The Strategist by Vijay Shankar
Vijay Shankar
 Vice Admiral (Retd.)
  • "The World is Not Peaceful"
    Vijay Shankar   ·    31 Aug, 2017   ·    5351
    Addressing senior Communist Party and government officials in Beijing at an event to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Premier Xi Jinping declared, “We do not allow any indiv ...
  • A Pug, a Terrier and the Doklam Stand Off
    Vijay Shankar   ·    07 Aug, 2017   ·    5335
    William Moorcroft, a British veterinary surgeon of the East India Company, set off in 1816 on an expedition to the Kailas region of Tibet to search for that breed of Central Asian horses that would revitalise the blood stock of the Compan ...
  • Nuclear Crises in the Time of Orwellian Wars
    Vijay Shankar   ·    28 Jun, 2017   ·    5314
    "…the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival." George Orwell, 1984      ...
  • The Value of a Declared No First Use Nuclear Policy
    Vijay Shankar   ·    01 May, 2017   ·    5278
    "Can it be a nation’s case to destroy the very purpose that polity sets out to attain; or as Milton put it “Our Cure, To Be No More; Sad Cure!” The sensibility of negotiated agreements to assuage friction betw ...
  • The CPEC: Corridor to Chinese Coffers
    Vijay Shankar   ·    28 Mar, 2017   ·    5256
    Misshapen Marshall Analogy  Deceptive arguments are current that the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) finds historic equivalence in the ‘Marshall Plan’. The Plan was an American Congressional Act legislated on ...
  • Forecast 2017: Carnage Ahead?
    Vijay Shankar   ·    15 Feb, 2017   ·    5235
    Donald Trump in his inaugural speech, vowed “…this American carnage must stop here.” What preceded his vow suggested, with more intensity and less clarity, what the “carnage” was. Presumably he implied a hos ...
  • Perils of Nuclear Paranoia
    Vijay Shankar   ·    31 Dec, 2016   ·    5215
    If armed hostilities, for the initiator, has very little to do with military balance both conventional and nuclear; then it raises the prospect that balance may indeed be skewed against gravity. Nuclear Brinkmanship Plus The late T ...
  • The Catechism of a Minister
    Vijay Shankar   ·    28 Nov, 2016   ·    5192
    The honourable Raksha Mantri was at a public book release function on 10 November 2016. Addressing the gathering, he suggested that India should not bind itself to a No First Use (NFU) nuclear policy; continuing in the same vein, he blath ...
  • The Misshapen Pivot
    Vijay Shankar   ·    21 Oct, 2016   ·    5158
    We note, with some anxiety, an unmistakable parallel to the current situation in the Western Pacific with what obtained in the run-up to the 20th century. An impending face-off between a rising and revisionist China against a loose entent ...
  • The Blind Men of Hindostan
    Vijay Shankar   ·    21 Sep, 2016   ·    5133
    Edited Transcript of Valedictory Address to the International Conference on Non-Traditional Security Threats, Christ University, Bengaluru, 03 September 2016. In coming to grips with threats and challenges that confront a nation, th ...
Other Articles by Vijay Shankar