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M.K. Bhadrakumar

M.K. Bhadrakumar

M.K. Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001). He writes the “Indian Punchline” blog and has written regularly for the Asia Times since 2001.

India Opinion

A war in the Himalayas would expose India’s soft power

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The Xinhua news agency and China Daily newspaper, two authoritative platforms of Chinese policies, held out warnings this week over the military standoff with India near the Sikkim border. China Daily starkly wrote that the “window for a peaceful solution is closing. The countdown to a clash between the two forces has begun....” Xinhua said China’s “restraint has limits and with every day that passes the tether shortens.” Should these warning be taken seriously? India stubbornly ignored similar warnings 55 years ago in...

Middle East Iran

New Iran sanctions simply don’t add up

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The new legislation by the venerable lawmakers in the United States, imposing sanctions against Iran (along with Russia and North Korea), has an air of inevitability. But what is inevitable doesn’t always have to be logical. The base line is how effective these sanctions are going to be. Iran is not new to US sanctions and its economy does not depend on trade or investment from the US. In sum, the US lawmakers are hoping to impose the sanctions via...

Russia United States

Russia adjusts to realities in US politics

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

An instance of such monumental patience is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, in Russian diplomacy: Moscow took 179 days to retaliate against former US President Barack Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats on December 30, 2016, ostensibly to show rancour at alleged Russian efforts to interfere with the US presidential election. The 35 Russian diplomats were “intelligence operatives”, Obama said. He gave them 72 hours to leave American soil, and he impounded two Russian diplomatic compounds as well. In Moscow, though, President...

South Asia Kashmir

A terrible beauty is born in the geopolitics of Kashmir

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The tallest Kashmiri politician today, Farooq Abdullah, former chief minister of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir and an erstwhile cabinet minister in the central government in New Delhi, would have been a consummate surfer in the world of sports. The audacity with which he rode the wave of Kashmiri nationalism through turbulent decades (while also remaining “Delhi’s man in Srinagar”) has been breathtaking. Abdullah, who is currently a parliamentarian, may have deliberately opted to surf unforgiving political waves when...

Middle East Syria

US rocket deployment triggers intense speculation

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The move by the US military to shift for the first time the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) into Syrian territory from Jordan is "breaking news." According to CNN, the deployment will be at the military base in Al-Tanf near Syria’s border with Iraq in the south-eastern region, which is currently an area of contestation between US-backed rebel groups and Syrian government forces. The Russian Ministry of Defence has signaled disquiet. A statement in Moscow on Thursday speculated that...

Politics United States

An open-ended Afghan war can serve ‘America First’

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

US President Donald Trump’s reported decision to delegate the Afghan war to Defense Secretary James Mattis reflects smart thinking. The POTUS doesn’t have a military mind – unlike his predecessor Barack Obama. The decision to delegate the war to the Pentagon generals should have been taken by Obama eight years ago when the war party comprising then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates (plus the top brass) hustled him into sanctioning the famous “surge.” Had he done...

Turkey Opinion

Turkish-American relations at crossroads

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

When President Donald Trump receives President Recep Erdogan on Tuesday at the White House, his legendary deal-making prowess will be on trial. Trump has not been in a tearing hurry to receive Erdogan. During the first 100 days of his presidency, Trump received the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan (twice), Iraq and Palestine. Yet, none of them belongs to a Nato member country and or is a crucial “swing” state in Trump’s messianic war against ISIS, as...

Syria Russia

Trump warms to taking Putin’s help in Syria

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The cracking of the ice on the frozen Russian-American lake can only mean a temperature change. The telephone conversation between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on Tuesday can be compared to ice cracking after an unusually cold and long winter. The readouts from the White House and the Kremlin both give a positive spin to the phone call. The White House said the conversation was a “very good one” and the Kremlin was satisfied that it was “businesslike and constructive”....

Russia United States

US intervenes in Russian politics but Moscow shrugs it off

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The Russian-American relationship received a jolt after Washington took exception to the Kremlin’s handling of protesters in many Russian cities, including Moscow, at the weekend. The US state department’s acting spokesman, Mark Toner, told the Russian state news agency TASS in Washington that the US condemned the arrest of the demonstrators – who were protesting against endemic corruption in Russian politics – and demanded that they be released. TASS quoted him as follows: “The United States strongly condemns the detention of hundreds of peaceful...

Politics Afghanistan

UK helps US renew focus on defeating terror in Afghanistan

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The meeting in London on Wednesday between the Pakistani prime minister’s special advisor on foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, and the Afghan national security advisor, Hanif Atmar – a meeting which was painstakingly brokered by Britain – was aimed principally at reducing tensions between the countries following a series of major terrorist attacks in Pakistan. The talks addressed Pakistani allegations regarding sanctuaries for terrorist groups on Afghan soil – a mirror complaint to the longstanding Afghan allegations that Pakistan-based militant groups...

Afghanistan ISIS

Trump’s generals should be wary of Pakistan bear trap

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The Telegraph newspaper in London carried a sensational interview in its March 5 edition with “a senior Pakistani army source” who claimed the Afghan situation is a “total mess” and the West now faced “losing control.” The military official warned that there might be a Syria-like intervention by Russia, using the justification of an Islamic threat to Central Asia, Moscow’s strategic backyard. He disclosed that in recent weeks top brass in the northern Pakistani city of Rawalpindi held discussions with US Defense...

India-China Territorial disputes

China throws gauntlet at India’s ‘strong man’ Modi

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

Hyperbole and daydreaming have been two distinguishing traits of Indian foreign policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration. The government resorts to unreal exaggeration to emphasize the real situation, while the reality gets blurred and is often substituted by a visionary fantasy, especially one of happy thoughts, hopes or ambitions. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to Modi’s policies toward China. It’s time to abandon the three-year-old notion that calibrated moves to create irritants in the bilateral relationship will incrementally...

Moscow’s wriggle room shrinking vis-à-vis Trump

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The pall of gloom and uncertainty descending on the Russian mind over the intentions of the Donald Trump administration would only have deepened on Sunday when Washington brusquely demanded that Moscow “and the separatist forces it backs” in Donbas, Ukraine’s breakaway eastern region, should “immediately observe the ceasefire, withdraw all heavy weapons, and allow full and unfettered access to the OSCE monitors.” The State Department statement warned that Washington is “closely watching the growing violence in eastern Ukraine” and stressed...

Politics Turkey

Turkey gets preview of US action plan in Syria

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

Sometimes in inter-state relationships, it becomes necessary to pick up a quarrel with another country at a certain point in time. Turkey may have done just that to Iran. The spat makes a mockery of the “trilateral alliance” between Russia, Turkey and Iran that Moscow has been promoting at the Astana talks on Syria. With an eye on the new US administration, Turkey is steadily restoring the ‘status quo ante’ in its Syria policies. The US and Turkey have been...

Politics Iran

Iran nuclear deal is here to stay – for the present

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The Israeli-Palestinian issues – settlements, ‘two-state solution’ and the American embassy’s relocation to Jerusalem, etc. – hogged the attention during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meeting with President Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday. The Iran question became a sub-text. This was rather odd, but not entirely surprising on the part of the beleaguered Trump administration. For Netanyahu, the Iran nuclear deal was a historic mistake, which he did everything to kill, while for Trump it was the “worst...

Politics Russia

World community sizes up a diminished Trump

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

For the world at large, the resignation by the US National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Monday is not about an obscure 19th century law that defines a phone conversation between him and the Russian ambassador. What it conveys are three things. First, the US is sliding into a vicious civil war. A Fox News poll released on February 14 shows that the American public is almost evenly divided over President Donald Trump’s job performance since his inauguration on January...

China Xi Jinping

Trump gets off to flying start with Xi Jinping

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

High-level exchanges in international diplomacy at the leadership level are carefully choreographed. The very first phone conversation between the US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Thursday was no exception. Two things stand out. First, the call itself came through only after it dawned on Trump and his advisors that an affirmation of the “One china policy”, the bedrock of the Sino-American relationship, would pave the way for the conversation — and that “the costs of...

China United States

Trump’s larval-pupal metamorphosis on China policy

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

If the prevailing thesis was that the US President Donald Trump harbored a secret project to forgive Russia and punish China, the drift of things points in a contrarian direction. Trump’s project increasingly looks like pandering Russia’s superpower vanities while engaging China substantively. The signs are that on China, Trump is putting behind his awkward behavior as president-elect. One interesting signal is the toning down of rhetoric on South China Sea by Rex Tillerson. Tillerson had made some very abrasive remarks...

Politics Nato

The frozen ground of US-Russia ties is hard to till

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

Rex Tillerson’s confirmation as US Secretary of State must come as comforting news for Moscow. It augurs well for the Russian-American relationship. It leads to ‘de-escalation’ in the tensions, of which incipient signs appear already. The veteran Russian diplomat heading the Mission to the United Nations in New York, Vitaly Churkin said on Thursday that he could sense the winds of change in his newly-minted American counterpart Nikki Haley (in comparison with her combative predecessor.) Amid all the speculation on what...

Islamic State Middle East

Trump sets out to resolve the Persian puzzle in Syria

M.K. Bhadrakumar M.K. Bhadrakumar

The statement by the US National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Wednesday, against the backdrop of Iran's missile test on Sunday, is the first major policy pronouncement on the Middle East strategies of the Donald Trump administration. So far, all we knew were three things about the Trump administration. One, the defeat of the Islamic State and other terrorist groups will be its “highest priority” and to that end the US will pursue “aggressive joint and military actions when necessary.”...

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