claryc.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Forthcoming in Asian Survey. Coming soon to a fine academic journal database near you.

submitted 1 hour ago • 0 comments

A Dutch friend shared with me that Henk Slebos, one of A. Q. Khan's European suppliers--both for Pakistan and for Khan's non-Pakistani customers--has died, at the age of 82 in a nursing home in Norway.

submitted 1 hour ago • 0 comments

He said he was “deporting criminals” but he’s actually importing them…

submitted 1 day ago • 141 comments

This interview of Tarun Chhabra by Mike Green is worth 30 mins of your time if you are interested in export controls, alliance management, and/or AI (DeepSeek in particular). www.csis.org/podcasts/asi...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

From a speech Trump gave in August 2017 on South Asia policy. Does he still believe this about Pakistan? If so, do any implications flow from that?

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

The intro of this 2019 piece by Alyssa Ayres has held up well. (And a helpful reminder that Trump 2.0 vs. 1.0 is more about the rate of travel rather than direction.) www.india-seminar.com/2019/715/715...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

"'Multialignment' has been Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s lodestar... over the last decade. In Washington to meet with President Trump last week, Modi got to see—firsthand and in real time—how Trump was developing a multialignment of his own." foreignpolicy.com/2025/02/18/m...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Time is a flat circle.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

By my math, about 41% of the active military U.S. officer corps are women or non-white men, yet somehow none of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are. (Picture from @nancyayoussef.bsky.social on X)

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Strong piece by Mara Karlin & Brig Gen (retd.) Paula Thornhill on the civ-mil crisis. They fear that "at every level" service "members [will] start to question personal or partisan motives rather than focusing on building their unit’s competence and unity..." contrarian.substack.com/p/we-got-it-...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

For a decade, Xi Jinping's heavy-handedness has made Washington's job easier in Asia. Now, Trump's fecklessness returns the favor and eases China's task. This Sanjeev Satgainy story from the weekend looks at a Nepal sub-plot to the current global drama. www.thehindu.com/news/interna...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

In his column today, Indian Commodore (retd.) C Uday Bhaskar argues the lesson of Trump's Ukraine maneuvers is clear. India must be ready to "walk alone" with independent military capabilities sufficient to do the job. indianexpress.com/article/opin...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

One read of this op-ed by a retired senior Indian diplomat is that India should build up independent capabilities so that it doesn't need US help. Another read is that India should be more accommodative of China so it doesn't find itself in a position where it needs US help.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

"[P]roxies always end up as the doormats of history... In the realm of geopolitics, the quest for proxies is eternal, as must be our vigilance against it. Ukraine, sadly, is the living example of a dying proxy, its fate there for the whole world to see." indianexpress.com/article/opin...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

As with most return to office policies, the reason is to make your life a little more unpleasant in the hope that you might quit.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Also, is Panama this weird depository so that Trump will stop threatening to invade?

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

So as I understand it, the US shipped these Indians to Panama, IOM bought them a ticket (on Turkish Airlines via Istanbul) to India. Seems like there has to be a more efficient way to do this. Also, does US Government pay IOM for this? timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/deport...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Reading an Agatha Christie novel and is it true that old houses were really operating on an 11:1 bedroom-bathroom ratio?

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Noise-to-signal ratio for any info coming out of DOGE is off the charts. Almost all noise and no signal. Might be the largest single source of misinformation globally at the moment.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

A metaphor for Trump’s America: we accidentally locked ourselves in the shitter.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

This is why I really have no time for the "behind the scenes, Republicans say yadda yadda yadda." This is a public-facing business. If you tell a reporter you don't want to vote "aye" then you vote "aye," who cares?

submitted 7 days ago • 40 comments

When I was in the Pentagon, basically all civilians came into the civil service in 1 of 2 ways: veteran preference or the Presidential Management Fellows program. So much of the vitality came from PMFs because so many veterans were on their second career. That energy will be sorely missed.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Through hard work over many years, USIP has assembled arguably the best South Asia team of any institution in the US. It is expertise that will not easily be reassembled ever again. Let’s hope Congress does not let Trump eliminate this part of Reagan’s legacy. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

New piece from me @goodauth.bsky.social on why Riyadh talks were very bad, why Rubio's appt was doomed from the start, and why U.S. diplomacy is in crisis (hint: giving away the store is not diplomacy). To paraphrase @dandrezner.bsky.social, I wrote sharper today. goodauthority.org/news/why-hig...

submitted 8 days ago • 7 comments

God bless. There is some fight in us still.

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

If only the Senate had the ability to provide advice and consent on appointing rookies to cabinet office…

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

The thing about firing so many federal employees is it really makes it easy for Democrats to blame any poor government service—Grandma didn’t get her social security check, Uncle on a long wait list at VA for a surgery, your tax return is late—on Trump. They own this now.

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Emil Bove is Stringer Bell

submitted 14 days ago • 52 comments

Valor Danielle Sassoon, Acting U.S. attorney for SDNY - refuses to drop Adams charges and resigns John Keller, Acting head of DOJ Public Integrity Section - refuses and resigns Kevin Driscoll, Acting head of DOJ Criminal Division - refuses and resigns www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

submitted 14 days ago • 1083 comments

I understand the list of things this man has said and done is long but that he tweeted that COVID was engineered to spare Jews and Chinese people less than two years ago and is now HHS secretary is truly toxic icing on the antivax cake, to me www.npr.org/sections/sho...

submitted 14 days ago • 22 comments

Ummm, I hope this works out better for Ukraine than it has so far for Palestine.

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

"Constructivist (and English School) approaches would suggest (see Goddard and Gause in this collection) that no international order can be truly hegemonic without commanding some degree of consent and legitimacy. Material power is not enough without the ability to mobilize shared purpose."

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

New York Post is honestly dredging up USAID scandals from the George HW Bush administration. As I live and breath. It's actually kinda funny Elmo's team of terrorist toddlers hasn't found anything in recent history to condemn and we're left with a 35 year old "scandal." nypost.com/2025/02/11/u...

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Karan Thapar summing up: "The Trump admin will not share the Biden admin's belief that something that is in the long-term interest of India would also be in the long-term of the United States. Trump will be more transactional, less concerned about India's future." www.youtube.com/live/bZH0eDk...

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

The former director-general of India's coast guard faces criminal charges for tampering with personnel records relevant to senior promotions within the service. www.thehindu.com/news/nationa...

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

"3 people, including 2 members of the Hindu community, were gunned down by unknown armed men in the Turbat & Buleda areas of Kech district on Monday... Police termed the incident a targeted killing while no group has claimed responsibility for the attack." www.dawn.com/news/1891165

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Does anyone know why India's foreign aid to Chabahar port in Iran is a flat 100 crore Rs. a year? Terms of a bilateral agreement? It doesn't make sense that there wouldn't be some fluctuation year to year (inflation, exchange rate, etc).

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

"What we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government."

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Opposition leader Chidambaram attacking Indian foreign minister Jaishankar in the upper house of parliament on the deportation issue. Not clear to me this issue will have legs politically in India, but the fact Opposition keeps hammering away at it is notable.

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Michael Waltz, Jan. 14, 2025: "True evil... does exist.... We have to recognize that evil exists and it only respects strength. Hopefully you can reform the next generation, but sometimes you just have to put bombs on foreheads." www.usip.org/sites/defaul...

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

Presumably this is an implicit goal. "It scares me for the future of farming,” Resnick said. “Not just that funding won’t be available for new farmers that need it, but that farmers won’t trust the government going forward.” www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Hmmm, wonder why Golfo de Nueva España is trending in Spain.

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Now that the Union of Concerned Scientists satellite database appears not to be regularly updated, is there a better place for one-stop-shopping satellite statistics?

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

Reading this you can infer that Rubio tells himself that if it were not for him, it would be worse. Despite his opposition to the policy, he will stay. He will keep telling himself this until Trump fires him in a quasi-humiliating way in the next year or so.