Argentine President Mauricio Macri and his wife Juliana Awada, left, with Indian President Ram Nath Kovind, center, his wife Savita Kovind and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in New Delhi, Feb. 18, 2019 (AP photo by Manish Swarup).

Argentine President Mauricio Macri paid a three-day visit to India last month, a sign of India’s recent efforts to deepen its links with Argentina. But while high-level engagements have increased in recent years, the two sides have mostly been unable to realize the full benefits of increased cooperation, says Ronak D. Desai, a scholar at Harvard University’s Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute. In an interview with WPR, he explains why Latin America is increasingly seen as a priority for New Delhi’s diplomatic strategy and what it will take for India to compete with its rival, China, in the region. World […]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping at their recent summit, Wuhan, China, April 27, 2018 (Photo by India’s Ministry of External Affairs via AP).

The India-China rivalry may force countries in South Asia to choose sides. Find out more when you subscribe to World Politics Review (WPR). As the India-China rivalry for influence in Asia grows, India has begun to take a bolder stance. In 2016, at Bhutan’s request, Indian forces entered the disputed Doklam territory in Bhutan to keep Chinese forces from building a road there. As the most serious conflict between India and China in decades, the standoff represented a shift in New Delhi’s posture toward Beijing, signaling India’s resolve to act more forcefully to counter Chinese influence and activities in South […]

U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Nov. 30, 2018 (AP photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais).

In its early days, the international trade regime that the United States and its allies created after World War II counted relatively few less-developed countries as members. For the first few decades, developing country members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, remained mostly small in economic size, unimportant in trade and participated little in multilateral trade negotiations. In the 1960s and 1970s, developed countries unilaterally extended preferential market access to poorer countries to spur economic growth and development. As the “newly industrializing countries” of Asia, followed by Brazil, India, Mexico, South […]

International Finance Corporation building.

The shallow waters of the Gulf of Kutch, an inlet of the Arabian Sea along the northwestern coast of India, are ideal for fishing, with coral reefs and mangrove forests that provide breeding grounds for a diverse array of marine life. On the gulf’s northern coast, near the town of Mundra, the gently sloping seabed and calm tides make it easy to catch local delicacies like prawns, pomfret and a type of lizardfish known colloquially as “Bombay duck.” The Waghers, a Muslim minority group, have fished these waters for generations. They maintain permanent inland villages, but from September until May, […]

Indian paramilitary soldiers stand guard outside a closed market, Srinagar, India, March 5, 2019 (AP photo by Mukhtar Khan).

It is far from the first flare-up between India and Pakistan in recent years along the Line of Control, the de facto border in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. But the still-unfolding crisis there, which was sparked by a suicide bombing last month that killed 40 Indian soldiers in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, points to troubling new trend lines in how future conflicts could unfold between these nuclear-armed neighbors. Every recent crisis—from the Kargil War in 1999 and the so-called Twin Peaks incident in 2001 to the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai and India’s 2016 “surgical strikes” […]

Portraits of Saudi King Salman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan line a highway outside Islamabad ahead of the crown prince's visit to tout Saudi investment in Pakistan, Feb. 17, 2019 (AP photo by Anjum Naveed).

QUETTA, Pakistan—Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Pakistan last week and promptly pledged twice the amount of Saudi investment in infrastructure that observers had expected: $20 billion. Though it may not all be delivered, the promised money signaled the growing Saudi role in major infrastructure development in Pakistan. Until last year, such projects were being funded prominently, and almost exclusively, by China. But last fall, soon after Prime Minister Imran Khan took office, Pakistan unexpectedly invited Saudi Arabia to join the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC—the big-ticket Pakistan component of China’s huge Belt and Road Initiative, which was previously only […]