Salman Rafi Sheikh

With Joe Biden being one of the key architects of the Obama administration’s “Asia Pivot”, an increasing focus on Asia – especially, Southeast Asia – was/is inevitable. However, it is not just Biden’s obsession with the region that explains the on-going shift. America’s drastic failure in the Middle East despite decades of military...

Even though the US withdrawal from Afghanistan was expected to make the Afghan war less ‘international’, this has been far from the case. Contrary to the projections, even ‘civil war’ in Afghanistan has an international dimension, not because some international actors are militarily involved in it, but mainly because the fallout could destabilise the whole region...

While there was a lot of optimism surrounding the Biden-Putin summit in Geneva as a big leap towards re-defining US-Russia ties in an era when the US is primarily engaged with China as its leading competitor, the post summit developments have clearly shown that the rivalry between the US and Russia is too deep to be simply overcome just because the US has another...