When India and Pakistan clash, the world too often dismisses it wearily as just another flare-up of age-old animosities over religion and Kashmir punctuated by inconclusive cross-border skirmishes. As President Trump recently put it — inaccurately — “They’ve had that fight for a thousand years in Kashmir,” and “probably longer than that.”
This is somewhat understandable. Despite a few wars and many more scuffles between Muslim-majority Pakistan and predominantly Hindu India, confrontations have always been followed by negotiation and diplomacy, often facilitated by the United States. Even when serious fighting did erupt, established guardrails kept the two sides from coming too close to the unthinkable: using their nuclear weapons.
That predictable cycle is a thing of the past. The immediate trigger for the military conflict now underway between the countries was a terrorist attack on Hindu tourists in Kashmir last month that killed 26 people. The incident’s rapid escalation into armed hostilities spotlights a profound and dangerous shift in the India-Pakistan rivalry in recent years that has eliminated the diplomatic space that had allowed the neighbors to avoid a devastating conflict.
That shift can be traced to the two countries’ vastly different trajectories.
India has emerged as a geopolitical and economic powerhouse and its Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, has cast it as not only a great nation, but an ascendant great civilization whose moment on the global stage has arrived. This has crystallized an uncompromising mind-set in which New Delhi increasingly views Pakistan not as a disruptive nuisance but an acute threat to India’s rightful rise. India has lost patience with Pakistan’s claim on the Indian-held half of Kashmir, the Muslim-majority region that each side calls its own, and its support of anti-India terrorism.
Pakistan, on the other hand, has been mired for two decades in economic, political and security crises. One institution there reigns supreme: a powerful army that dominates decision-making and has very significant conventional and nuclear military capability. Although beleaguered, Pakistan, with its own ambitions to remain a regional power, is unwilling to back down against India and on issues such as Kashmir that are central to its national identity.
In decades past, it was usually Indian restraint in the face of Pakistani actions that maintained an uneasy equilibrium. Even after deadly incidents such as the 2008 attack in Mumbai by Pakistan-based terrorists, which killed 166 people, India typically responded with moderation and periodic peace overtures.
Under Mr. Modi, that has changed. Over the past decade, he has shifted to a strategy of seeking to isolate Pakistan internationally coupled with covert operations, subversion and targeted killings. At the same time, Pakistan, and in particular its army, has showed signs of interest in stepping back from its traditional anti-India posture for a period. After a border conflict in 2019, Pakistan exercised more restraint than perhaps at any other point in the two nations’ fraught history, including restoring a cease-fire in 2021. But by then, India had moved on.
Even if the two sides back off and the current hostilities fizzle, India seems determined to pursue a more absolutist endgame of long-term pressure aimed at changing Pakistani political calculations on India and inflicting irreparable damage to Pakistan’s main power center, its army. Since the Kashmir attack last month, prominent Indian politicians and analysts have taken a more maximalist position, arguing that Pakistan is a failed rogue state and that India must actively seek its destruction.
Pakistan, aware of this shift, has abandoned hope of normalized relations with India and appears to be girding for a prolonged confrontation. Ominously, the confrontation is threatening crucial guardrails that prevented conflicts from spiraling. India last month suspended a 1960 treaty on the sharing of rivers, in particular the Indus waters, threatening one of Pakistan’s most important water supplies. Pakistan previously warned that such a suspension would be considered an “act of war” and has threatened to abandon a 1972 agreement that established the border in a divided Kashmir.
All of this is taking place as the United States has stepped back from being South Asia’s crisis manager. Washington once served as an intermediary, trusted by both sides and able to pull India and Pakistan back from the brink. In 1999, President Bill Clinton personally intervened to help end direct fighting between the two countries in Kashmir; U.S. shuttle diplomacy defused tensions after terrorists attacked India’s Parliament in 2001; and American officials prevented military escalation after the 2008 Mumbai attacks and helped bring some of those responsible to justice.
Today, prospects for that kind of good-offices role have withered. The Biden administration distanced itself from India-Pakistan tensions largely to placate New Delhi, which Washington wants to serve as a regional counterweight to China. The Trump administration has voiced strong support for Mr. Modi but is otherwise preoccupied with its trade war, conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, and diplomacy with Iran. At any rate, third-party mediation appears no longer welcome in New Delhi, which sees it as enabling Pakistan, and it is often ineffective with Islamabad, which distrusts Western countries’ ties with India. Communication channels between India and Pakistan that once provided crucial safety valves have also atrophied.
None of that is any excuse for international complacency as the two nuclear-armed nations trade blows. The Russia-Ukraine war has shattered taboos on issuing nuclear threats, and if India cannot change Pakistani calculations through limited armed actions it may try more punishing military operations that bring it closer to Pakistan’s nuclear redlines. A deeper, more spiteful animosity between two countries that account for roughly a fifth of humanity would add to the world’s mounting political and economic troubles, to say nothing of the potential human costs of expanded conventional warfare along the densely populated India-Pakistan border.
The United States needs to recognize it has vital interests at stake. India is crucial to America’s future in Asia, especially to the U.S. rivalry with China. Some in the U.S. government may be tempted to more squarely back India and completely disengage from Pakistan. But India’s effectiveness as a balance to Beijing, as a contributor to broader Indo-Pacific security and as a U.S. trade partner will be substantially diminished if New Delhi is perpetually locked in a costly rivalry with Pakistan.
Pakistan, for its part, would almost certainly be driven further into China’s arms, leaving the United States with even less leverage and influence over a nation of nearly 250 million people in a region otherwise dominated by American adversaries. That will be a bad outcome for both the United States and deepen India’s challenge.
The United States and global partners such as Britain and Japan — along with nations that have influence over Pakistan, such as Persian Gulf powers and Turkey — should see the current hostilities not as an annoying and typical outburst, but for what it is: a conflict that is primed to become nastier with the terrifying potential to go nuclear.
They should immediately intervene to cool things down, pressure India and Pakistan to recommit to longstanding guardrails and start talking. Equilibrium must be restored, quickly, in this most dangerous of global hot spots. The alternative is a catastrophe the world cannot afford to risk.
Asfandyar Mir is a senior fellow in the South Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington. His research centers on South Asia strategic affairs and U.S. counterterrorism policy with a focus on Afghanistan, India and Pakistan.
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