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 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Using outdated balance-of-payments provisions designed for fixed exchange rates makes no sense under current monetary arrangements.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 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.
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