As the United States seeks reconciliation with China in the second term of the Obama administration, New Delhi must end its current policy paralysis, dressed up as non-alignment between the world's two most important powers. China's warm reception to US Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing over the weekend and the new emphasis on jointly addressing the current crisis in the Korean peninsula could help reduce some of the recent tensions in the Sino-US relationship.

Only the other day two well-known American South-Asia hands, both having served as top US envoys in the region, made a strong plea that Washington should now steer India’s passage into the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec).India, they believe, had overcome the problems that blocked its entry when the Apec was formed. India’s economic policies were now forward-looking instead of looking inwards, as they did then, thus falling in line with the organisational goal of free and open trade movement.

The West won the world not by superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non Westerners never do.’ Samuel. P. Huntington as quoted by J.B. Muller in his dissertation Anglophiles, Eurocentric Arrogance and Reality –The Island November 5, 2010.

When Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American upwardly mobile son of a retired senior Pakistan Air Force officer was picked up for the bombing attempt at New York City’s Times Square in the summer of 2010, it was seen as an aberration but it chipped at the comforting argument that youngsters take to terrorism out of poverty and deprivation.

On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.

Contemporary developments in India’s foreign policy are often based on perceptions and not facts, views divorced from reality and political advocacy based on make-believe. India’s approach to the Sri Lankan issue and the vote in the Human Rights Council (HRC) is a case in point. Variously described as a “new low” in our foreign policy and a departure from our principled stand of not supporting country-specific resolutions, this line of reasoning suggests that New Delhi should ignore and overrule regional sentiment, and refrain from meddling in the affairs of a small neighbour.

The conventional wisdom of Nepal being a yam between two boulders is a metaphor to explain the historical compulsions to balance relations between our two big neighbours, China to the north and India to the other three sides. However, our neighbours’ aspirations of becoming superpowers in the next twenty or thirty years necessitates a shift in Nepal’s foreign policy agenda—from the traditional buffer towards a more vibrant bridge.