By Medha Prasanna

The oil age will not end because the world runs out of oil, but because oil reserves stop being worth pumping. The UAE has moved fast, not as just a knee-jerk reaction to the conflict in the region, but as a strategic divergence.

By Andre Nicola

Across South America, governments are increasingly framing environmental regulation as a constraint on growth, investment, and national competitiveness. South America's political direction over the next several years will be an early test of whether economic development can be reconciled with environmental stewardship throughout the region.

By Pietro Zecca

Pursued only through scattered pilot projects, industrial decarbonization stays fragmented and slow. Organized as clusters, it becomes more practical and politically durable, connecting climate finance to visible assets and bridging decarbonization with development.

By Uma Vatsa and Shailesh Mishra

The AI industry is making large, long-lived bets on future demand, even as the technology itself is becoming more efficient. If AI systems become cheaper to run, more efficient to train, or less dependent on massively centralized compute, some of today’s infrastructure may prove oversized, poorly located, or economically fragile.

By Anit Mukherjee

As crude oil prices moderate and energy supplies become more predictable, India has an opportunity to address three key challenges.

By Ashita Jain

The proposed India-U.S. trade deal discussions are distinct from traditional FTA negotiations, for they resemble a strategic economic partnership being negotiated under tariff pressure and in pursuit of an increasingly elusive sense of predictability for Indian exporters.

By Dhruva Jaishankar

What’s the latest on U.S.-India relations? Dhruva Jaishankar answers.

By Dhruva Jaishankar and Jeffrey D. Bean

Earlier this month, India was among the first countries to receive expanded access to Anthropic's Claude Mythos large language model, but the White House decision to block all foreign access to Anthropic’s new Mythos and Fable models via export control elevates concerns regarding reliability of U.S. partnership and AI dependency. 

By Sarah Salah

As the IAA continues to undergo amendments, its ultimate success will hinge on careful calibration. The EU will need to preserve channels for strategic foreign investment, especially in capital-intensive sectors where domestic capacity alone may fall short. If the Act is overly complex or restrictive, it risks deterring the very investment it seeks to shape.

By Rohan Sharma

The United States’ and India’s commitments are clear: pro-innovation regulation, joint next-generation data centers, and cooperation on advanced compute. But agreements do not operationalize themselves. What is needed is not another forum, but an interface. A jointly staffed mechanism, anchored in implementation agencies, becomes the only viable bridge.

By Vishal Manve

India’s nuclear future is increasingly unfolding along two parallel tracks, one rooted in indigenous strategic capability and the other in internationally integrated commercial innovation. For Washington, understanding and engaging both will be central to the next phase of U.S.–India civil nuclear cooperation.

By Piyush Verma

The conflict in West Asia was not South Asia's war. But South Asia — and particularly the smaller South Asian states such as Nepal, Bangladesh, and Bhutan — are paying the price in fuel queues, kitchen economies, and fiscal wounds that will take years to heal.

By Jhanvi Tripathi and Samriddhi Vij

Countries in the Global South are the fastest growing consumer markets with their growing and increasingly aspirational populations. Fulfilling this potential requires addressing deep connectivity gaps that have implications for the speed and cost of doing business.

By Anit Mukherjee and Caroline Arkalji

If implemented effectively, the Global Biofuels Alliance could help position biofuels not simply as a short-term response to supply disruptions, but as a more strategic pillar of long-term energy security, industrial development, and energy transitions.

By Soumya Bhowmick and Arya Roy Bardhan

For countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the challenge is no longer simply how to engage Washington or Beijing diplomatically, but how to preserve developmental autonomy in an environment where great-power competition is restructuring markets, supply chains, and industrial choices.

By Aleksei Zakharov

China is carefully balancing its position on the war in Ukraine, offering Russia targeted support while avoiding direct military involvement in the form of supplying lethal weapons or deploying troops. Similarly, Moscow would like to avoid getting entangled in China’s conflicting relations with India, Japan, Vietnam, or the United States. This cautious approach on both sides imposes a clear ceiling on their engagement and leaves limited prospects for an alliance-like partnership in the future.

By Rudra Chaudhuri

There is a need for an architecture, such as a Trusted AI Corridor, which can help mitigate the risk that regulators in both the United States and India take steps that could roll back years of investment in a deepening technology partnership.

By Vasabjit Banerjee

China’s economic and military presence in Latin America is expanding, prompting the United States to pursue countermeasures. Other extra-regional actors, ranging from the European Union to countries such as India, are simultaneously deepening their engagement with the region. The United States could strategically leverage these relationships to reinforce its own position.

By Dhruva Jaishankar

The latest Quad joint statement highlights how economic security is receiving priority at this juncture, critical and emerging technologies are being somewhat marginalized by unilateral and bilateral efforts, and efforts of maritime security continue to progress in a more workmanlike manner.

By Kartik Bommakanti

The emerging nuclear competition is increasingly being shaped by a key structural driver: the expansion of Chinese military power.

By Clemens Chay

The reality is that “America First” under the Trump administration has functioned as a structural force rather than empty rhetoric — one that has prompted state actors to exercise agency by prioritizing their own national interests.

By Kabir Taneja

As the global appetite for risk increases drastically, strong bilateral relations such as India and the UAE will need even stronger guardrails to future-proof themselves.

By Rachel Rizzo

As the Arctic region, ocean floor, and space emerge as the new theaters of great-power competition, how major powers navigate this moment, and whether multilateral institutions created in a different era can adapt to the new one, will be the defining questions in the years ahead.

By Andre Nicola

Unlike previous elections where the primary concern was social media manipulation, 2026 will test how Brazil, and other large democracies, respond to this new generative AI challenge. The question is no longer whether AI will shape elections. It is whether governments will build the right safeguards before, rather than after, elections can be manipulated.

By Sapna Suresh

It is not just on trade and market access that Washington and Brussels are competing for favor in India. Their competition extends to defense and security and to migration and mobility.

By Dhruva Jaishankar

Despite Europe’s push for more military self-sufficiency amid tensions with the United States, questions remain as to whether Europe’s political leadership, domestic politics, and social conditions can facilitate the development of true security and strategic autonomy.

By Ammar Nainar

The Iran War has already had a severe impact on the United States’ arms and ammunition inventory. The new demands for arms and munitions come just as India has begun to improve its domestic weapons manufacturing and promote defense exports. In the coming years, this offers opportunities for India and the United States to cooperate in defense manufacturing at scale.

By Andre Nicola

Colombia’s upcoming election is not just a domestic political contest; it will shape whether Colombia remains a closely aligned U.S. partner or evolves into a more autonomous and less predictable actor in the region.

By Dhruva Jaishankar and Piyush Verma

A CTIP could deliver relatively quick wins by supporting joint manufacturing, standards cooperation, and market access to meet Europe’s diversification needs, while deepening India’s role as a global clean energy manufacturing hub. 

By Parul Bakshi and Samriddhi Vij

While the current crisis in the Middle East may not be permanent, Asia’s dependency on Middle Eastern crude is, necessitating a deeper examination of the structure and extent of this vulnerability.

By Anit Mukherjee

The current crisis in the Middle East has demonstrated that ensuring energy security will remain a challenge for policymakers in the foreseeable future, especially for countries like India. At the same time, the current disruption provides an opportunity to initiate and build on energy sector reforms to make sure that countries are better prepared to deal with such shocks in the future.

By Siddharth Yadav and Khush Advani

As AI reshapes economies, militaries, and societies, the nations that control the hardware pipeline will shape the rules of the emerging order. At present, that pipeline runs through a single bottleneck in Veldhoven, Netherlands. For middle powers, the choice is to either accept permanent dependency on a supply chain governed by the strategic priorities of others, or invest collectively in an alternative.

By Rohan Sharma

The effectiveness of U.S.-India AI cooperation will be measured not by the number of joint statements issued, but by whether both countries can build systems that are trusted, interoperable, and deployable across borders.

By Cauvery Ganapathy

Disruptions triggered by the Iranian blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have interrupted global efforts at industrial reshoring, data center-led digitization, electrification, and the reinforcement of defense production lines, while also posing risks to global food security.

By Jeffrey D. Bean

If the U.S. government can facilitate practical, targeted bilateral engagements for mining and processing under the banner of Pax Silica and FORGE, these could support derisking semiconductor, AI, and critical mineral supply chains provided key Global South actors are engaged effectively and equitably.

By Mahdi Ghuloom and Cauvery Ganapathy

What is noteworthy is that the UAE and Bahrain, two countries which have consistently advocated for a diplomatic resolution to the dispute, have now been forced to pivot towards seeking a more proactive approach aimed at securing the Strait under a UN-supported coalition.

By Arnold Musungu, Leigh Mante, and Reem Sagahyroon

The ensuing crisis in the Middle East is intensifying food and water insecurity, climate systems, and agricultural production. The Climate and Energy program from ORF Middle East provides concise analysis of these impacts and reflections on potential pathways forward. 

By Manish Thakre

As local governments increasingly rely on private vendors, building institutional capacity is essential to ensure AI technologies serve the public interest. Decisions about what AI systems to buy, and under what conditions, determine to what extent these systems benefit citizens or produce harmful outcomes.

By Ammar Nainar

Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz resulting from the conflict between the United States and Israel, on the one hand, and Iran on the other, threaten to create another global energy crisis. India has many reasons to proactively take such action: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz risks exacerbating the country’s energy shortages and food insecurity.

By Mannat Jaspal

The only real winners will be those that draw lessons from the crisis and move quickly to build robust energy security frameworks — one that integrate securitization, resilience, and transition planning to safeguard the present and insulate the future.

By Cauvery Ganapathy

In Venezuela’s case, as was the case with Iraq, it is the systematic domestic mismanagement of its resources coupled with inequities of political agency that diminished the value of its natural wealth. American engagement in Venezuela’s oil sector may soon demonstrate, like it did in the United States’ Iraqi sojourn, how deep-rooted these structural fractures are.

By Caroline Arkalji and Telmen Altanshagai

In the coming decades, green steel will shape whether heavy industry can remain both competitive and environmentally-aligned. The remaining question is whether policy frameworks, financing mechanisms, and workforce strategies can move at the same pace.

By Samriddhi Vij, Kabir Taneja, and Akram Zaoui

Ten days into the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran, the conflict has entered a more entrenched phase. With air and maritime connectivity significantly disrupted and President Trump maintaining uncompromising rhetoric, Gulf leaderships find themselves navigating a precarious balance between containment and active self-defense. ORF Middle East experts offer their concise analysis on the latest developments.

By Vishal Manve

India has largely resolved the political signaling problem around nuclear energy. The harder phase now begins: building the human capital, regulatory resilience, and industrial depth necessary to sustain multi-decade deployment.

By Jeffrey D. Bean

The AI Impact Summit underscored India’s commitment to be seen as a leader for technology deployment to the Global South. In this way, India is attempting to serve as a bridge between the leading technology manufacturing countries and the societies where applied technology may have the biggest impact on quality of life, in areas like healthcare, education, and agriculture

By Dhruva Jaishankar

With ongoing strikes in the Middle East, the strategic intentions of Israel, the United States, Iran, and the Gulf Arab states are worth examining, for they will shape the intensity and scope of the war — as well as the long-term repercussions regardless of the outcome. 

By Priyasha Chakravarti

Political parties can use EMAs to more easily campaign and effectively target voters, plan party operations, and rally their supporters, free of outside interference. At the same time, unverified information and hate speech can circulate largely undetected, particularly in countries with limited oversight and regulatory capacity.

By Marta Bengoa

Using outdated balance-of-payments provisions designed for fixed exchange rates makes no sense under current monetary arrangements. Trump can continue imposing tariffs within constitutional boundaries, but the constraints now bind more tightly. Whether this leads to a more sensible trade policy or simply shifts chaos to different legal authorities remains to be seen.

By Anit Mukherjee

Lula’s state visit to India will underscore the important role of Brazil and India as leaders of the Global South helping countries navigate geopolitical uncertainty, rebalanced global trade and supply chains, rapid diffusion of transformational technologies, and accelerating impact of a changing climate. With the United States hosting the G20 this year, a strong relationship between the two countries will be critical to consolidate the achievements and keep the priorities of the Global South on the agenda.

By Sarah Salah

There is no question that Greenland holds substantial mineral wealth. Most mining exploration sites in Greenland are located along the coast, making port infrastructure essential for transporting heavy equipment and extracted materials. Yet declining sea levels threaten the long-term viability of deep-water ports built today, potentially rendering them too shallow within decades.

By Udaibir Das

When finance is discussed in the context of India’s trade agreements, the debate polarizes: either India is genuinely opening, or it remains stuck in defensive regulation. But neither captures what is happening: India is selectively binding regulatory discretion, exporting specific platforms, and keeping control over balance-sheet risks.

By Sunaina Kumar, Soumya Bhowmick, Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, Arpan Tulsyan, and Manish Vaidya

By 2033, the Global South is projected to account for 1.2 billion youths aged 15–24, yet only 480 million are projected to be enrolled in school, and about 420 million to secure employment, leaving nearly 300 million young people facing severely constrained opportunities. Equipping them with quality education and relevant skills is crucial.

By Nilanjan Ghosh, Ramanath Jha, Oommen C. Kurian, Soma Sarkar, and Shoba Suri

A distinctive feature of the year 2026 is the convergence of several transitions: food systems are being reshaped by regenerative practices and digital technologies, health governance is undergoing reform within a post-pandemic framework, and cities are simultaneously sites of vulnerability and centers of innovation.

By Katherine Salinas

As AI rapidly transforms the landscape of research and knowledge production, think tanks face an existential question: what is their role when AI agents can conduct research at speeds no human could match? 

By Mannat Jaspal, Parul Bakshi, Cauvery Ganapathy, Lydia Powell, and Piyush Verma

As we enter 2026, climate and energy policies are being shaped not only by decarbonization imperatives. Geopolitical upheaval, technological competition, economic transformation, supply chain resilience, and national security concerns are exerting influence over the future of energy and climate policies worldwide.

By Anirban Sarma with Sauradeep Bag, Anulekha Nandi, Prateek Tripathi, and Siddharth Yadav

The year 2025 saw several disruptive and emerging technologies advance from rhetoric, and experimentation, into ongoing expansion, to an accelerated phase of growth. At the same time, there emerged a rising sense of urgency about the need for digital sovereignty. Taken together, AI, quantum computing, digital currencies, and nanotechnology represent a frontier where technology, power, and the political economy increasingly converge.

By Anit Mukherjee with Dhruba Purkayastha, Arya Roy Bardhan, Srijan Shukla, and Jhanvi Tripathi

The “reciprocal tariffs” announced by the United States in early April disrupted the global trade flows and unsettled the multilateral system built over several decades. As a result, global players are adjusting to this new reality and altering their behavior beyond tariff measures to safeguard their own interests.

By Piyush Verma

India’s latest Union Budget marks a subtle but important shift in how the country is framing its energy priorities. Rather than centering the narrative solely on clean energy targets or renewable capacity additions and relevant policy support, the Budget signals a broader and more mature emphasis on energy security.

By Dhruva Jaishankar with Pratnashree Basu, Kartik Bommakanti, Lindsey Ford, and Kabir Taneja

The re-election of Donald Trump in the United States (US) has introduced a wave of turbulence to the international system, reversing certain pre-existing trends while accelerating others. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues to contribute to Europe’s rearmament. Israel’s strikes in Iran, Syria, Qatar, and Yemen reflect broader upheaval spreading across the Middle East and beyond. China’s competition with the US persists, extending across multiple domains and regions. Amid this backdrop, at least five major geopolitical megatrends are likely to unfold.

By Marta Bengoa

The India-EU free trade agreement will connect over two billion people across a market representing nearly a quarter of global GDP. But the real story isn't about size. It's about timing. After seventeen years of false starts and negotiations, both parties finally grasped what's at stake: in a world fragmenting between Washington's capricious tariffs and Beijing's economic coercion, this deal is economic insurance.

By Holly Stevens and Siddharth Sharma

As demand for electric vehicles, battery storage, clean energy systems, and advanced technologies continues to accelerate, Australia’s resource base and mining history, Canada’s resource base as well as its mining and industrial capabilities, and India’s market scale and commitment to value-added manufacturing could support diversification across multiple stages of the value chain.

By Marta Bengoa

Speaking at Davos, Trump first ruled out using military force to acquire Greenland (after weeks of refusing to do so), then hours later announced what he called a "framework of a future deal" with NATO on Arctic security. Whether the framework leads to substantive Arctic security cooperation or remains another example of Trump declaring victory without achieving objectives, the damage to transatlantic economic relations has been done.

By Ammar Nainar

For the first time in a defense framework agreement, India and the United States specified “operational coordination” as an objective for enhancing collaboration in Professional Military Education (PME) and training. While earlier exchanges largely involved India borrowing best practices from the United States, recent cooperation between the two countries has emphasized greater joint activities and operations.

By Krishnaveni Palanivelu

Cybersecurity must be treated as a shared economic security challenge. By aligning standards, strengthening cooperation, and embedding cyber resilience into trade, infrastructure, and foreign policy, democracies like the United States and India can better protect their digital foundations and sustain long-term economic stability. 

By Ashwini Thakre and Piyush Verma

No single country can efficiently develop the entire critical minerals value chain on its own, particularly for rare earths and battery materials. Cooperation among the United States, Australia, Japan, and other Indo-Pacific economies reflects a growing recognition that resilience lies not in isolation, but in diversified and trusted networks.