Viswanathan K's Thoughts

As the Ukraine war completes its first year, Andrew Sullivan’s article asks the pragmatic question: “It (the war) is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?” Ironically though, both sides (West and Russia) believe the war is “right and just”. Russia views a Ukraine that joins NATO as an unacceptable, existential risk. The West considers the invasion of a European country as unacceptable.   Sullivan wonders about the wisdom or folly of Biden’s declaration that Ukraine “must triumph”. Won’t any attempt to retake all of Ukraine, he asks, inevitably mean the war will spill over into “Russia proper at some point”? “My worry is that the West is committing itself to an end-goal — the full liberation of all of Ukraine — that no Russian government could accept, without regime change in Moscow itself. Which means, as Biden’s gaffes sometimes reveal, that this is ineluctably a war for regime change in a nuclear-armed country — which is an extremely hazardous enterprise. It’s righ...

The environmental cost of the fast economic growth is visible in the capitals of the two fastest growing economies in the world: Beijing and New Delhi. The solutions, unfortunately, are not easy. No, it’s not just political or vested interests that are the problem. The bigger problem is the old ecology saying: “You can’t do just one thing.” Expanded, that means that you can’t change one element of an ecosystem without having unintended consequences on other parts of the ecosystem. Take the obvious solution of finding a viable fuel source than oil. That very prospect puts the oil producers on their guard because as Anatole Kaletsky says : “Environmental pressures and advances in clean energy (would) transform much of their oil into a worthless “stranded asset” that can never be used or sold.” So what do the oil producers do? Apart from lobbying, they start pumping as much as oil as they can before it becomes a “stranded asset”. Consequences? a)      Th...