Bharat Wariavwalla

Publication

A Defining Moment for France and Europe

Two clashing visions of France were before the French voters. They chose, with many reservations, Macron and rejected Le Pen, but not wholly, for, her opposition to the EU, in some measure, enjoys the support of a sizeable section of French society.

Thinking with Kissinger about World Order

In tranquil times or troubled times reflective persons have asked why our world is where it is today. E. H. Carr wrote about the troubled years between the two world wars. The years of the Soviet–American confrontation, made frightfully deadly by the possession of nuclear weapons by the two antagonists, prompted many scholars and statesmen to think of the different kinds of world order that could spare humanity a nuclear holocaust.

State, Secularism and Democracy

Democracy has spread spontaneously and swiftly in an area of the world generally thought to be immune to political changes: West Asia and North Africa (WANA). An incident of common occurrence in Third World countries—a policeman extorting money from a fruit vendor—sparked this surge for democracy, which spread rapidly from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea in some two months. On December 17, 2010, a fruit vendor, Mohammed Razzack, set himself on fire to protest against a policeman extorting money from him.

Name of the Game Is Interdependence

Lawrence Summers, United States President Barack Obama's chief economic advisor and formerly secretary of treasury in the second term of the Clinton administration, once said that there was a ‘balance of financial terror’ between the US and its financial creditors, primarily China and Japan. Today, China, holding some $800 billion in US treasury bonds and some $2 trillion worth of currency reserves wields financial terror against the US.