Nida Amir Afridi- History in a glance

In the first week of January the American president said, of Greenland, that his country needed it for reasons of security. What struck me was the silence that followed in European capitals, which told me more than any reply could have. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.” — President Donald Trump, January 2026, as reported by the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy The island belongs to Denmark, a founding member of NATO, and the man claiming it leads the alliance’s most powerful state. After years of covering summits, I know that diplomats reach for euphemism the way other people reach for an umbrella. Plainness, when it comes, is startling. My argument is a narrow one, and admirers of the West may not enjoy it: Europe’s predicament is not chiefly about money or machinery. It is about political will. Moscow has noticed, and so has Beijing, and so has every middle power watching from the stands. Read full article on Minute Mirror

  When Kabul fell in August 2021, Western capitals watched with dread. Islamabad barely hid its satisfaction. American transport planes lifted off from Hamid Karzai International Airport, closing twenty grinding years of occupation, and inside Pakistan’s deep state the mood was one of historic vindication. For decades the country’s security thinking had rested on “strategic depth”: a friendly, pliant government in Kabul that would shut India out of the western flank and quiet a porous border. Then came the photograph, of senior Pakistani intelligence officials sipping tea in the lobby of Kabul’s Serena Hotel days after the takeover. It said what everyone assumed: the new rulers would remember their benefactors. They did not. History is hard on short-sighted victories, and the euphoria soured fast. Pakistan’s original error was misreading the Taliban’s motives. Islamabad had treated them as one obedient proxy, brushing aside Pashtun nationalism and the binding force of global jihad....