Latest news with #TheNationalInterest
Hindustan Times
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Hotmail's Sabeer Bhatia in intense online spat over X post on India-Pakistan hostilities: 'Price a country pays for…'
Hotmail's India-born founder Sabeer Bhatia is facing backlash over a pro-Pakistan news story he has shared on social media. The piece – titled 'How Chinese Missiles Routed India's Air Force Over Pakistan' – was published on May 8 in the American bimonthly magazine The National Interest. In the controversial piece, author Brandon J Weichert claimed an 'unambiguous victory for Pakistan' in the India-Pak conflict. Weichert repeated the Pakistan government's claim of shooting down five Indian Air Force jets – including three Rafales – using Chinese-made PL-15 air-to-air missiles. 'Their [Pakistan's] successful engagement downing five IAF warplanes is a tremendous blow to the IAF, as well as to India's military,' read the piece. Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia shared the piece on X with a caption suggesting critique of Indian leadership. 'This is the price a country pays for the sins of its leaders,' Bhatia wrote, indicating criticism of the Indian government for underestimating the China-Pakistan defence cooperation. Chandigarh-born and San Francisco-based Bhatia has since engaged in multiple online spats defending his stance. His comments section has been flooded with Indians slamming him for his take on India-Pakistan hostilities. 'Have you gotten yourself checked? Sometimes dehydration causes this, and sometimes it could be a serious condition. Mental illness is no joke. The sooner you get yourself checked, the better. Rest well. May you recover soon,' commented X user Jaivardhan Vermaa, to which Bhatia replied: 'No joke.. I'm hydrated too…' X user Karan pointed out that the article is dated and requested the Indian-American entrepreneur to give further context. 'This article is from 8th May. A lot has happened since. Give the complete picture Sabeer. Don't edit stuff like a troll,' he wrote. Bhatia replied to him with a short 'Thank you for your advice.' Some wondered if he even held an Indian passport, with one person writing: 'Which passport do you have Sabeer ? Nonsensical tweets repeatedly from your handle at this time when the nation is at war.' 'World Passport,' Bhatia replied. Others accused him of having become an 'American.' Sabeer Bhatia was born in Chandigarh and grew up in Pune and Bangalore. According to a Times of India report, his father was in the Indian Army. He went to the US at the age of 19 on a Cal Tech scholarship.
News18
12-05-2025
- Politics
- News18
India Won The War, But Lost Narrative Battle To Pakistani & Western Lies
It is time for India to up the PR ante, spend money on building presence in international media, and counter the global negative narrative more robustly India has decisively won the latest military conflict against Pakistan. If anybody had a doubt, the Indian Air Force (IAF) presser on Sunday conclusively demonstrated it with clear images and videos of the precision strikes in Pakistan Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK) and deep inside Pakistan. From Muridke to Bahawalpur and from Sargodha to Jacobabad, every missile strike has been captured, as if in 4K. It is now clear that the bombing of Sargodha and a couple of other airfields could be the immediate reason for Pakistan's panicked outreach to the US, which, in turn, advised it to directly request India for a ceasefire, which Pakistan did. Apparently, the Indian missiles landed alarmingly close to its nuclear facilities and could even have triggered radiation. But despite this unprecedented aggressive response to a terror attack (the Pahalgam massacre, in this case), cheer was missing from the Indian side. It was as if we had lost. Pakistan, forever blissfully in denial, actually started claiming victory. The Western media obliged, with almost congratulatory pieces and shows about Pakistan snatching a ceasefire. advetisement There were three main narrative setbacks for India. First, some seriously irresponsible and childish mainstream media reporting. It is fine to run psy-ops on social media and rattle the enemy. But when the mainstream media outlets mirror that misinformation, it leads to loss of credibility and opens up the nation's information environment to damaging fact-checks and mocking, even when there is enough meat in its military response. Sensational stories like Lahore, Karachi or Islamabad falling did just that. It is a good occasion for the Indian media to introspect. At a time when plain-vanilla reporting is sensational enough, going overboard with spice is a recipe for self-goals which harms the nation's splendid military effort. Second, the international media coverage was grossly tilted against India. The West was especially negative. Neocon online publication The National Interest carried pieces titled 'How Chinese Missiles Routed India's Air Force Over Pakistan' and 'Why Has India's Military Performed So Poorly Against Pakistan?', both by Brandon J Weichert, a contributor to the Hong Kong-based Asia Times and author of Biohacked: China's Race To Control Life and other books. 'The Pakistanis have proven their mettle. Armed with top Chinese equipment, and with military assistance provided by the Turks, Islamabad has shown itself to be more than capable of rebuffing at least the initial wave of Indian air attacks. The Pakistanis shot down a total of five Indian Air Force (IAF) warplanes at the start of Operation Sindoor, after all," Weichert writes. A Reuters headline screamed: 'Exclusive: Pakistan's Chinese-made jet brought down two Indian fighter aircraft, US officials say'. 'At least two Indian jets appeared to have crashed during Pakistan strikes, visuals show', read a Washington Post headline. Interestingly, neither Pakistan nor the unnamed US officials whom the Western media quoted could produce any proof of a single Indian plane being shot down. Al Jazeera, the undeclared mouthpiece of Islamists worldwide, went as far as to carry the laughable Pakistani canard that Indian woman pilot Shivangi Singh has been captured. Pakistani director general of inter-Services Public Relations Ahmed Shareef Chaudhry, who is the son of UN-designated terrorist and Osama bin Laden's close aide Bashiruddin Mahmood, later denied that Pakistan has custody of any pilot and dismissed it as 'fake news from social media". It is another matter that his boss, Pakistani defence minister Khawaja Asif, told Sky News that the proof of Pakistan downing Indian planes was 'all over social media". But why did the international media lap up Pakistan's brazen lies and contradictions? Why was the Indian side so bleakly presented? Is it because China wielded its influence—built through years of lobbying, buying out journalists, and funding western media and academia? Or does Pakistan and its intelligence ISI do better PR in the West than India? Or because the West and China's planes and missile defence systems were effectively busted by India's own homegrown weapons and Russian aircraft and missile interception systems like S-400, making it a terrible advertisement to potential buyers? advetisement We may not know the precise answers, but it is time for India to up the PR ante, spend money on building presence in international media, and counter the global negative narrative more robustly. Third, US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance have re-hyphenated India and Pakistan. Trump infantilised India, which is the victim of Pakistan-sponsored terror, by his statement: 'Proud that the USA was able to help you arrive at this historic and heroic decision." Claiming credit, he said on Saturday that the US mediated talks after which the two neighbours 'agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE". He then added insult by bringing up Kashmir and offering to mediate, which India had politely but firmly turned down in the past. 'I am going to increase trade, substantially, with both of these great Nations. Additionally, I will work with you both to see if, after a 'thousand years," a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir," read his statement. advetisement Could it be some ulterior reason, some kind of a negotiating chip to cut India down to size before the imminent trade deal? top videos View All Whatever the reason, India will need to disabuse the pathological narcissist in Trump and set the narrative right. It was never enough to win the war on the battlefield. The greatest nations and leaders have also won the war in the mind and popular imagination. Only then does one effectively break the enemy's morale and lift it for one's own people. The ceasefire has given us that moment of introspection. tags : donald trump Operation Sindoor Pahalgam attack pakistan United states Location : New Delhi, India, India First Published: May 12, 2025, 08:50 IST News opinion Opinion | India Won The War, But Lost Narrative Battle To Pakistani & Western Lies
Iraq Business
08-03-2025
- Politics
- Iraq Business
Iraqis Fear That Trump's America Will Depart Once and For All
By David Schenker for The National Interest. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News. Iraqis Fear That Trump's America Will Depart Once and For All Baghdad has good reason to be concerned about the trajectory of the U.S.-Iraq relationship. Click here to read the full report.
Politico
12-02-2025
- Business
- Politico
A future-minded Republican senator launches an uphill battle
Presented by A key Senate Republican with some big ideas about tech is calling for Trumpworld to reconsider some of its basic governing premises. Writing Monday in the realist international relations magazine The National Interest, Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) — an architect of the CHIPS and Science Act — made an exhaustive case that in order to keep America's place as the global tech leader, the second Trump administration might have to embrace spending and diplomacy at a level it has so far shunned. 'If America leads smartly to strengthen our industrial base and enhance our economic resilience, our allies and partners will follow, and our adversaries will quake,' Young wrote in what he called the 'Tech Power Playbook for Donald Trump 2.0.' 'The promise of America First will be fulfilled.' While conveyed with Trump-friendly rhetoric and bluster — and seemingly aligned with the America-first tech vision that Vice President JD Vance touted in Paris yesterday — Young's ideas differ in crucial ways from other major players on the Trumpian right. Elon Musk is engaged in a single-minded cost-cutting project. Steve Bannon continues to preach his gospel of isolationism. Young, a second-term senator from Indiana and heir to that state's legacy of technocratic, yet still pointedly conservative governance, argues instead that if America really wants to ensure supremacy on AI over China and the triumph of American values abroad, it needs a muscular State Department and well-funded federal research infrastructure. That's a seemingly counterintuitive program for the modern GOP, but one that's earning praise from tech-focused thinkers on the right. 'Senator Young has been consistently ahead of the curve on AI's enormous geopolitical implications,' Samuel Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, told DFD, calling Young's worldview 'appropriately paranoid' about the risks of China winning the AI race. It's not just Young's fellow tech-first Republicans who lauded the document: Oren Cass, founder of the anti-libertarian American Compass think tank, praised its 'focus on leveraging our economic power rather than blindly embracing globalization,' and the Brookings Institution's Mark Muro called it a 'compelling argument.' Maintaining both a Biden-era spending package and good relations with allies are likely to be a tough sell — to say the least — for a Trump administration seemingly more concerned with dismantling the administrative state and taking back the Panama Canal. But Young's document represents one of the most thorough attempts yet to ground Musk and Trump's star-spangled vision of interplanetary techno-supremacy in real-world policy, and tackle the more prosaic problems that need to be solved for it to achieve liftoff. The 'playbook' undergirds its global ambition with a domestic spending program. Young, as an author of the CHIPS and Science Act, is clearly chagrined at Congress' failure to appropriate the billions of dollars in research spending it authorized. 'Congress should act swiftly to fully fund the authorities of the 'and Science' portion of the bill' to 'out-compete and out-innovate' competitors, he writes, and 'help more innovators commercialize their research and present options to the world that are not tainted by the authoritarian designs of the CCP.' Is anyone in Congress listening? It remains to be seen whether there's an audience for big ideas about the American future from anyone not named Trump or Musk. A Young spokesperson said in an email that 'Senator Young has had conversations with colleagues about the importance of science funding, particularly how important it is to our national security.' Meanwhile, current negotiations over the budget center around border security and military funding, while Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has called for massive cuts at agencies, including the National Science Foundation where the bulk of the 'and Science' funding was promised. Ars Technica reported last week that cuts to the NSF budget in Trump's forthcoming budget request could be up to 66 percent. When it comes to diplomacy, Young clearly believes in Trump-style sticks as much as carrots. He calls in his blueprint for a strong, active approach to enforcing export controls against China on AI and other advanced technologies, arguing that 'growth in the U.S. market catalyzed by the CHIPS Act will help offset restrictions on selling into the Chinese market.' He lays out a wonky plan for the State and Commerce Departments to work together using offices and funding established under the CHIPS and Science Act to ensure compliance, and for America to 'keep working with like-minded allies and partners while utilizing commercial and trade advantages wherever possible to develop a liberal, democratic market for technology that reinforces our values — privacy, transparency, safety, property rights, freedom of speech, and religion.' To a certain kind of MAGA Republican, that might sound suspiciously like the 'globalism' that Trump made his first political hay in part by railing against. At the same time, even for tech-friendly moderate Democrats the pitch's pointed hawkishness toward China and invocation of the Reaganite 'we win, they lose' mentality could make it a hard pill to swallow. For now, Young's path forward is unclear. In response to a query about whether it will continue the International Technology Security and Innovation Fund that Young cites as a key tool for diplomacy — and which was set up through CHIPS and Science — a State Department spokesperson said 'As a general matter, we do not comment on congressional communications and correspondence.' And with the administration's all-out trade war against geopolitical foes and allies alike, the prospect of multilateral collaboration on tech and economics seems to fade each day. All this means that Young and the otherwise Trump-friendly thinkers who support him might, for the moment, be swimming upstream politically. Still, they seem to be placing a bet that when the shock-and-awe of the first 100 days wears off, and the everyday burden of governance sets in, the administration will ultimately come around to their way of thinking — that the AI and semiconductor race provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and responsibility, to roll up their sleeves and get to the bureaucratic dirty work required to fit geopolitics to American values. FAI's Hammond described the document as an attempt to bring Republicans back around to 'grand strategy,' a foreign policy concept associated with the post-World War II era that demands such a sweeping program aimed at establishing multi-generational hegemony. 'If we lose the AI race to China, it will be more a failure of statecraft than raw technological capability,' Hammond said. If AI turns out to be as powerful a world-changing tool as Vance proclaimed it in Paris Tuesday, Young and his allies are betting a return to that level of statecraft will be necessary to make sure America guides it. Christine Mui contributed to this report. doge at gsa Employees at the General Services Administration are chafing at the Silicon Valley-style approach DOGE is taking to their workplace. POLITICO's Danny Nguyen reported today based on conversations with three anonymous GSA employees that staff fear 'career-ending' consequences should they not answer questions to DOGE's satisfaction. One project manager said people are trying to play up their technical skills because 'They don't think DOGE people respect the softer 'moving complex projects through government bureaucracy' types of skills.' The staffers said DOGE representatives did not indicate what happens next after these interviews. One data scientist argued that the chainsaw Elon Musk seemingly wants to take to the GSA could be counterproductive for the mission of modernizing government IT systems, although the staffers believe they are most likely to keep employees who engineer and ship code. One supervisor familiar with DOGE leadership's thinking said its vision for the agency likely reflects 'a Silicon Valley mental model of 'pour all the data into a [language learning model] and then replace all the jobs with AI.' europe pivots on ai The AI Action Summit's reframing of the global AI discussion earned cheers and boos as it came to a close Tuesday. POLITICO's Morning Tech Europe reported this morning on the response from industry and digital rights groups, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a pitch that the EU is 'innovation-friendly' and open for business. Industry was happy — to a certain extent. OpenAI's chief lobbyist Chris Lehane told reporters he was encouraged by von der Leyen's remarks, but he still wants more out of the EU's regulatory framework: 'Attracting the global capital to invest in infrastructure in those places is really going to require a regulatory framework here that will allow for this part of the world to be able to develop and build its own AI ecosystem so that the economic model can justify the investment into that infrastructure.' On the other hand, digital rights groups saw European regulators as caving to industry pressure. Blue Duangdjai Tiyavorabun, policy adviser at the nonprofit advocacy group European Digital Rights, said that EU tech czar Henna Virkkunen was 'caving in on pushback against EU's tech laws … she fuels deregulation, appeases U.S. and tech corporations, while ruining civil society's few, but hard-won human rights victories in the AI Act.' post OF THE DAY The Future in 5 links Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@ and Christine Mui (cmui@
