@Chellaney
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Professor, strategic thinker, author and commentator
Joined January 2009
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In its centennial anniversary issue released today, @ForeignAffairs has a special review section, "Books for the Century." My book, Water: Asia's New Battleground, has been named as one of the six essential Asia-Pacific books published over the century. foreignaffairs.com/reviews/b…
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
If this report is true, it means we are using U.S. troops to escort oil tankers through the SOH, where oil had been flowing freely before we started this disastrous war of choice at the behest of the Israelis.
This a reckless and frivolous gamble with American lives, which we are foolishly opting to put at risk—not to thwart active terrorist threats to the homeland, but as an attempt to mitigate the damage we inflicted on ourselves & the global economy.
Attaching U.S. military personnel to civilian ships makes those ships legitimate targets. This increases the threat level for all vessels and adds an even risker layer of complexity to the already challenging conditions we created in the SOH.
It’s time to walk away now. End this war—any effort to use military force to secure a “win” will not have a meaningful lasting impact. It’s not worth the cost to our troops or inviting further escalation in this foolish war.
nbcnews.com/politics/nationa…
The real losers in an informal U.S.-China G2 are America’s own friends, who will be compelled to hedge against U.S. unpredictability.
Taiwan worries that its security could become a bargaining chip in U.S.-China negotiations. Japan fears that Trump's accommodating approach to China could dilute the U.S.-Japan alliance. India sees a G2 framework as fundamentally incompatible with its vision of a genuinely multipolar Asia.
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
Yesterday, police detained nearly 300 opposition activists from the central office of the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JASOD) in Dhaka.
It began with an attack by Jubo Dal, the BNP’s youth wing, which surrounded the party office. The police then arrived and joined the attackers, forcing their way into the office of a registered political party and detaining those inside.
The justification? Police claimed they suspected the activists of having links to the Awami League, whose activities are currently banned.
Just imagine. First, they banned the Awami League, the largest political party in the country and the real opposition, effectively turning Bangladesh into a one-party system under the BNP-Jamaat coalition.
Second, by using the ban on the Awami League to justify arrests based merely on suspicion, the authorities are effectively allowing ruling-party activists to target the offices of other political parties, with the police then stepping in to make the arrests.
When the real opposition political parties are banned and/or attacked, and their members are detained simply on the basis of alleged political associations, what is left of democracy? If this is what they call democracy, then where does fascism begin?
News Link:
thedailystar.net/news/crime-…
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Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
Glad to share a few thoughts with @semafor’s Andy Brown for his column on the Trump-Xi Summit.
As I said after the October summit in Busan last year, the tectonic plates are shifting.
The reason why is that both Washington and Beijing believe Xi has defining leverage with rare earths, even if the truth is more complex. Perception, in this case, has become reality.
The result is temporary stability. But the time we are buying is being better used by Beijing.
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
For the record: as Xi Jinping touched down in Washington, DC, three PLA Navy vessels and five China Coast Guard vessels interfered with the routine resupply of BRP Sierra Madre near Second Thomas Shoal, even though China has no legal right to treat the Philippine presence there as an intrusion into Chinese territorial waters manilatimes.net/2026/09/26/n… #BRP_Sierra_Madre #Second_Thomas_Shoal #Philippines_EEZ_continental_shelf
Energy as Leverage: Since May, the U.S. has become India’s largest supplier of both Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)and Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG). Between April and May alone, U.S. LNG exports to India jumped 227%, while LPG exports rose 63%. At Washington’s urging, India has also become the largest export destination for Venezuelan oil.
The U.S. government is the primary financial beneficiary of Venezuelan crude exports to destinations like India. Under U.S. sanctions and licensing arrangements, all proceeds, royalties, federal taxes and fixed per-barrel production levies generated from Venezuelan oil exports (including sales lifted by trading firms for Indian refiners) are deposited into U.S. Treasury Department-administered accounts, with Washington determining how and when portions of the revenue are released to Caracas.
Washington, however, is not content with India’s newfound dependence on U.S.-origin and U.S.-controlled energy supplies. A State Department official told the PTI news agency that the U.S. will use the new Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act to induce India to end its purchases of Russian oil and rely more heavily on American energy.
The objective appears to be to weaken the India-Russia strategic relationship by wielding the threat of sweeping sanctions to force New Delhi’s hand over Russian oil imports.
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
Trump may have just handed Beijing a useful new line against Tokyo.
Standing beside Xi, he hailed China as America’s WWII ally. The catch is that Washington’s ally was Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China, not Mao’s Communist government.
Xi ran with it, as Beijing steps up claims that Takaichi’s Japan is returning to militarism.
asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/tr…
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
“I've interviewed President Trump about his relationship with Xi Jinping. President Trump thinks they are friends. He thinks they really like each other. And he thinks that this friendship can get all sorts of things for him and for the United States. He thinks that President Xi is not going to attack Taiwan, because he wouldn't do that to his friend Donald Trump. That's how trump really thinks about it.”
“Trump is also not a China hawk. In his first term, he had a lot of China hawks around, Pompeo and Pence and these kinds of guys. Not not so much anymore. And what Trump believes is that the U.S. and China should have sort of an agreement to sort of divvy up the world - spheres of influence - and then just sort of get along as much as possible. That's also what XI jinping believes.”
“Now, the problem, of course, is that the on the Chinese side, they're doing a lot of things that threaten our national security, our public health, our prosperity. Then why the praise? Well, because Trump is not a China hawk. He doesn't really care about that kind of stuff. He thinks it's about business. It's about investment. It's about keeping the relationship in check so that he can pursue his other adventures, like in Iran, et cetera.”
“And you could say that plays into XI Jinping’s hands. Because if you think about the things that are really threatening us. China's expanding militarily. They're interfering in democracies. They're stealing our intellectual property. They're providing intelligence to the Iranians to kill Americans in the Middle East. It's really hard to address those things when the main goal of your policy is just to keep everything copacetic.”
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
گھر کے پچھلے صحن میں سانپ پالنے کا نتیجہ یہی ہوتا ہے کہ ایک دن گھر والوں کو بھی ڈستے ہیں۔ پاکستان نے پچاس برس پہلے انتہا پسند جہادیوں کو مسلح کرنا شروع کیا تھا۔ اب پاکستان دہشت گرد حملوں کا نشانہ بننے والے ممالک میں سب سے اوپر ہے۔ ہے کوئی سبق سیکھنے والا؟
India the Perennial Soft State
The decision to let American covert operative Matthew VanDyke and six Ukrainian drone specialists quietly leave India is more than an isolated legal reversal. It belongs to a long and uncomfortable tradition in which New Delhi invokes its tough criminal laws and then retreats when geopolitical pressure builds up.
VanDyke, a veteran of covert wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, was arrested in March alongside six military-trained Ukrainian partners. According to Indian court filings, the group belonged to a larger international network that smuggled drones into India before routing them onward to Myanmar. The National Investigation Agency initially invoked the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, India’s premier anti-terrorism statute.
Then came the dramatic climbdown. After U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally raised VanDyke’s detention with New Delhi, the NIA dropped the UAPA charges. VanDyke and all six Ukrainians have now been released on bail and permitted to return home.
The episode recalls a familiar pattern. From the Bhopal gas disaster and the Purulia arms-drop affair to the Enrica Lexie Italian-marines case and Ottavio Quattrocchi’s escape in the Bofors scandal, India has repeatedly seen high-profile criminal proceedings against foreign nationals or entities diluted, abandoned or rendered inconsequential under diplomatic or strategic pressure.
Different cases, different Indian governments, but the same question endures: What makes India such a soft state that it so often fails to enforce accountability when powerful foreign interests are involved?
More revealing than the pomp and pageantry of Xi’s Washington visit is Trump’s own language. Since last fall’s summit in Busan, he has repeatedly described his meetings with Xi as a U.S.-China “G2.”
The writing on the wall is clear: Trump sees America and China as the world’s two preeminent powers that should cooperate in managing global affairs, despite their intense rivalry. For America’s allies and strategic partners, especially in Asia, that signals a profound shift in Washington’s strategic worldview.
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
I don't think it was in the cards for him to go after China under the legislation. The question for me has been whether he will go after India, which he may believe is a softer target possessed of far fewer retaliatory options.
To be blunt about it, the zeitgeist of the past 15 months has been to try to coerce India (which for several months at the end of 2025, was tied with Brazil for the highest American tariffs imposed on any country) while demonstrating repeatedly that the threats to China are mostly rhetorical. Peter Navarro at one point called Ukraine "Modi's war." Nobody in the administration has ever tried to call it "Xi's war." And various of Scott Bessent's comments on the India-EU trade agreement and India's Russian oil purchases have gone down poorly in Delhi.
This U.S.-China summit in Washington will have reinforced the suspicion in India that it is New Delhi in the crosshairs while Beijing keeps escaping U.S. scrutiny. If you rewind the clock to Trump's 2025 inauguration day, that is decidedly not what most people would have expected.
Dr. Brahma Chellaney retweeted
Not a careful choice of words.
He is internationalising the India- Pakistan conflict by listing it along with the Sudan, DRC- Rwanda and Iran conflicts.
He is implying that a better functioning international system should deal with the India- Pakistan conflict.
Implicitly he is backing Trump’s mediation desire.
This is against India’s well established policy decision to oppose any third party or UN intervention in the India-Pakistan differences.
The only exception is focusing on all platforms Pakistan’s long standing use of terrorism against India as state policy.
Terrorism is recognised as an international problem even by the UN which lists international terrorists and terrorist organisations and so we are on solid ground.
Beijing has long practiced panda diplomacy through a lucrative rent-a-panda program, portraying the animals as “envoys of friendship.” In Washington, Xi Jinping announced that China would send two giant pandas to Zoo Atlanta as precisely that: “envoys of friendship.”
Native to the bamboo forests of southeastern Tibet and adjoining regions, giant pandas remain a vulnerable species.
By allowing overseas zoos to host a female-male breeding pair for a standard fee of $1 million a year, China has used pandas to project the image of a nation that is gentle in appearance yet resolute in power.
To soften the transactional nature of the arrangement, Beijing now prohibits zoos from using terms such as “lease,” “rental,” or “loan.”
When new medications become a cultural phenomenon: According to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, almost three in four American adults over age 20 are overweight or obese. It is thus unsurprising that about 11% of U.S. adults are already taking GLP-1 medications such as Wegovy, Ozempic and Zepbound for weight loss. What is surprising, however, is this new study's finding that a sizable number of Americans are using these drugs despite having no medical indication for doing so. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
BRICS is often united more by what it opposes than by what it practices — or by any shared vision of the alternative international order it hopes to build. None of this means the U.S. should underestimate the organization.
BRICS has already succeeded in signaling that the era of Western dominance is drawing to a close. For Washington, ignoring legitimate demands for greater representation in global institutions would be counterproductive to its own interest in upholding the present international order. thehill.com/opinion/internat…
A swaggering bully: By giving Xi Jinping a king's welcome, Trump validates his critics' charge that he appeases dictators, including America's adversaries, while bullying America's friends. He prizes dominance, treating leaders he sees as weak with aggression and extracting concessions from them. Yet he shows respect to a country willing to pay him in the same coin.
Trump’s threat at the UN to “annihilate” Iran echoes what he told Fox News just days earlier: that one option he is considering is to “blow the entire nation up.” In April, he threatened to return Iran to “the Stone Age” and destroy a “whole civilization.”
Unlike his April threat, which triggered strong international and domestic backlash, his latest threats have drawn a far more muted response. It is as if the world has become inured to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, including threats to destroy an entire country, highlighting a notable shift in international norms and public fatigue.
Meanwhile, Trump — like much of the Western media — uses “Islamic Republic” as shorthand for Iran. But it is Pakistan that has remained the world’s first "Islamic republic" since 1956, more than two decades before Iran adopted that title following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
"For decades, China’s repression of Tibetans has involved controlling physical space: monasteries, schools, communities. Tibetans who escaped across the Himalayas built new lives and institutions beyond Beijing’s immediate reach, most importantly in India... Beijing has long monitored Tibetans outside China. What is changing is the scale: Work that once required teams of analysts is increasingly done by a single operator using AI." wsj.com/opinion/beijing-turn…
Trump goes out of his way to accommodate dictators like Xi Jinping while taking a far more aggressive approach toward leaders of America’s allies and strategic partners.
In an extraordinary break from longstanding American diplomatic custom, Trump will tomorrow become the first U.S. president to travel to the airport to personally greet a visiting Chinese leader. Xi’s arrival will mark the start of an elaborate state visit featuring a 479-member military honor guard and a high-profile flyover by a B-2 Spirit bomber escorted by four F-22 Raptors.
Trump seems to embody the maxim widely attributed to Henry Kissinger: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”