The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation turned twenty-five this year. Created in 2001 as a six-member Eurasian security grouping, it has expanded into a ten-member forum bringing India together with China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus and the four Central Asian republics. Its members account for more than 40 per cent of the world’s population and roughly a third of global output. India became a full member in 2017 for specific reasons: a standing seat alongside Russia and Ch

Why India's “Studying Implications” Response Is a Deliberate Psychological Signal, Not Indecision On August 11, 2026, a reporter at the Ministry of External Affairs' biweekly briefing asked spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal what New Delhi made of the newly inked defence pact binding Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey. His answer was, on its face, unremarkable. India, he said, was "examining" the agreement's implications for its national security and for regional peace and stabilit

On 7 August, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, declaring that an armed attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. Naturally, the comparison with NATO's Article 5 followed immediately. In truth, the pact is better understood as three states converting overlapping security interests into a shared institutional framework than as a finished military alliance: a commitment has been signed, but the mechanisms that would give it co

Pakistan is having one of those summers where every direction you look, something is on fire. In the north, a banned militant group is quietly retooling for a new kind of war. In the west, a resource-rich province is caught between a real, bleeding insurgency and a viral independence claim that has taken the internet by storm. Along the Line of Control, a protest movement that started over flour prices has hardened into open, deadly defiance against Islamabad. Three fronts, t

PM Modi embarked on a three nation tour of Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand from July 6, 2026. This was a vital visit since all three nations are important trading partners of India and integral to the Act East policy. India ranks as New Zealand’s 11th largest export market while Indonesia and Australia are respectively India’s second largest ASEAN partner and fifth largest trade partner. The visit also carried heightened urgency due to the ‘China factor.’ Beijing conduct

History reserves its severest judgement for those who fail to recognise transformation when it stands before them. Every fundamental shift in the international order has yielded two categories of nation: those who identified the resource anchoring the new world and secured it with conviction, and those who perceived it too late, condemned to dependency, stripped of agency, and forced to operate within conditions they played no part in designing. Coal raised empires. Oil remad

Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi recently wrapped up her visit to India on July 3. Early efforts in preparing her itinerary for her first visit to India were uncertain, but in a great show of commitment, her first official visit has produced a robust roadmap for the future of bilateral relations between these Asian giants. During the three day visit, PM Takaichi and PM Modi elevated the Special Strategic and Global Partnership through landmark agreements, ambitious investments, and

“SpaceX certainly has the US government over the barrel.” — Clayton Swope, Centre for Strategic and International Studies In the classical realist framework, states are the primary actors in international relations - sovereign, rational, and ultimately self-reliant when it comes to security. What happens, then, when a state cedes its military infrastructure to a private corporation? This is the operational reality the United States confronts in 2026 as it struggles w

Over the past few weeks, we have been seeing rapid developments in the relations between the United States and India. For more than a decade now, India–U.S. relations were sold as the defining partnership of the twenty-first century. Washington increasingly described India as central to balancing China, securing maritime routes and shaping the Indo-Pacific order. New Delhi, while retaining strategic autonomy, moved steadily closer to the United States through defence agreemen

Japanese PM Sanae Takaichi recently wrapped up her visit to India on July 3. Early efforts in preparing her itinerary for her first visit to India were uncertain, but in a great show of commitment, her first official visit has produced a robust roadmap for the future of bilateral relations between these Asian giants. During the three day visit, PM Takaichi and PM Modi elevated the Special Strategic and Global Partnership through landmark agreements, ambitious investments, and

I. Introduction On the morning of June 22, 2026, Sir Keir Starmer stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced that he would resign as Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The announcement made Starmer the sixth British Prime Minister to resign outside that famous black door in seven turbulent years, a statistic that might have seemed satirical were it not now a factual feature of British political life. Less than two years had elapsed since L