Global affairs | The Daily Star

  • Trump, Johnson and globalisation’s discontented

    One wonders with a resigned sigh: Is life not depressing enough? Here we are, in the United States, saddled with President Donald J Trump, the leader of the free world who on any given day can blithely contradict in the afternoon what he says in the morning.

  • Attacks on Saudi oil facilities could trigger more conflicts

    The drone attacks on two Saudi Arabian oil facilities last Saturday could have serious regional and global consequences. The Saudi Arabian Oil Company (or Saudi Aramco) that was targeted is a global energy giant and perhaps the world’s most valuable company.

  • Eurasia’s Great Game

    Eurasia’s Great Game is anything but simple and straightforward. A burgeoning alliance between China and Russia that at least for now is relegating potential differences between the two powers to the sidelines has sparked a complex geopolitical dance of its own.

  • India-Russia bonhomie in a changing world

    When it comes to treading previously unexplored or seldom traversed areas of domestic and foreign policies, one can safely bet on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At home, he had undertaken demonetisation in a shock move in November, 2016 and in August

  • Politics, verbal duel hot up again over NRC

    The fortnight after the August 31 publication of the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam has seen politics over the issue hotting up in neighbouring West Bengal, and the war of words between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Mamata Banerjee-led

  • Donald Trump’s Afghanistan Strategy

    In a self-styled twitter message, on September 8, 2019, US President Donald Trump claimed he had cancelled a secret talk with the Taliban leaders and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani that was due to be held at the historic Camp David presidential retreat.

  • ‘Bangladesh should stay alert and observe Assam situation’

    First of all, this demonstrates the extent to which politicians can go to exploit an issue and the devastating effect that it may have. After the release of the final NRC in Assam, the number of the excluded came down to 1.9 million (an earlier list had excluded about 4 million).

  • The push for peace

    From the ashes of a tragedy that wiped out almost 90 percent of the city of Hiroshima on August 5, 1945, an institute called the Hiroshima Peacebuilders Center (HPC) rose like a phoenix of hope that is pioneering the creation of a global pool of peacebuilders.

  • Reimagining ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ as social commentary on inequalities in Asia-Pacific

    It’s 1962, and in a modest Hong Kong neighbourhood, a poetic love story unfolds. Filmed almost twenty years ago, Wong Kar-wai’s seminal movie “In the Mood for Love” captured the world’s imagination about lifestyle in the region.

  • When remembering Robert Mugabe’s corrupt legacy, blame Britain

    When I last saw Robert Mugabe, in 1980, he was the most popular man in Zimbabwe.

  • Will the El Paso killing be a wakeup call for America?

    A 2009 Homeland Security Department report warned that race-based extremism would become a serious and growing threat to American national security.

  • Playing Palestinian politics: UAE-backed ex-security chief weighs his options

    A controversial former security official and Abu Dhabi-based political operator, Mohammed Dahlan, has lurked for several years in the shadows of Palestinian politics.

  • Close the door on nuclear testing

    Everybody knows that nuclear weapons have been used twice in wartime and with terrible consequences. Often overlooked, however, is the large-scale, postwar use of nuclear weapons.

  • The G7, ‘Thucydides Trap’ and the Rising Global Anarchy

    The G7 summit has been wrapped up with a show of harmony among its member states where none of the participating states raised the concern over the danger of the “Thucydides Trap”,between the US and China, a major cause of the anarchy in the international system, today.

  • The US is making a historic mistake once again in Afghanistan

    In the late 1980s, without ending the war, foreign troops withdrew from Afghanistan, which prolonged the conflict for three decades.

  • Protests: The king is dead, long live the king!

    Protest is back on the front burner. Protesters occupy streets in cities ranging from Hong Kong and Moscow to Khartoum and Algiers.

  • How much is Bolsonaro responsible for the Amazon fires?

    The Amazon is not on fire. There are fires in the Amazon rainforest, as there are every year in July-September, because this is the dry season.

  • Trump’s wish to buy Greenland

    Donald Trump. Boris Johnson. Marine Le Pen. Norbert Hofer. Are they ignorant? Short-sighted? Populist?

  • Is peace with the Taliban possible?

    Despite ongoing peace negotiations between the United States and the Taliban, the bloody conflict in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on the country’s people. The recent suicide bombing by the Khorasan branch of the Islamic State (IS-K) at a wedding in Kabul, which killed more than 60 and injured close to 200, is a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s poor security situation. It also shows that the Taliban are not the only armed opposition fuelling the conflict. A US-Taliban peace pact is, therefore, unlikely to bring any respite.

  • Diverging Gulf responses to Kashmir and Xinjiang ripple across Asia

    Recent diametrically opposed responses to repression of Muslims by China, India and other Asian countries highlight deep differences among Gulf states that ripple across Asia. The different responses were evident in Gulf reactions to India’s unilateral withdrawal of Kashmir’s autonomy and Qatar’s reversal of its support of China’s clampdown on Turkic Muslims in its troubled, north-western province of Xinjiang.

  • Inside the unexpected, unstoppable Hong Kong

    When she first heard about the infamous extradition bill on March 31 this year, Adrienne, a 24-year-old Hong Kong national, had lost hope.

  • Is Trump winning at the expense of America?

    Accept it or not, President Richard Nixon had contributed to China’s opening-up in the past. President Donald Trump’s strange policy is now contributing to China’s economic gearing-up, and North Korea’s opening-up.

  • The second coming of Sonia Gandhi

    In 2017, it was widely expected that the top leadership position of the Congress Party would be extended to a member of the Gandhi family.

  • Security architecture in the Gulf: Troubled prospects

    Russia, backed by China, hoping to exploit mounting doubts in the Gulf about the reliability of the United States as the region’s sole security guarantor, is proposing a radical overhaul of the security architecture in an area that is home to massive oil and gas reserves and some of the world’s most strategic waterways.

  • Spiralling anger and nuclear dangers

    In the summer of 1945, a jittery premonition marked the lives of the citizens of Hiroshima, as B-29 super fortresses—planes that the Japanese locals called B-San or Mr.B—had been stationed in the northeast corner of the fan-shaped city.

  • Saudi-Iranian rivalry polarises Nigerian Muslims

    A recent ban on a militant, Iranian-backed Shiite group raised the spectre of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry spilling onto Nigerian streets as security forces launched a manhunt to find the alleged Boko Haram operatives who killed 65 people attending a funeral.

  • America in search of an enemy

    Roberto Goizueta, the legendary CEO of the Coca Cola Company, once said that to thrive every business must “get an enemy.”

  • A tweet that will live in infamy

    A few days may have passed, and the news media may have moved on, but US President Donald Trump’s racist rant on Twitter on July 14 has ripped open a raw wound for US immigrants of colour (this writer included), that will take a long, long time to heal.

  • A deep dive into America’s latest nosedive

    Four years ago, when I stepped onto American soil for college, I quickly learned, somewhere in small talk, the rhetorical question “Where are you originally from?” and the phrase “Go back to your country” were vintage stocks of an evil market called racism.

  • ICJ ruling on Kulbhushan Jhadav puts Pakistan under pressure

    The July 17 judgement of the Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case relating to former Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav has seen India coming out a winner on most counts against Pakistan. While any India-Pakistan standoff is almost invariably accompanied by chest-thumping and jingoism, it is time to sift the hype from the reality.

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