Mint | Iran-Israel lesson: Effective missile defence is costly and could be risky too

The conflicts between Ukraine and Russia and between Israel and Iran over Palestine have demonstrated that missile defence has come of age. Even before Israel, with the help of the US and its allies, successfully intercepted nearly all of the 320 drones, cruise and ballistic missiles that Iran launched last week, the Ukrainians had reported that they had shot down all 80 of the drones that the Russians had dispatched against them on one New Year’s weekend. Read the full article here.

ThePrint | India-Pakistan can become Israel-Hamas. Lesson is not to fight terrorism by force alone

The Hamas-Israel war has entered its fifth week and deaths of innocent civilians remain the hub of its politico-strategic landscape. The cycle of violence initiated by Hamas on 7 October resulted in nearly 1,200 deaths and the kidnapping of over 200 hostages including children. This invited the Israeli invasion of northern Gaza, which continues to progressively enlarge the boundaries of humanitarian tragedy in Palestine. This article aims to explore the action-reaction cycle in the framework of ‘just war’ tradition, which categorises the moral criteria guiding two types of judgements under the captions of jus ad bellum (right to war) and jus in bello (right in war). It also touches upon the relevance of the issue in the context of India’s approach to Pakistan’s use of terrorism as a foreign policy tool. Read the full article here.

Mint | The world cannot escape repercussions of the ongoing war in West Asia

The externalities of Hamas’s perverse terrorism and Israel’s massive military retaliation will haunt the whole world for at least another generation. The conflict is still in progress, but its course over the past month has already given us three terrible assessments. First, Hamas demonstrated that terrorism can succeed in advancing political objectives. In this, it has reversed the post-9/11 strategic consensus that terrorism is not only ineffective as a political strategy but can delegitimize the political cause it seeks to advance. The world had forgotten the Palestinian cause. A month ago, Israel was close to a rapprochement with Arab powers, while Western powers were focused on Russia, China and Iran, and Palestine was off the global agenda. Even before Hamas invaders were beaten back, the ‘two-state solution’—meaning the creation of a viable Palestinian state—was back in circulation. Read the full article here.