There are many, especially in India, who see the Arab spring as a terrible thing. Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and the like may have been dictators, but they were secular and, at a stretch, represented the first wave of postwar Arab nationalism. Now they are gone, Islamicist groups are capturing power, and the threat to regional stability and the curdling of India’s Muslim ethos is rising. Read more

I’m coming to the view that the best way to judge a nation’s response to the new Arab political order is whether it preferred the status quo or not. The status quoits nations are not ideologically similar. Iran and Israel, India and Saudi Arabia – on this they are all on the same side. Read more

On the basis of one recent but short trip to South Sudan and a lengthy, but distant, stay in southern Ethiopia I concluded recently that one of the more interesting consequences of the Libyan war has been a remarkable change of fortunes in what was a small Cold War in the Horn of Africa. Read more

The “jasmine revolutions,” or the Arab spring, have been seen through two different prisms by the world’s two largest democracies. Read more

I have my doubts that the present riots in Egyptian will result in the overthrow of the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Read more