author

 
Menu
Search
 
August 09, 2025
 

Today's print edition

Home Delivery
Subscribe for more access
Brahma Chellaney

Meta

Twitter

@Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney
Brahma Chellaney, a longstanding contributor to The Japan Times, is a geostrategist and the author of "Asian Juggernaut" (Harper, 2010) and "Water: Asia’s New Battlefield" (Georgetown University Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Bernard Schwartz Award. He is professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi.
COMMENTARY
Oct 2, 2008
Averting Asian water wars
As the most pressing resource, water holds the strategic key to peace, public health and prosperity. The battles of yesterday were fought over land. Those of today are over energy. But the battles of tomorrow will be over water. And nowhere else does that prospect look more real than in Asia.
COMMENTARY
Sep 17, 2008
Hope overwhelms reality on U.S.-India nuclear deal
The controversy that has dogged the vaunted U.S.-Indian civil nuclear deal is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon despite the recent rule change by the Nuclear Suppliers' Group. Deep-seated partisan rancor in India over the deal and the still-needed U.S. congressional ratification will ensure that. But...
COMMENTARY
Aug 7, 2008
Say no to 'NPT' of climate change
Climate change has been correctly identified as a threat multiplier. Yet it has already become a divisive issue internationally before a plan for a low-carbon future has emerged.
COMMENTARY
Jul 10, 2008
Travails of a nuclear deal
In the twilight of George W. Bush's presidency, there is an unseemly rush in Washington and New Delhi to seal a contentious but far-from-complete civil nuclear deal, even as that issue has landed India in a political crisis.
COMMENTARY
Jun 18, 2008
Is the India and China hype true?
Today it has become commonplace to speak of India and China in the same breadth as two emerging great powers challenging the two-century-old Western domination of the world.
COMMENTARY / World
May 22, 2008
A first lady's diplomatic mission
A natural calamity is usually an occasion to set aside political differences and show compassion. But Burma, ruled by ultranationalistic but rapacious military elites distrustful of the sanctions-enforcing West, came under mounting international pressure to open up its cyclone-wracked areas to foreign...
COMMENTARY
May 9, 2008
How to succeed in Burma with a practical approach
NEW DELHI — Such is the tragedy that Burma symbolizes that, in one week, it has been hit by new U.S. sanctions and by a tropical cyclone that left thousands dead.
COMMENTARY
May 2, 2008
Publicity stunt on Everest
NEW DELHI — As a triumphal symbol of its rule over Tibet, China is taking the Olympic torch through the "Roof of the World" to the world's highest peak, Mount Everest, which straddles the Tibetan-Nepalese border. That publicity stunt will only infuse more politics into the Games, already besmirched...
COMMENTARY
Apr 9, 2008
Contrasting responses to crackdowns in Tibet and Burma
NEW DELHI — There are striking similarities between Tibet and Burma — both are strategically located, endowed with rich natural resources, suffering under long-standing repressive rule, resisting hard power with soft power and facing an influx of Han settlers. Yet the international response to the...
COMMENTARY
Mar 27, 2008
Prolonged unrest in Tibet could unravel China's monocracy
NEW DELHI — The monk-led Tibetan uprising, which spread across Tibet and beyond to the traditional Tibetan areas incorporated in Han provinces, marks a turning point in communist China's history. It is a rude jolt to the world's biggest and longest surviving autocracy, highlighting the signal failure...
COMMENTARY
Mar 14, 2008
Burma sanctions don't work
NEW DELHI — Burma today ranks as one of the world's most isolated and sanctioned nations — a situation unlikely to be changed by its ruling junta scheduling a May referendum on a draft constitution and facilitating U.N. special envoy Ibrahim Gambari's third visit in six months.
COMMENTARY
Feb 20, 2008
Obstacles to overcome in the development of a concert of Asia-Pacific democracies
NEW DELHI — The new Australian government is signaling a wish to turn its back on an initiative bringing four major democracies of the Asia-Pacific together, even as U.S. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has vowed to institutionalize that venture.
COMMENTARY
Feb 4, 2008
Geopolitical risks on the rise
DAVOS, Switzerland — At the recent World Economic Forum meeting of top political, business, intellectual and civil-society leaders, the discussions centered on a range of major international challenges — from new threats to the growing strain on water and other resources.
COMMENTARY
Jan 3, 2008
The military is the problem
NEW DELHI — After having fretted over a rising prodemocracy tide, Pakistan's ruling military can expect to be the main gainer from former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's killing at the very public park where the 1951 assassination of the country's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, helped smother...
COMMENTARY
Dec 26, 2007
China puts muscle to policy
NEW DELHI — Rising economic and military power is emboldening Beijing to pursue a more muscular foreign policy. Having earlier preached the gospel of its "peaceful rise," China is now beginning to take the gloves off, confident of the muscle it has acquired.
COMMENTARY
Oct 13, 2007
Democracies' double standard
NEW DELHI — The repression let loose by Burma's (Myanmar) military junta has fittingly drawn international outrage. But the indignation and new wave of U.S.-led sanctions also obscure an inconvenient truth: Promotion of freedom has become a diplomatic instrument to target not China — the world's...
COMMENTARY
Sep 27, 2007
Hype on nuclear power is misleading
NEW DELHI — Talk of a "global nuclear renaissance" remains just that — all talk. Notwithstanding the strong public relations campaign by the nuclear power industry and its powerful lobbying groups, nuclear energy is hardly the answer to the twin challenges of carbon mitigation and energy security...
COMMENTARY
Aug 16, 2007
Japan, India: natural allies
NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, weakened by a mortifying defeat in Upper House elections, will address the Indian Parliament later this month. This is an honor that U.S. President George W. Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao did not get during their state visits to India last year. India and...
COMMENTARY
Jul 19, 2007
'Quad Initiative': an inharmonious concert of democracies
NEW DELHI — The newly launched Australia-India-Japan-U.S. "Quadrilateral Initiative" has raised China's hackles, but its direction is still undecided owing to differing perceptions within the group over what its aims and objectives ought to be.
COMMENTARY
Jun 26, 2007
China aims for bigger share of South Asia's water lifeline
NEW DELHI — Sharpening Asian competition over energy resources, driven in part by high growth rates in gross domestic product and in part by mercantilist attempts to lock up supplies, has obscured another danger: Water shortages in much of Asia are beginning to threaten rapid economic modernization,...
How Pakistan shot down India's cutting-edge fighter using Chinese gear
An Indian Air Force pilot gets out of a Rafale fighter jet during its induction ceremony at an air force station in Ambala, India, September 2020.
Trump: The $550 billion pledged by Japan is 'our money'
U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. He told CNBC that investment pledges are like signing bonuses.
The United States imposes 15% 'reciprocal' tariff on most Japanese goods
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks at the White House on Wednesday.
Japan's inheritance tax is high, unforgiving and sometimes avoidable
The National Tax Agency at the Ministry of Finance, Kasumigaseki, Tokyo. Japanese tax authorities can bill foreign residents in Japan for assets inherited globally.
Cheer with caution: Expert advises sports fans have game plan for extreme heat
A Cardinals fan fans himself during the seventh inning of a game against the Pirates in St. Louis, Missouri, in June 2022.
Japan's inheritance tax is high, unforgiving and sometimes avoidable
The National Tax Agency at the Ministry of Finance, Kasumigaseki, Tokyo. Japanese tax authorities can bill foreign residents in Japan for assets inherited globally.
Will the movement seeking Ishiba’s resignation succeed?
Liberal Democratic Party youth division head Yasutaka Nakasone (center) and other members speak to reporters in Tokyo on July 25.
Photographer Bleg Bayraktar is winning social media with politeness
A video on Bayraktar's Instagram account of the Belgian photographer approaching an elderly worker in Tokyo's Shibuya has gone viral, garnering almost 9 million views.
Australia announces new warships will come from Japan
The Maritime Self-Defense Force's Mogami-class frigate Niyodo sails at an undisclosed location in this image released Tuesday.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Koichi Tagawa’s diary entry from Aug. 9, 1945, describes the day of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
The horrors of Nagasaki, in first person
By Naoko Abe

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Looking ahead to Yokohama’s Green × Expo 2027
Looking ahead to Yokohama’s Green × Expo 2027

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENTS note

Read more

SUPPLEMENTS BINDER