Nepal, Oct. 16 -- Nepal must work to avoid becoming a pawn at the hands of either of its two neighbors or going against them to please any powers.

The basic premise of any country's foreign policy is its geography and socio-historical tradition. It was against this setting that the unifier of Nepal, King Prithvi Narayan Shah (1742-1774), laid down the guidelines of a "yam between two boulders." He alerted the nation to be careful, cautious, and rational, as geography is a hard reality a country cannot afford to ignore.

In the early 19th century, Napoleon suggested to study a nation's geography to know its foreign policy. The "geographic location" of a country, wrote Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to US Preside...