Thomas Mathew

• Published: 2010
• Book

In death too, Lech Kaczynski has divided the nation first by the decision of the Polish authorities to give him a resting place at Wawel Castle and then by giving Russia an opportunity to make strong overtures that could blunt the opposition of all but the strongest pro-West parties of Poland.

• Published: April 21, 2010
• Special Feature

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the U.S.-India Business Council in Washington D.C. on 17th June rekindling hope that India-U.S. relations could regain some of the traction lost under the Obama administration. She is now on a visit to India and it would be keenly watched for the actions she would take to match her words, especially since there is a growing uneasiness at the U.S. insensitivity to some of India’s important concerns. And the list of issues that could poison India-U.S. relations is getting longer.

• Published: July 19, 2009
• IDSA Comments

Since 2001, Islamic terrorists have struck India with frightening frequency and ferocity. The most disturbing aspect of these attacks is that they have spread into the hinterland from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) which was the main focus of the terrorists in the late 80s and the following decade.

• Published: February 25, 2009
• Policy Brief

British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, arrived in India on his two-day visit on 13 January, barely a month and a half after the carnage in Mumbai. His visit was controversial for what he said during the visit and it was made worse by his article that appeared in The Guardian on the last day of his visit. It even provoked the normally restrained Ministry of External Affairs to comment that it could do without Miliband’s “unsolicited advice” and that his views were only “evolving”.

• Published: January 22, 2009
• IDSA Comments

Offsets have been variously defined. In essence, offsets in defence, as in civil trade, are compensations that a buyer seeks from the seller for the purchase of goods and/or services. The demand for offsets in defence has exhibited an upward trajectory since the 1950s.1 It gained further momentum in the 1980s and has been growing ever since.

• Published: January 2009
• Journal of Defence Studies

The Russian military blitzkrieg to counter the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s dispatch of his Israeli and US trained and equipped forces to retake the breakaway region of South Ossetia on August 7, 2008 took many by surprise. Moscow brazenly took the war straight into the Georgian heartland routing the Georgian forces in South Ossetia and expelling them from the other main Georgian separatist region of Abkhazia.

• Published: September 17, 2008
• IDSA Comments

Nuclear weapons are seen as the ultimate guarantors of nations’ security. During the cold war, peace between the two super powers, for instance, was tenuously guaranteed by the fear that conflicts could escalate into a nuclear conflagration. Consequently the nuclear weapon states which had assiduously built their stockpiles, worked with an equal sense of urgency to obviate the use of these very weapons. They did so by paradoxically working to guarantee their usability.

• Published: Summer 2008
• Journal of Defence Studies