Bhutan’s recognition of Bangladesh without waiting for Indian advice was a clever move. It was a calculated gamble to assert its independence, says Ambassador T P Sreenivasan.

Thimphu, the capital of Bhutan had very few comforts in 1971. For us, who went to Bhutan from Tokyo, with a nine-month old baby 42 years ago, the feeling was that we had walked backwards in time by about half a century. The first motorable road was opened only in 1968 and there were no commercial flights into Bhutan. The drive from the border town of Phuntsholing in India to Thimphu took the whole day, with a lunch break at Chukha, a small rivulet at that time, but a gigantic hydro-electric project now. Electricity was a rarity and we had to huddle around a bukhari, which bu...

Foreign policy often involves making difficult and debatable choices about which parts of the world matter more to a given country—and which, by extension, matter less. It’s about defining national interests and determining where those interests are most evident and endangered. This is why the United States has done far more to stop ISIS in Syria and Iraq than, say, sectarian war in the Central African Republic. In short, it’s about priorities. And according to a new survey of U.S. foreign-policy experts and practitioners, those priorities could look a lot like the map above in 2015, at least from America’s point of view. The map sorts potential conflicts around the world into three tiers of risk: red for high-priority threats, orange for moderate-priority threats, and yellow for low...