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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Washington last week, making his fourth trip to the United States since taking office just two years ago. India and South Asia Program Fellow, Ronak Desai examines the strategic approach to India's relations with the United States.

The Chinese cyber threat to the United States has been exaggerated. China's cyber capabilities are outmatched by those of the West, and Beijing reaps too many benefits from the internet's liberal norms to attempt to seriously undermine them.

Cyberwar has been described as a revolution in military affairs capable of overturning the prevailing world order. By itself, however, cyberwar can achieve neither conquest nor, in most cases, coercion. Conflict over the internet is much more likely to serve as an adjunct to, rather than a substitute for, existing modes of terrestrial force, and to augment the advantages of status quo powers rather than threatening existing political hierarchies.

While decisionmakers warn about the cyber threat constantly, there is little systematic analysis of the issue from an international security studies perspective. Cyberweapons are expanding the range of possible harm between the concepts of war and peace, and give rise to enormous defense complications and dangers to strategic stability. It is detrimental to the intellectual progress and policy relevance of the security studies field to continue to avoid the cyber revolution's central questions.

"...[T]he rivalry between models of socio-economic development did not begin with the cold war. During the Depression, liberals sought to show that planned economic and social development was possible without the use of autocratic methods. Liberal internationalists, aware that their totalitarian ideological competitors offered their own attractive modernization programmes needed a liberal champion. In the TVA they found a global model that became nearly synonymous with liberal development because of its claim to harmonize potentially destabilizing forces. At a time when development models were features of the international discourse, the TVA distinguished itself by offering proof that large-scale, socially transformative, planning-based development was viable in a liberal democracy. The ease with which these ideas supplied an ideological strategy during the cold war illustrated the degree to which modernization had already proved its effectiveness as a weapon against ideological challenges to liberalism."

China's Ministry of Science and Technology launched the China-Africa Science and Technology Partnership on November 24, 2009.  The ministry announced that technological cooperation will be enhanced in areas such as water management and conservation, sanitation, crop breeding, health, and renewable energy. One hundred joint research partnerships will be created, and 100 African scientists at the postdoctoral level will have the opportunity to conduct research at China's technology parks, research institutes, and private enterprises. Chinese scientists and engineers will also travel to African countries to provide technical guidance, and in order to increase the research capacities of African countries, China will also donate laboratory equipment.

Science, Technology, and Globalization Project Director Calestous Juma shared his insights into the history and future of Sino-African relations in a February 2008 interview with that's China columnist Jing Zhang.

"This introductory essay explains how this new technology is being driven by the actors (multinational corporations), markets (large global markets) and rules (intellectual property) of globalisation."

This paper was written for the conference "The Challenge of Hiroshima. Alternatives to Nuclear Weapons, Missiles, Missile Defenses, and Space Weaponization in a Northeast Asian Context" organized by INESAP and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation on October 8-11, 2004, in Hiroshima, Japan.

Dr. Ashton B. Carter in Foreign Affairs.

Carter, Deutch, and Zelikow addresses the threat of Catastrophic Terrorism in Foreign Affairs.