's annual Armed Forces Day parade.

Washington insisted this week's visit by Stephen Blake, director of the Office for Mainland Southeast Asia at the State Department, did not reflect any shift in policy toward a regime the former Bush administration labeled an "outpost of tyranny."

Blake met with Foreign Minister Nyan Win, representatives of ethnic minority groups and members of detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party during his visit, part of a five-country tour of the region.

The trip, which U.S. officials confirmed after it was reported by Myanmar's state-run newspaper, came a month after Hillary Clinton announced the policy review during her first tour of Asia as U.S. Secretary of State.

Over the years Washington has tightened sanctions on the military, which has ruled for more than four decades, to try to force a political rapprochement with Nobel laureate Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD).

Western governments have criticized the forthcoming poll as a sham aimed at entrenching rule by the military, which refused to recognize the last election in 1990, won by Suu Kyi's party.

The NLD has insisted on a list of preconditions before it will negotiate with the regime, including the release of all political prisoners, a review of the new constitution and the honoring of the 1990 election results.

The junta has ignored those demands as it pushes ahead with its seven-step "roadmap" to democracy.

In his address to the troops, junta leader Senior General Than Shwe, 76, warned politicians to "refrain from inciting unrest, to avoid personal attacks and smear campaigns against other parties" during next year's campaign.

This 1996 documentary examines the CIA's connection to the global drug trade, with a focus on opium and heroin. Posted with the permission of Director Chris Hilton, who now makes his home at Essential Media and Entertainment: http://www.essential-media.com/index.php More info on the documentary here: http://www.oneworldmagazine.org/seek/deamon/epis2.html

UN Attacks Free Speech

newsblaze writes "The UN Human Rights Council assaulted free expression today, in a 23-11 vote that urges member states to adopt laws outlawing criticism of religions. The proposal came to the UN from Pakistan on behalf of the Organization for the Islamic Conference. There were 13 abstentions. South Korea, Japan, India, Mexico and Brazil, all strong democracies, allowed this to pass by abrogating their responsibility. While the resolution doesn't mention the online world, where does this subject get mentioned most, if not online?"

Massive Chinese computer espionage network uncovered

'Unhappy China' bestseller claims Beijing should 'lead the world'
A new book claiming that China is a victim of Western bullying and "should rise up and lead the world" has soared to the top of the country's bestseller list.

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai
Last Updated: 2:49PM BST 29 Mar 2009

On the eve of the G20 summit in London, "Unhappy China" has stirred debate about whether China should have a greater role on the world stage. Although the country will soon overtake Japan as the world's second-largest economy, China is not included in the G8 and is a second tier member of the G20. Beijing has little influence in the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund and is highly vulnerable to changes in the value of the dollar.

"We still feel suppressed because we are sometimes condemned or criticised by the western world," said Zhang Xiaobo, the book's publisher.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/fina ... world.html

vsudhir wrote:There's no doubt China propagates a huge 'victim' mentality to keep nationalist fires burning within its educated class. And the chinis are more jingo and more nationalist than even die hard khans.

And this sort of 'take-no-prisoners' nationalism based on a victimization complex scares the conomist and its paymasters sh1tless. Which is why we've had sermons in India on why its fruitless to seek vengeance for past wrongs and why a victim mentality is oh-so-bad onlee. I don't agree 100% with that sermon for various reasons. A nationalist narrative that seeks to keep alive memories of past wrongs helps forge a stronger nation, if handled properly.

India needs to get back its own unapologetic nationalist narrative the way the chinis have theirs. Of course, in India we can;t overboard the way the chinis have simply because of our diversity. And thats a good thing, I guess.

vsudhir wrote:THE EUROPEANIZATION OF AMERICA ... Mark Steyn

Cross-posting from the US and the World thread on Ramana's request;

vsudhir wrote:
THE EUROPEANIZATION OF AMERICA ... Mark Steyn


- Parag Khanna served as a consultant to SOCOM and CENTCOM. This is more than Mark Steyn can say for himself

and neither organisation is known for its airy-fairy nature.

But a more compelling challenge to the current world order may be emerging from an unlikely trio of countries that boast both impeccable democratic credentials and serious global throw weight. They are India, Brazil and South Africa and their little-noticed experiment in foreign policy coordination since 2003 to promote subtle but potentially far-reaching changes to the international system has the potential to leave fears of a rising China in the dustbin of history.

Sanjay M wrote:Rasmussen Named Head of NATO

I'm glad that they picked this guy, because he's shown he can stand up firmly to Islamists, just like Sarkozy has. If Muslim Turkey objected, tough luck for them - they're shedding their Ataturkism everyday.

http://en.convention2008.risa.ru/paper/greatpowers/
Great Powers in World Politics (2008-2018): The Changing Pattern of Relationships

Relations between major power centers will continue to shape world politics in the coming decade. These relations unfold in a number of "traditional" domains - strategic deterrence, geopolitical rivalries as well as international trade and mutual investment. In addition to that, great powers will increasingly interact in new dimensions, such as coping with the implications of global climate change or regulating transnational migration flows. The emergence of these areas of relationships will not undermine the impact of great powers on world politics, but will rather enhance their role as providers of global public goods.

This section invites papers discussing the existing and prospective areas and patterns as well as outcomes of great power interaction. We analyze all facets of foreign relations of such players as the USA, China, Russia, Japan, India or the European Union. We encourage original forward-looking thinking about the ways in which the world's possible futures depend on the policies and mutual positioning of great powers as well as their ability for multilateral action. Specific directions of great power foreign and security policies are also of significant interest to this section.

Chair: Dr. Mikhail Troitskiy

Just as solving or at least neutralizing the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a requirement for reducing radicalism and Iranian influence throughout the Levant, the same is true of the Indian-Pakistani dispute at the other end of the Greater Middle East.

We need a second special negotiator for the Middle East, a skilled diplomat shuttling regularly among New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul. (There has been some speculation, in fact, that Barack Obama is considering Richard Holbrooke, the former United Nations ambassador, for just such a job.)

The Coming Middle Ages
McKinsey Quarterly Special Issue | February 2009

The middle of the 21st century will resemble nothing so much as the Middle Ages of the 5th to 15th centuries, from the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths, in 410, to the fall of Constantinople, in 1453. This was a long and uncertain period and thus an ideal metaphor to characterize our times. It was an age of plagues and progress, commercial revolutions, expanding empires, crusades, city-states, merchants, and universities. It was multipolar, with expanding empires on the Eurasian landmass, and apolar, with no one global leader. The new Middle Ages—synonymous with the age of globalization—have already begun.

First let us take the empires. Charlemagne’s efforts to resurrect the Roman Empire have been succeeded, over a millennium later, by the multipronged armadas of Brussels Eurocrats steadily colonizing Europe’s periphery, in the Baltics, the Balkans, and, eventually, Anatolia and the Caucasus. The Eurocrats’ book is not the Bible but rather the acquis communautaire: the 31 chapters of the Lex Europea, which is rebuilding EU member states from the inside out. By 2040, even depopulated Russia, with any luck, will be an EU member and the West’s front line against the far more populous East.

By then, a rebranded, globalizing China will be just a decade shy of the centennial of its civil war’s end, in 1949; the Communist Party has long declared that 2050, not 2008 (the year of the Beijing Olympic Games), will mark the country’s real coming-out party as a superpower. A half century from now, China may still be the world’s most populous country, and if the exploits of its 15th-century explorer–statesman Zheng He are any guide, its demographic, commercial, and strategic presence from Africa to Latin America—to say nothing of its diplomatic and cultural dominance in East Asia—will have substantially increased.

Israel's version of a nuclear grand bargain that brings peace to the Middle East may be messier and more violent than what the Obama administration imagines can be accomplished through sanctions, blandishments, and the invocation of Barack Obama's magic middle name. But who can really argue with the idea of trading the Iranian nuclear bomb for a Palestinian state? Saudi Arabia would be happy. Egypt would be happy. Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates would be happy. Jordan would be happy. Iraq would be happy. Two-thirds of the Lebanese would be happy. The Palestinians would go about building their state, and Israel would buy itself another 40 years as the only nuclear-armed country in the Middle East. Iran would not be happy.

But who said peace won't have a price?

Paul Huth, Christopher Gelpi, and D. Scott Bennett
ESCALATION OF GREAT POWER DISPUTES: DETERRENCE VERSUS
STRUCTURAL REALISM, 1816-1984 (ICPSR 6355)
SUMMARY: The purpose of this study was to test the relative
explanatory power of two theoretical approaches--deterrence theory
and structural realism--in predicting dispute escalation among
"Great Powers" from 1816 to 1984. The Great Powers during this time
period are identified as Great Britain, France, Russia/Soviet
Union, Austria-Hungary, Prussia/Germany, Italy, the United States,
Japan, and China. A Great Power deterrence encounter is defined by
the explicit verbal threat of force or the movement and buildup of
military forces in preparation for armed conflict by a challenging
Great Power and a counterthreat by the defending Great Power.
Variables measure dispute escalation, system uncertainty, risk
propensity, balance of conventional military capabilities of
challenger and defender, defender's possession of second-strike
nuclear capability, interests at stake for challenger and defender,
past behavior of challenger and defender, and current dispute
involvement of challenger and defender.
UNIVERSE: Deterrence encounters involving Great Powers during the
period 1816-1984.

My meeting with the man accused of plotting the assassination of Evo Morales
Eduardo Rozsa Flores was one of three members of an alleged assassination plot against Bolivia's left-wing president Evo Morales who were gunned down in a police raid on their hotel last week. Philip Sherwell met him in Croatia in 1991

Acharya wrote:http://www.paragkhanna.com/2009/02/the_ ... _ages.html
Parag Khanna is Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation.
[ China may still be the world’s most populous country, and if the exploits of its 15th-century explorer–statesman Zheng He are any guide, its demographic, commercial, and strategic presence from Africa to Latin America—to say nothing of its diplomatic and cultural dominance in East Asia—will have substantially increased.