Let our geopolitical strategy be like a patchwork quilt

Morning shows the day and developments during the first week of 2026 promise to turn the year into a geopolitical roller-coaster.

- RAJRISHI SINGHAL

India will probably need new tools during this period and may have to look further afield for some tips.Each nation’s individual and unique strategy has to be a sum of parts, some of which may have to be borrowed. At a stretch, even a small country like Laos can probably offer India some partial lessons. Here is why.

The landlocked southeast Asian country Laos earned a rather unenviable distinction during the mid-1960s and early 1970s: it became the world’s most bombed country on a per capita basis. Between 1964 and 1973, US bomber planes discharged over 2 million tonnes of ordnance over Laos, which works out to about a planeload of munitions every eight minutes over nine years. A lot of unexploded stuff is still out there, detonating even now and causing damage to life and limb. The US had two reasons to dump so much incendiary material: Laos had not only become a staging platform for North Vietnam president Ho Chi Minh’s assault on South Vietnam, running circles around US forces, he also used the opportunity to aid a communist rebel uprising against the Laotian monarchy. After the smoke cleared, Ho Chi Minh was able to successfully integrate North and South Vietnam, Laos became a communist republic and the US retreated battered and bruised, but its then secretary of state Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.