Table of Contents
Today’s brief reads three articles. Shairee Malhotra and Maiwand Safi of the Observer Research Foundation ask what the Taliban visit to Brussels does to the idea of recognition. Lynn Kuok writes in Foreign Affairs on how China is making its control of the South China Sea look normal. Vishwajeet Singh Akhawat of the Vivekananda International Foundation argues that Iran’s politics at home now drive its conduct in the Strait of Hormuz.
Europe cannot send Afghans home without the Taliban, so it has begun to deal with them.
In June 2026 officials of the European Union received a Taliban delegation in Brussels. The talks were about migration and the return of Afghan nationals. The European Commission said they were technical and did not amount to recognition. Shairee Malhotra and Maiwand Safi read the visit differently. Europe wants Afghans sent back. Only the government in Kabul can take them. So Brussels has started to deal with a government it refuses to recognise, and each such dealing makes the refusal harder to hold.
The record
- The delegation had five members. It was led by the Afghan foreign ministry spokesperson Abdul Qahar Balkhi, and Belgium gave the members one day visas.
- European governments closed their embassies in Kabul when the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. This was the first official meeting between the Taliban and the European Union on European soil since then. An earlier meeting was held in Austria in January.
- The European Union approached the Taliban. The Taliban did not begin the contact.
- Member states received about one million asylum applications from Afghans between 2013 and 2024. Roughly half were approved.
- The European Union has framed the meeting as an answer to 20 of its 27 member states, which have asked for stricter migration rules and quicker deportations.
- Germany and Austria have already deported Afghan nationals with criminal records. Berlin let two Taliban officials work at the Afghan mission in Germany to help further deportations.
- The delegation asked that diplomats appointed by the Taliban be allowed to serve in Afghan embassies in Europe. Apart from Germany, most of those embassies are still staffed by diplomats appointed before August 2021.
- Over three million Afghans were forced back from Pakistan and Iran in the past year.
- One third of the Afghan population, more than 17 million people, is food insecure. The figure is from the World Food Programme. On the Rule of Law Index Afghanistan stands 142nd of 143 countries.
- Hannah Neumann, a member of the European Parliament, says the talks make relations with the Taliban normal without getting any account in return.
The argument
The case shows the difference between dealing with a government in fact and recognising it in law. Brussels grants visas, holds talks and negotiates returns. It still says the Taliban is not the government of Afghanistan. The authors call this a pattern of de facto recognition, arriving in instalments. Carry the case into any answer on recognition, and into answers on what a state gains from being dealt with rather than acknowledged.
It is also a lesson in what decides a foreign policy. The EU has spoken for years about human rights in Afghanistan. What moved it was the pressure of migration at home and the strength of the far right in member states. Interest beat principle. That is the realist claim about foreign policy, and here is an example a candidate can name and date.
For India the point is comparative. The PSIR 2023 question asks what India has done in Afghanistan since the takeover of August 2021. The same problem runs through that answer. A state can deal with Kabul on the things it needs without saying the words that recognise it.
“The reality is that the Taliban remains the authority governing Afghanistan. Any substantial arrangement regarding the return of Afghan nationals, the provision of consular services, and the coordination of humanitarian assistance inevitably requires cooperation with the Taliban.”
Shairee Malhotra and Maiwand Safi
“The Taliban’s Brussels visit should be understood less as a diplomatic breakthrough and more as evidence of Europe’s growing recognition that practical challenges — migration management, consular affairs, and humanitarian coordination — cannot be addressed without engaging the authorities in Kabul.”
Shairee Malhotra and Maiwand Safi
China is taking the South China Sea by acts too small to be worth answering.
In April 2025 Chinese coast guard personnel stepped on to Sandy Cay, an empty sandbar in the Spratly Islands, and held up the Chinese flag. Most of the world did not notice. Lynn Kuok writes that this was the first formal claim of sovereignty on the ground over an unoccupied feature in more than a decade. China has gone back to contesting land, after years in which the quarrel was about rights at sea. Each new act is small. A flag, a floating structure, a survey ship. No single one is worth a war, and that is the design.
The record
- Sandy Cay lies barely two nautical miles from Thitu Island, which the Philippines occupies. The territorial seas of the two features, twelve nautical miles each, therefore overlap almost completely. A claim to the sandbar narrows the space in which Philippine forces can work around their own outpost.
- Between late 2013 and 2015 China dredged sand and coral to enlarge seven features it already held, and later built military and civilian facilities on them.
- In October 2025 China began large scale dredging at Antelope Reef in the Paracel Islands, about 215 nautical miles east of the coast of central Vietnam. Satellite pictures suggest it is on course to become the largest Chinese military outpost in the South China Sea, with room for a runway, a harbour, missile facilities, underground storage and equipment for watching and for electronic warfare.
- The tribunal at The Hague ruled in 2016 on the case the Philippines brought under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It rejected any Chinese claim to historic rights inside the nine-dash line, a shape for which Beijing has never given coordinates. It also found that none of the features it examined generates an exclusive economic zone.
- That ruling binds only the Philippines and China. The tribunal did not decide who owns the land features, because it had no power to do so. This is why so much of what China now does on land sits in a legal grey area.
- Under the Convention, land that stays above water at high tide is an island and carries a territorial sea of up to twelve nautical miles. If it can support human habitation or an economic life of its own it may also carry an exclusive economic zone of up to 200 nautical miles. Features exposed only at low tide cannot be owned at all.
- In September 2025 Beijing approved a national nature reserve at Scarborough Shoal. China has controlled access to the shoal since 2012 without occupying it. The reserve lets it present a ban on fishing as protection of the environment.
- In the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, China and the members of ASEAN promised restraint about settling on features nobody occupies. The declaration is not binding.
- The Philippines buys about 98 per cent of its crude oil from West Asia. Of the three million people from South East Asia who live or work there, an estimated 2.4 million are Filipinos. The war has therefore hit Manila hard, and its president has spoken of talks with Beijing on oil and gas.
The argument
This is the grey zone in one case study. A rising power changes the position on the ground while staying below the level at which the other side must fight. It mixes coast guards, survey ships, administrative orders and law. Navies are built for the big attack. The big attack never comes.
His second point is about law. Where the tribunal spoke, on rights in the water, other states have firm ground to stand on. Where it was silent, on who owns the land, they have almost none. A candidate can use this to show what an international judgment does and what it cannot do.
For India the reading is direct. India argues for the Convention, for knowing what moves in its waters, and for partnerships across the Indo-Pacific. This article shows why all three are needed together. It also gives the material for the PSIR question on the Quad and on the shift from Asia Pacific to Indo-Pacific.
“In both domains, China’s aim is the same: the steady accumulation of advantage rather than a single decisive victory.”
Lynn Kuok
“Countering this strategy requires more than conventional naval power.”
Lynn Kuok
Iran is asking a strait to carry more weight than it can bear.
Vishwajeet Singh Akhawat argues that Iran’s conduct in the Strait of Hormuz is now set at home. Before 28 February 2026 Tehran practised what he calls strategic restraint. It answered attacks in measured steps and kept a door open for talks. The killing of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on the first day of the war closed that door. Hard line factions now say that force is the way to win concessions. His warning is that Iran is asking the strait to deliver more than it can, and that every month of pressure teaches its customers to buy elsewhere.
The record
- The old posture was one of calibrated escalation. It was seen after the killing of Qassem Soleimani, and again in the twelve day war with Israel in June 2025.
- The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding collapsed over the Strait of Hormuz. Each side read the wording its own way. The quarrel was about other shipping routes, above all routes through the waters of Oman, which Iran treated as a breach.
- Iran has since attacked commercial ships that crossed by the Omani route without its permission. It has also struck at Gulf states, including Jordan and Oman, which have usually been closer to it.
- Iran has set up the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, or PGSA, to handle the passage of commercial ships through the strait. The Gulf states have jointly asked shipping companies neither to use the route Iran designates nor to deal with the authority.
- Japan depends wholly on imports for its crude oil, and 80 per cent of that oil comes through the Strait of Hormuz. It has repeatedly asked for free and safe passage at no extra cost.
- China is Iran’s strategic partner and the largest buyer of its oil. It has refused to lend any support to the Iranian claim to control commercial traffic through the strait.
- India has widened its supply of oil and gas from 27 countries to 41. India’s External Affairs Minister has spoken of a fundamental and possibly irreversible change in the flow of energy out of the region.
- The United Arab Emirates has fast-tracked a second pipeline that will double what it can export through Fujairah. Saudi Arabia is enlarging its East West pipeline.
- At the funeral in Tehran, President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi were heckled as traitors. The Payadari Front, which calls itself principlist, has held demonstrations against the government for entering ceasefire talks.
- The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps holds power over nearly every centre of authority. It supports negotiations in public while telling Iranian negotiators to give up nothing on control of the strait.
The argument
Here is the clearest use for the topic on the determinants of foreign policy. The determinant at work is domestic. Factions, ideology, a funeral crowd and the fear of being heckled as traitors are shaping what Iran does at sea. A candidate who can name the Payadari Front, and the crowd that heckled Pezeshkian, has moved from assertion to evidence.
The second lesson is about power drawn from geography. A chokepoint gives a state power only while its customers have no other way. Japan protests, China refuses to back the claim, the Emirates build new pipelines and India buys from 41 countries instead of 27. Iran’s threat is using up the very thing that gives the threat its force.
For India both points matter. The PSIR question on the limits of India and Iran relations and the GS-2 question on energy security are answered from this article. The lesson to carry is the one the writer draws. Lasting influence comes from workable relations with neighbours, not from a hand on a chokepoint.
“Iran’s strategic objectives are considerably more ambitious than the leverage available to achieve them.”
Vishwajeet Singh Akhawat
“The domestic political climate is gradually eroding the space for pragmatic diplomacy.”
Vishwajeet Singh Akhawat
Where this belongs in your syllabus
Open the note and read the full topic.
The questions this feeds
Questions from earlier years that today’s reading speaks to. Where the answer is written, the red link opens it. The full set is in the PYQ Vault.
- PSIR Paper II · 2023 · 15mQuadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) performs an important role in India's strategic balancing act to withstand the dominance of China in Asia. Discuss.Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2024 · 10mDiscuss the rationale for replacing "Asia-Pacific" with "Indo-Pacific".Answer
- PSIR Paper II · 2023 · 15mWhat are the challenges and limitations in India-Iran relations?Answer
- GS-2 · 2025 · 15mDiscuss about energy security as the kingpin of India's foreign policy and its influence in Middle Eastern countries.
- PSIR Paper II · 2023 · 15mWhat are the steps India has taken to regain its foothold in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover of August 2021?Answer