News, Views From Nepal

  Yuba Nath Lamsal The war in Ukraine will leave deeper mark in the geopolitical landscape of Europe. History is witness that invasion in a sovereign country has always been costly no matter how big or powerful the country might be. The world history is littered with the rise and fall of empires. The empires that once boasted as invincible did not last forever and were eventually dumped in the trash of history. Let us go back to recent history. Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded its small neighbour Kuwait in 1990. The Kuwait invasion brought his downfall.   Soviet Union, which was a superpower of that time, invaded Afghanistan in 1979 that proved costly for Moscow and Soviet Union disintegrated in 1992 and lost its super power status. The United States got into military conflict in Vietnam in 1975 to contain spread of communism but Washington had to return in humiliation losing more than it gained as the same Vietcong communists against which America fought 20 years came to ...

  Yuba Nath Lamsal Diplomacy is a litmus test of an individual or state especially in time of crisis, which should be visibly seen to maximize the engagement of counterparts and get things done in the larger interest of the country. Sun Tzu, a military strategist and philosopher of ancient China, said in his famous book ‘The Art of War’, diplomacy is “a supreme art of war to subdue the enemy without fighting”.   In a way, a diplomat is a warrior without fatal weapons and strategist like a commander in war.   The real test of a diplomat is, thus, seen at the time of crises between countries. Given Nepal’s stated non-aligned foreign policy, we have no enemy but friends all over the world. But sometimes, geopolitics is so cruel that it drags even a neutral country into difficult position although the country itself may not be responsible for it. At times, countries fall victim to geopolitical rivalry between big powers, while the slight miscalculation and mishandling o...