Having made incremental progress in getting the Pahalgam terror attacks inscribed in the 25th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit joint statement at Tianjin, and enhancing personal rapport with other leaders, India is now confident of weathering the emerging gloomy global geopolitics.
India and Japan have found common cause at sea as the Indo-Pacific becomes the world’s strategic center. For Japan, the sea lanes through the Malacca Strait are its economic lifeline. For India, security across the Indian Ocean is necessary for trade and energy.
The SCO summit at Tianjin in China, followed by a spectacular military display in Beijing, signal a resolve to contest the vagaries of the Trump Administration and tweak the global and regional orders.
The 5 “stans” form the Central Asian region, namely Kazakhstan (Astana), Uzbekistan (Tashkent), Turkmenistan (Ashabat), Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek), and Tajikistan (Dushanbe).
The international system is crowded with security alliances, NATO, AUKUS, QUAD, BRICS+, I2U2, yet wars rage across Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan and beyond.
BRICS travelled from the world of fiction to an institutional reality in 2009, with Brazil, Russia, India and China coming together.