Ramesh Thakur is the Director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, and Professor of International Relations at the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University.
On February 18, SKY News UK trumpeted that ‘Lockdown is working! COVID-19 infection rate plummets in England’. Yet, as Figure 1 shows, Sweden with voluntary social distancing guidelines experienced an earlier and faster decline of COVID deaths per capita. The other interesting feature about the figure is how the mortality curves are policy-invariant, mimicking one another regardless of policy interventions between Sweden, the UK and the EU countries. The virus infection, hospitalization and mortality curves seem to rise and fall by seasons, independent of lockdowns.
The world is witnessing a geopolitical shift from the North Atlantic to the Indo–Pacific region. US power is in relative decline with a steady build-up of Chinese power, wealth and influence. The last 15–20 years have also seen the rise of India. Against this backdrop, Australia’s reconceptualisation of its strategic frame as the Indo–Pacific widens its geopolitical canvas and elevates India’s importance for multiple Australian interests and objectives.
The latest report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme, released on November 8, 2011, has effectively raised the global threat level. The agency faced the daunting challenge of making a judgement on how far Iran's nuclear programme has advanced and its potential for weaponisation on the basis of suggestive but dated, inconclusive and possibly fake evidence (hundreds of pages of evidence have been sourced to one laptop of unproven provenance given to the IAEA by a Western intelligence agency).
Rajiv Nayan's article is both important and interesting. It is important because nuclear weapons pose a threat to humanity and the planet that in magnitude, severity and immediacy is the gravest of all known risks confronting us today.
To paraphrase the mantra of realism—international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for normative ascendancy: the establishment and maintenance of the dominant normative architecture of international order created and maintained by the interplay of power and ideas. As China, India and Brazil emerge as important growth centres in the world economy, the age of the West and its disrespect for the role, relevance and voice of the rest of the world is passing.
