News, Views From Nepal

Yuba Nath Lamsal:- The year 2023 is about to bid farewell and a brand new year 2024 will soon dawn. While the year 2023 remained eventful with full of twists and turns in the international political and geopolitical arena having far reaching consequences in the world, the 2024 comes with new hopes and optimism for better world order. The Ukraine war that started in 2022 is still going on, which has impacted the world in multiple ways. It is still not clear what shape and turn this ugly war would take. What is clear is the fact that the Russian invasion in Ukraine has sent a sense of fear in the neighbourhood of Russia. As a consequence, countries in the eastern and northern flank of Europe are strategically moving westward seeking collective European security umbrella. Finland and Sweden sought to join the NATO while Ukraine and Georgia are in the pipelines. Even during the height of the Cold War, Finland practically adopted neutrality which was a role model for many non-aligned an

Yuba Nath Lamsal: Hennery Kissinger, a man gifted with diplomatic genius, has said ‘no foreign policy - no matter how ingenious - has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none’. By this he meant, the conduct of foreign policy must be in congruity with broader popular will and opinion. In the era of modern democracy, foreign policy is no longer an elitist vocation but a subject of public discourse. Technology has reduced the world into a global village wherein every citizen has access to information including the matters of public concerns. Foreign policy too has come to be a subject of public scrutiny and discourse about which foreign policy interlocutors are required to be well cognizant of this reality. Failure to cope with the newer concept of public diplomacy, the foreign policy is doomed to fail. While foreign policy is a broader strategy of the state that seeks to protect and enlarge one’s own national interest, the governmen