… Biden said that President Vladimir Putin “has never seen sanctions like the ones I promised will be imposed if he moves”... “If they actually do what they’re capable of doing with the forces amassed on the border, it is going to be a disaster for Russia if they further invade Ukraine, and that our allies and partners are ready to impose severe costs and significant harm on Russia and the Russian economy…” as of end February 2022, all these conjectures had been thrown in the wind. The invasion is underway. Times are extremely critical and the attention of the whole world will be on Ukraine …

This paper seeks to investigate the factors that allowed China to emerge as a major player in the Oceania. The paper argues that the traditional powers in the region, the ANZUS, have viewed the region predominantly through the geostrategic lens and in the process, have ignored the core concerns of the Pacific States and instead securitized the region driven by their narrow strategic goals, creating a vacuum and a readymade ground for China to step up and assume a gradually increasing influential role in the region with relative ease and without any credible resistance.

On 11 March 2021, China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, endorsed a plan to build a ‘super dam’ on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River in southeastern Tibet. According to Chinese media reports, the dam will have an installed capacity of around 60 Gigawatt (GW), the world’s largest, and will be built at The Great Bend section of the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Nyingchi Prefecture’s Medog County close to the Indian border.

… cyber weapons will be used individually and blended simultaneously with conventional kinetic weapons as force multipliers … for both attacker and defender, it is difficult to predict; cyber weapons often achieve things other than their intended purpose … strategic calculation for attackers thus becomes considerably more complex ... over-reliance by strategists and scholars on such imprecise terminology has significant risks for misinterpretation and premature prescription ...