Gulshan Dietl

Sultan Qaboos once observed that “while other Gulf Arabs prefer to get on a camel and go west into the Arab desert, Omanis prefer to be on a boat and drift towards India.”

• Published: December 09, 2014
• IDSA Comments

Is the Eurasian Economic Union aimed at reincarnating the Soviet Union minus the Marxist ideology? While some in Russia assert that the term “union” symbolically harkens back to the Soviet Union, many outside Russia fear that it could be so.

• Published: December 01, 2014
• IDSA Comments

White House has sought to assuage the West Asian states’ feelings that the ties with Asia-Pacific would not be at their expense. On the other hand, there are strong prescriptions from within the US calling for quietly downgrading involvement in the sorry mess of West Asia as the problems there can at best be managed, but never solved.

• Published: December 11, 2013
• IDSA Comments

Turkey’s natural gas reserves are 218 bcf and its production is roughly 27 bcf. It relies heavily on imports to meet its domestic demand. Additionally, Turkey positions itself as a gas transit hub – importing from Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Iran and re-exporting some of it to Europe.

• Published: November 06, 2013
• IDSA Comments

New energy find in West Asia will set forth new political equations. Syria alone has discovered huge proven gas, oil and shale reserves. Whether the Assad regime survives or a change of regime happens there would determine the global gas system in a large way.

• Published: September 09, 2013
• IDSA Comments

The article proposes to trace India's relations with Iran in the post-Cold War period, to identify the highs and lows in its contours and analyse the current situation. No country, however powerful, can formulate and implement its policy towards another in a total vacuum. India's Iran policy, as well as its foreign policy on the whole, reflects its domestic and external concerns and compulsions. India's need to secure its interests and broaden its options is unexceptionable.

• Published: November 2012
• Strategic Analysis

Unlike other aspects of non-traditional security, energy security has been very closely linked with military security. Very often, it is the powerful state-consumers seeking to preserve an uninterrupted supply of energy at an affordable price, who threaten and use military force. At times, it is individuals and groups within the energy-producing countries seeking to resist energy-driven foreign interventions, who disrupt the supplies. The energy-military security nexus is at its peak in the present circumstances - mainly in Iraq, but also in the energy-rich West Asia.

• Published: July 2004
• Strategic Analysis