author - oman observer

Prediction is always difficult, but doubly so in the case of the US president-elect. Donald Trump not only speaks loosely and changes his positions often; he also considers unpredictability to be a...

Victory in war is sometimes easy to define. World War II ended with Allied troops in control of Berlin and Tokyo, and with the German and Japanese leadership removed. The Vietnam War, on the other...

As the US presidential election draws near, many are wondering what it will mean for American foreign policy. The answer is wrapped in uncertainty.First, who will win the election? At the beginning of...

Humans are a tool-making species, but can we control the tools we make? When Robert Oppenheimer and other physicists developed the first nuclear fission weapon in the 1940s, they worried that their...

When US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently visited Beijing in an effort to stabilise relations with China, many of the issues that he discussed with Chinese President Xi Jinping were highly...

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, three broad camps are visible in America’s debate over how the United States should relate to the rest of the world: the liberal internationalists who...

The term “Global South” is in constant use nowadays. For example, some commentators warn that Israel’s incursion into Gaza is “alienating the Global South,” and we often hear that the...

The great-power competition between the United States and China is a defining feature of the first part of this century, but there is little agreement on how it should be characterised. Some call it...

The first debate between the Republican Party’s candidates for next year’s US presidential election revealed major schisms over foreign policy. While former US Vice-President Mike Pence and former...

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with US President Joe Biden in the White House this month, many observers saw the makings of an evolving alliance against China. But such expectations are...

As the 2024 US presidential primary campaign season begins, the most likely final contest is a rematch between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Judging by the electoral map in 2020, Biden would...

We live in a world where geopolitical stability relies largely on deterrence. But how can we prove that deterrence works? Consider the ongoing war in Europe. Beginning in December 2021, US President...

Late last year, Morris Chang, the legendary founder of Taiwan’s (and the world’s) leading semiconductor producer, proclaimed that “globalisation is almost dead.” In a world where supply chains...

Russia’s war in Ukraine is the most disruptive conflict that Europe has seen since 1945. While many in the West see a war of choice by Russian President Vladimir Putin, he says that Nato's in favour...

Russian war on Ukraine and nuclear saber rattling against the West have revived a debate about nuclear weapons. Last year, when a United Nations treaty to ban such weapons outright entered into force,...

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine inherited part of its nuclear arsenal. But in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine agreed to return these weapons to Russia in exchange for...

When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered war on Ukraine on February 24, he envisaged a quick seizure of Kyiv and a change of government analogous to Soviet interventions in Budapest in 1956 and...