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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Middle East

What Islamic Enlightenment?

15 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Abdulaziz, Abdulmecid I, Abdulrahman al-Jabarti, Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, al Ghazali, al Qa'ida, Christopher de Bellaigue, Egypt, Enlightenment, Europe, ibn Taymiyya, Industrial Revolution, Iran, ISIS, Islam, Jacques Pierre Brissot, Middle East, Mirza Taki Khan Farahani, Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Ali Pasha, Reformation, Renaissance, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Taliban, Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, terrorism, The Islamic Enlightenment, Thirty Years' War, Turkey, Westphalia

Islamic EnlightenmentDe Bellaigue, Christopher. The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle Between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017. 432 pp.

The end of the Cold War did not usher in a thousand years of peace; nor did it see the end of History. Instead, even as the victorious Western alliance was popping champagne, a new menace was taking shape in the Islamic world. Terrorism was certainly not a new phenomenon, but the global reach and sophistication of what emerged in the closing decade of the second millennium was unsurpassed. Samuel Huntington famously – controversially – called it a clash of civilisations. Whether he was right or not, the Age of Terrorism has come to be deeply linked to Islam. It is this perception that Christopher de Bellaigue hopes to dispel. His latest book, The Islamic Enlightenment: The Struggle between Faith and Reason, 1798 to Modern Times, is meant to be a riposte against Western historians, politicians, and commentators who repeatedly demand that Islam join the 21st century, that it should “subject itself to the same intellectual and social transformations that the West experienced from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.” To those who clamour for an Islamic Enlightenment, Reformation, and Renaissance, to those insisting that the religion of Muhammad develop a sense of humour, de Bellaigue’s response is that it already has, albeit with a particular cultural touch.

Westerners have not generally come to the East with open minds and in their inability to see past a European universalism, de Bellaigue contends, have missed the fact that not all Muslims are primitive, regressive terrorists. In fact, the Islamic world has not shown any more hostility towards modernity than Christendom did a couple of centuries earlier. The author dates the clash between European modernity and Islam in 1798 with the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte’s army on the shores of Egypt. De Bellaigue astutely observes that Western ideas were initially absorbed with greater success when they were perceived to be universal than later, after World War I, when they were seen as the business end of a hostile ideology.

Islamic Enlightenment locates the foci of modernisation in Cairo, Istanbul, and Tehran, where numerous figures, nationalists, litterateurs, monarchists, as well as the ulema, engaged with Western science, technology, and political science to adapt them to the needs of Islamically-minded societies. However, many of the modernisers were inspired not by the trinkets and gimmicks of European innovation but by the achievements of classical Islamic civilisation. De Bellaigue narrates the tales of modernisers of all shades. Some were intrinsically hostile to Western methods yet awed by them such as Abdulrahman al-Jabarti; others infused the “genius of Islam” in the universal knowledge the West possessed such as Rifa’a al-Tahtawi. Some of the reformers were optimistic of Western intentions in the Muslim world such as Muhammad Abduh, while others felt forced into reforms such as the Ottoman sultans Abdulmecid I and Abdulaziz. There were, of course, a few who saw modernity as a means to power and pursued Western knowledge with a purely secular interest such as Muhammad Ali Pasha. Regardless, the author notes, a liberalising, modernising tendency had emerged strongly in the Middle East.

This pushback against Islamophobia is laudable yet eventually flawed in its conception. Fundamentally, Islamic Enlightenment tries to pack into one term what in Europe properly describes at least four zeitgeists – the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It is difficult to imagine, at least in Europe, an Enlightenment that was not preceded by the Reformation and the Renaissance. It was the rediscovery of the classical world and an emphasis on humanism based on reason that caused the first crack in the totalising edifice of the Christian faith. Renaissance intellectuals did not necessarily reject religion but there was, nonetheless, a subtle shift in the way they approach it. The Reformation continued this trend in two important ways – first, and more obvious, is the theological schism between Catholicism and Protestantism, and second, the savagery and horrendous toll of the Thirty Years’ War – between a third and half of the population of Europe – finally broke the power of the Church in temporal matters after the peace at Westphalia in 1648.

These two short yet turbulent epochs paved the way for the Enlightenment. Made receptive to a gradual shift from faith to reason, autocracy to democracy, European society broadly supported the principles of the Enlightenment even if not the pace of some of its most forceful advocates. The Counter-Enlightenment remained a German nationalistic rebellion against French supremacy in the arts rather than a full-blooded critique of the Enlightenment itself. Various aspects of Enlightenment thinking – in the arts, political reform, economic reorganisation, religious reconceptualisation – were realised over the next century and half in step with the Industrial Revolution.

De Bellaigue’s brief history of 19th century reform movements in the Middle East – to which he devotes half the book – describes abortive attempts at modernisation that underscores this point further. Middle Eastern – Islamic? – attempts to replicate Europe’s material successes failed precisely because they focused purely on the material aspects of the European experience without adequately contemplating on the socio-cultural reformations that had taken place since the late 14th century that had brought Europe to a place whence the Enlightenment was possible. ‘Enlightenment with an Islamic flavour’ deviates sufficiently from the European experience that it cannot be herded under the same umbrella.

As de Bellaigue narrates, most Muslim modernisers were enthralled by Western science and technology but retained their faith in the supremacy of Islam. Even secular, power-hungry rulers and administrators were loathe to go to war against the ulema in the name of Western science or progress for fear that they would destabilise their kingdoms and lose their thrones, or worse, their lives. This was not an altogether unfounded fear, as Mirza Taki Khan Farahani found out in a bathhouse in Kashan.

Reforms with largely material goals in mind can hardly be termed an Enlightenment. If technology were the sole arbiter of progress, some of today’s most visious terrorist groups such as the Taliban, al Qa’ida, and ISIS could be said to be progressive. All the major terrorist groups in the 21st century have access to highly sophisticated weaponry and knowledge of explosives and tactics to challenge most national armies, an equation that Middle Eastern rulers of two centuries ago would have yearned for. The pitfall of such progress is visible – although the armies of Muslim states reduced the technological gap between themselves and their European counterparts over the 19th century, there was a backlash against cooperation with Europe after World War I that returned the socio-political situation almost to where it had been a hundred years earlier.

It is also difficult to understand how de Bellaigue considers the fervour of the 19th century as an Enlightenment when many of the most influential actors, be they pashas, clerics, or men of science, continued to cast a sheep’s eye on Islam. Nor was this the Islam of the 10th century Mu’tazilites, a relatively open faith not allergic to external knowledge or inquiry. By the time of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, it was well past the era of Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali or Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyya and the closing of the Muslim mind. This Islam, intrinsically regressive as Shiraz Maher argues in his excellent Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea, looked to the era of its prophet and his companions as the most perfect era in human history and was, thus, fundamentally antithetical to reason. This is not to say that such a society cannot change, but there is certainly a big question mark on whether such a society is capable of an Enlightenment.

Finally, the European Age of Imperialism was not an epoch of liberalism in the Middle East. None of the bold reformers of Egypt, Turkey, or Iran were democrats in the spirit of Jacques Pierre Brissot. In fact, all of de Bellaigue’s examples were despots whose liberal tendencies ended outside the throne room. The question for the author becomes whether it is possible for autocrats to usher in an Enlightenment. Unintentionally, Islamic Enlightenment serves as a warning to Western politicians who believe that they can play midwife to liberal democracy in the Middle East: even when such an endeavour had local support, it was not quite liberal and eventually failed.

All said and done, de Bellaigue is not wrong in his larger point. There is a tendency to view Islamic societies as intrinsically defective and prone to violence. This is no more true for them than it is for Christian societies, especially in the past, even the recent past. A little nuance beyond the sterile dichotomies an attention-deficit media churns out is required in reading the politics of the Middle East. However, nuance cannot be an excuse to whitewash all sorts of regressive social customs and political beliefs. No one sane thinks all Muslims are terrorists but there is a gradation of radicalisation in the Muslim world from terrorists to those who, for example, think blasphemy and apostasy should be punishable by death, to a far more tolerant and humanist sample. Although our attention is held mostly by one extreme end of the spectrum, it is only prudent to consider whether problems also lie further along the spectrum. Furthermore, while a more pleasant distant past holds out hope, it is only natural that it is the stormy present that educates our policies and beliefs.

It is tragic that those who are convinced of de Bellaigue’s broader message probably do not need his book as much and are already familiar with the research of scholars like Majid Fakhry, Lenn Goodman, Marshall Hodgson, and Ira Lapidus. Those who are not convinced, however, will likely not be persuaded by his book or even read it.

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Blindspots in our Narratives

01 Sat Apr 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Afghanistan, Al Dibdibah, America's War for the Greater Middle East, Andrew Bacevich, Gulf of Sirte, Iran, Iran Air Flight 655, Iraq, Islam, Lebanon, Libya, Middle East, Somalia, terrorism, United States, USS Stark, USS Vincennes

BacevichBacevich, Andrew. America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. New York: Random House, 2016. 480 pp.

America can always be counted upon to do the right thing, to paraphrase Abba Eban, once they have exhausted all other possibilities. In the Middle East, then, the United States has shown extraordinary creativity – for four decades now, it has bungled its way through the region with devastating cost to the locals yet with little to show by way of securing its own interests. Andrew Bacevich’s America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History presents a scathing critique of Washington’s policies in the Arab world that have escalated in intensity over the years only to worsen the situation.

America’s War traces the beginning of Washington’s downward spiral in the (Greater) Middle East to the oil shock in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. A scarcity of petroleum, to the most automobile-obsessed culture in the world, was nothing less than an assault on its core value of conspicuous consumption. Much like the British Empire was built in a fit of absent-mindedness to protect the Crown’s Indian possessions, it was the United States’ quest for energy security that drove it deeper into a West Asian quagmire. This was not a simple case of an imperial presidency but the idea that the United States should be more involved in the Middle East – with boots on the ground, if need be – received widespread support from the media, think tanks, as well as legislators. As the author makes clear, this was a war of choice – there was no clear and present danger to the sovereignty or integrity of the United States or its allies.

Horrifyingly, as Bacevich shows, American views on the Middle East were unbelievably naive and obtuse. In all the Beltway policy advocacy, Islam hardly found a mention; nor did other schisms that have divided the Middle East for centuries – Shia-Sunni, Arab-Persian, Arab-Turk, Muslim-kafir. The United States was comfortably ensconced in its secular, post-Enlightenment bubble wherein such identities carried no meaning. This is intriguing because the mid-1970s was also the time when American academia was undergoing the Cultural Turn, an intellectual reappraisal of narratives, universality of values, agency, and points of view.

However, it was President Jimmy Carter’s decision to materially support anti-Soviet factions in Afghanistan that opened the floodgates of American weaponry in Central and West Asia. Aid that initially consisted of medical supplies, communication equipment, and small arms ballooned under his successor, Ronald Reagan, to include training, explosives, and the famous Stinger missiles.

Bacevich takes us from Afghanistan to Iran, Lebanon, Libya, the Persian Gulf, Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans, and finally to the regional war on Islamist terror. In every theatre, the United States was oblivious to local socio-cultural dynamics and believed that if brute force was not yielding the desired results, they were simply not using enough. US engagements with vastly outmatched foes, whether it was in the Gulf of Sirte or sands of Al Dibdibah, resembled a turkey shoot; most US casualties arose from asymmetric methods of warfare its foes employed.

US goals were further hampered by their gradualist approach to “decisive” action. Most involvement began with Washington dithering about playing a role, to be replaced by a search for regional partners in the Pollyannaish optimism that such allies would have the same motivations as those of Foggy Bottom. In the third stage, the United States would reluctantly deploy troops and advisors but never enough to get the job done, if that is even clear. Finally, Washington would be in an immense hurry to get its boys back; this haste, noticed by its enemies, would be exploited with the result that the region is more hostile and unstable than it was before US intervention. Bluntly put, American aid has done more damage than American bombs.

In the several incidents Bacevich focuses on, American hypocrisy is readily on display. The chapter on the Iran-Iraq War was particularly illuminating on Washington’s lies and double standards. For example, when an Iraqi Mirage fighter jet attacked the USS Stark, Washington promptly blamed Tehran! When the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, then President George HW Bush defiantly declared that he would never apologise for the incident. The United States did, however, later pay $61 million to the families of the 274 passengers who had died on board – still without admitting to any wrongdoing.

Bacevich’s observations are nothing new to anyone who grew up in the Middle East, perhaps to most who did not grow up in America. Much of the world has had the educational experience of having to live with the consequences of American intervention, whether it is the rise of Islamism or the nuclearisation of quasi-Islamist Pakistan. Bacevich is refreshingly candid that the United States was willing to support freedom, democracy, and prosperity as long as it got the lion’s share of it. However, the chronological flow of America’s War from debacle to unmitigated catastrophe has a powerful effect on the reader. The thread connecting what might appear to be loosely related yet disparate events – the results of one incomplete intervention fed into the next ill-advised adventure that catalysed a blowback elsewhere – weaves a depressing report card of US foreign policy in the Middle East. Worse, as Bacevich and countless others have observed, American justice would be unevenly, opportunistically to be less charitable, applied: Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the twin pillars of Islamism, have consistently escaped the consequences of their actions.

The common theme in the making of US foreign policy, not just in the Middle East, is that Americans are cocksure of their righteous narrative and they are convinced that technological and military superiority will resolve sociopolitical problems. The United States sees itself as progressively marching with History, a narrative all others (should) want to imitate. It is this same thinking that fuelled Washington’s policies towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War – and got it to a place where its nuclear arsenal neared an insane 30,000 warheads. The only difference between the Cold War and the Middle East is that US assertiveness came late to the desert. This fundamental failure to understand the world, to occasionally think beyond Anglo-American or Western modernity only foretells more pain and suffering in the future.

Despite an acerbic evaluation of US policy in the Middle East, Bacevich does not offer anything by way of solutions to America’s wayward policies. The implicit suggestion is that Americans should introspect on what matters to them as individuals and as a society. This offering, though, can apply to anyone in any situation and is not of much help. In a manner, the author comes close to what he criticised Carter for doing, that is, tell Americans off for their lifestyle. A more pessimistic conclusion the book hints at is that it is also possible that the Middle East cannot be “solved.” Chaos may indeed be the order of the day and it, too, has beneficiaries.

The bigger question Bacevich’s work raises is of narrative: it is not just the United States but anyone that can be too caught up in their own world view. This is partly inevitable but greater self-consciousness may give us some warning. As Henry Kissinger once lamented, government does not leave much time for reflection and all you have when in office is the intellectual capital you went in with. This places a great responsibility on academia, the media, and other opinion shapers to genuinely grapple with the complex issues of the day and resist the temptation of a witty sound bite.

Rather than the narrative and linkages Bacevich lays out in America’s War, the book is a great insight into the American mind. The casual style will be appreciated by lay readers and the experience and expertise of an academic who also served in uniform shines through. All in all, America’s War for the Greater Middle East should be read as much for what it asks and implies as for what it actually says on the pages.

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730 Days…

26 Thu May 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

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Afghanistan, ASEAN, Bangladesh, BBIN Initiative, Bhutan, Central Asia, China, Defence Technology and Trade Initiative, DTTI, economy, foreign policy, France, India, Indian Ocean Rim Association, International Solar Alliance, IORA, Japan, Middle East, Narendra Modi, Nepal, NSG, Nuclear Suppliers Group, Pakistan, SAARC, SCO, security, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, United Nations Security Council, UNSC

When Narendra Modi swept to power in May 2014, nobody could have dreamed that he would mould India’s foreign policy so decisively. Observers foreign and domestic all opined that Modi would not focus on international affairs much, choosing to pay attention to the domestic Augean stables he inherited instead. The wisdom was that, at most, Modi’s India might modestly reach out in its own neighbourhood but anything beyond the region was going to be primarily to buttress the country’s faltering economy.

If one is looking for unqualified and substantial successes, there is little the Modi government can boast about. Yet this is not to say that there have been no successes – rather, India’s track record in translating words into deeds has been poor throughout its history and it would be foolhardy to bet on noises in the pipeline too soon.

The achievements of the Modi government are also weighed down by the burden of public expectations – the Indian media has published report cards on the government’s performance after its first 100 days in office, at the six month mark, the one year mark, and now at the end of the second year in office. No other administration has ever faced such close scrutiny. Furthermore, the gargantuan scale of what needs to be done to bring the country in line with the ambitions of the younger generation dwarfs into insignificance any accomplishment of the National Democratic Alliance.

The general tenor on Modi’s India has been positive. The optimism in the international mood can be gauged from the increase in the flow of foreign investments into India; Japan has made substantial investments in infrastructure, the most visible project being the high speed rail project connecting Bombay to Amdavad. Similarly, France is playing an active role in developing smart cities in India as more and more of the country urbanises over the next few decades. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have also expressed interest in India’s road, maritime, and riverine infrastructure. All this is in line with expectations that Modi would focus on rebuilding India’s economy and developing the infrastructure needed for it to emerge as a regional power.

The past two years have also seen India take a greater interest in its backyard, Central and West Asia. Counter-terrorism and energy topped the agenda but Delhi’s pockets are not deep enough to spur breakneck development on visible markers of progress such as gas pipelines. India is also one of the largest investors in African countries. While previous administrations have also sought similar goals, the Modi government has brought an energy to the negotiations that leaves many observers cautiously optimistic of movement.

Frequent visits to the country by US defence officials also indicates the initial flowering of a mature security relationship that will have consequences for the entire greater Indian Ocean region. The US-India relationship that had been reincarnated by the George W Bush White House and stagnated since received new impetus once Modi took office. The Defence Technology and Trade Initiative has moved forward as Washington has been keen to help India build better aircraft carriers and talks have been going on to manufacture the M777 ultralight-weight howitzer in India under the Make-in-India scheme. Recently, there has even been talk of Boeing establishing a manufacturing line for its F-16s and F-18s in India and offering the F-35 to Delhi.

In the last two years, India has lost some of its timidity in participating in the Malabar naval exercises with the United States and Japan. Delhi is close to concluding a military logistics agreement with the United States that could significantly expand its influence over the Indian Ocean region. The Indian Navy – in the midst of a massive expansion and modernisation programme – may well evolve as the face of Indian soft power and diplomacy in the region as its augmented capabilities allow it to provide services such as security, search & rescue, and humanitarian relief for the regional commons. This will integrate India more closely with the ASEAN and SAARC nations who will become accustomed to seeing Indian power as a benign force.

In the neighbourhood, the Modi government can certainly report Bangladesh and Bhutan as success stories of its foreign policy. The border agreement and several agreements on energy, infrastructure, transportation, trade, and nuclear cooperation have made Bangladesh more comfortable with its parent state. However, things have been a mixed bag in Sri Lanka and disappointing in the Maldives and Nepal. These are difficult customers, trying to profit from playing India off against China as India tried – and failed – to do with the US and USSR during the Cold War. Without significant economic leverage, these states will continue to be a nuisance to Delhi.

Modi’s greatest diplomatic failure is alleged to have happened with Pakistan and China. Nothing could be further from the truth: while Pakistan sees India as an existential threat, China views its southern neighbour as eventually capable of sabotaging its rise and competition with the United States. The incursion by Chinese troops into Indian territory during a state visit by Xi Jinping to Delhi, not to mention Bejing’s obstructin of Indian accession to the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the UN Security Council as a permanent member, indicates that the Middle Kingdom is content to allow relations to simmer for now. The overtures to Islamabad, unequivocally rebuffed at Pathankot, suggests an ugly truth that Modi – and perhaps South Block – cannot admit publicly: that Pakistan is not a problem that can be solved with patient diplomacy. It is naïve to expect any improvement of relations with either of these two neighbours.

The Modi administration has done well in showcasing India economically and has also achieved a modicum of success on security matters given the options available to it. Afghanistan is an illuminating example: it can hardly be denied that it is in India’s interests that the war against Islamists, be they al Qa’ida, ISIS, or a Pakistani proxy, is best fought with Afghan sinew. Yet Delhi has been reticent to generously supply Kabul with training and material because of its own shortcomings. After decades of material and intellectual neglect, it would not be surprising if India’s armed forces find themselves shackled more by their own politicians than by the enemy.

Modi’s foreign policy has not stopped with nation-states – he has reached out to the Indian diaspora, multinational corporations, and potential technology disruptors to accelerate India’s growth. At the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015, India played a key role in promoting solar energy as an alternative to fossil fuels by committing to expand solar energy to 100 GW (installed capacity) by 2022. The International Solar Alliance, launched by the prime minister, will keep the country at the centre of innovation and regulations concerning solar energy.

While India has been content to involve itself in international and regional groups such as the G-20, BRICS, ASEAN, SAARC, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation until now, the Modi government has taken the policy one step further and started to nurture groups in which it could assume leadership roles such as the 1997-established Indian Ocean Rim Association and the Bhutan Bangladesh India Nepal . Delhi has also started to bypass Pakistan in SAARC via multilateral treaties with other neighbouring states such as the connectivity project between Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and itself which Modi revived in November 2014; the BBIN Initiative was established in 1997 as the South Asian Growth Quadrangle but little had been accomplished since.

In the two years of the Modi government, Delhi has strengthened its foreign policy along all axes – economic, security, and diplomatic leadership. While it is easy to be impatient with the rate of progress, the limitations on India’s economic, military, and diplomatic power also ought to be borne in mind. With continued progress, the several frustrations observers feel with the elephant will gradually dissipate.


This post appeared on FirstPost on May 27, 2016.

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