Prasad Dixit

Our country’s conduct in the 1971 War with Pakistan offers several lessons at a time when the principles of peaceful coexistence and a rules-based global order are in freefall. History shows that any war in the Middle East has a way of expanding beyond its declared aims. The ongoing confrontation involving the U.S.-Israel and Iran, now stretching into its second month, has already outgrown its immediate theatre, unsettling energy markets, rattling allies and inviting a familiar contest of...

While India’s civilisational ideals of restraint and magnanimity are admirable, they must be tempered by strategic realism in a harsher world. Humanity may have emerged from the trauma of the pandemic, but peace has proved far more elusive. The early 2020s, rather than ushering in a calmer international order, have been marked by a steady accumulation of wars and geopolitical tensions. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 set the tone. Tensions between China and Taiwan...

While global leaders preach sustainability with near-religious fervour, the green promise risks collapsing into empty ritual without incentives or a moral framework. Few ideas command such effortless global consensus as sustainability. From the annual pilgrimage to Davos to gatherings of the G20, BRICS, ASEAN, SAARC or the SCO, no conclave of world leaders now ends without solemn invocations of climate change and its looming toll on health, biodiversity, agriculture and growth. Targets are...