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Dear Readers,
Welcome to the August edition of Diplomatist. With Indonesia as the country focus, the current edition puts this south East Asian country into limelight as a sought after destination in trade, tourism and investment. The current edition also has an amalgam of reports on a slew of topics. Our reports on NAM Summit, G8 Summit, BRIC Summit, Shanghai Cooperation Summit are incisive and bear critical insights into the global diplomatic discourse. Global issues like tighter regulation of financial markets, terrorism, climate change, energy security, food security and equitable healthcare resonated in most of these global conferences. Similarly, our analysis of the visits of Indian PM and foreign minister to France and Japan from a bilateral perspective may be of interest.
Among topics of contemporary relevance, the vision of Sweden, which is the new chair of the EU, as outlined by its Prime Minister can be a good read. Similarly, NATO has a new chief who is facing a host of challenges including expansion of the military alliance; ensuring fair contribution of all NATO members in the war efforts at Afghanistan etc.
Russia, the most worried nation about NATO expansion had a diplomatic coup of sorts, when US President Barack Obama came calling them. The report of Obama’s historic visit to Russia is interesting in many respects.
Now a word about our cover story— Indo-US relations in the aftermath of the visit of Hillary Clinton to India. Mrs. Clinton’s was the Obama regime’s first high profile visitor to India as the secretary of state. Rather than making it a pedantic exercise, we have picked up the threads from Hillary Clinton’s July visit and drew our own inferences on how Hillary Clinton dispelled all skepticism of disconnect with the Bush era and put up a good show in handling the new regime in Delhi, without losing space to divergent stands on many issues. The real barometer of Indo-US relations is at the economic frontier. Says Secretary General of Indo American Chamber of Commerce in his article, “despite the meltdown, Indo-US economic relations are unruffled and agile”.
The article, Changes in Canada, written by Mr. William Hawke draws examples from personal experience to drive home a point as to how the new generation of Canadians are distancing themselves from all sorts of drunken driving and prefer to be the right side of law. Hawke’s article throws up some best practices on responsible citizenry and is a good case study for all nationalities. These are my picks. But there is more you would like. So, read on… |
