The recent flare up in tensions and military exchange between India and Pakistan has world leaders and strategic thinkers around the globe wiping the sweat from their brow as two nuclear powers managed to stop themselves moments before the outbreak of full-scale war. The night of 9/10th May 2025 will go down in history as a unique moment in the annals of modern military history where two nuclear armed nations threw everything they had at one another in the domain of conventional air power while maintaining strategic restraint regarding their ground forces and avoiding a direct confrontation along the international border. As the dust settles, the only question on everyone’s mind is “how did it come to this?”.
India and Pakistan’s rivalry has, at this point, become a staple of international politics. To world leaders and foreign audiences, a sharp increase in tensions between these two countries was not seen as particularly remarkable; business as usual in South Asia with India and Pakistan at each other’s throats. While, in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, analysts may have predicted some sort of limited exchange akin to the 2019 Pulwama crisis, even the most pessimistic mind could not have imagined the intensity of the clash that followed. Arguably surpassing the Kargil War, this can be considered India and Pakistan’s worst military confrontation since the 1971 war and possibly the closest the world has come to a nuclear exchange since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
While military analysts, journalists and government officials from other countries will spend the next several months picking this incident apart moment by moment and decision by decision in order to shed some light on the veracity of each side’s claims, it will be some time before we can determine which side had the operational edge. Now is the time for reflection. While the threat of nuclear annihilation is still fresh in our minds, we must determine what factors on both sides of the border were responsible for allowing the situation to grow so far out of control.
Since the Kargil War, there hasn’t been a major conflict between India and Pakistan aside from the occasional border stand-off. Due to the presence of a potent nuclear deterrent on both sides of the border, neither side has been willing to commit to a military engagement due to the fear of nuclear escalation. As a result, a new status quo has emerged in the sub-continent wherein, whenever such a flare up occurs, the international community rushes in to mediate the issue and find a peaceful resolution.
Indeed, we can see a pattern over the past 25 years where a diplomatic intervention led by the United States was able to successfully mediate the situation. During the 2001 stand-off following the attack on the Indian Parliament, which India claimed was carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, both sides positioned their forces on the border. The American Secretary of State, Colin Powell, initiated diplomatic talks between the two countries which helped to reduce tensions. A similar situation followed the deadly 2008 Mumbai attack which claimed the lives of 166 Indians, including 6 Americans. While both countries prepared for an armed conflict, diplomatic involvement by the United States was helpful in preventing an escalation. Then, in 2019, in the aftermath of the limited exchange following the Pulwama attack, international mediation was critical in bringing the crisis to a peaceful resolution.
Now, this is not a claim that foreign powers have always exerted a positive influence on the sub-continent. From the colonial era to the Cold War, western interests in South Asia have always been self-serving. Regardless, due to India and Pakistan’s mutual nuclear deterrent, all the nations in the world have a critical interest in making sure a conflict between the two does not get out of control. Since the end of the Cold War, which roughly coincides with the nuclearization of the sub-continent, the United States has been the undisputed global hegemon. In this capacity, it has usually led the international effort to reduce tensions and avoid escalation between India and Pakistan. However, with the shifting of the global power balance towards multipolarity, America’s diplomatic influence has begun to waver.
Amplified by the White House’s geopolitical posturing since Donald Trump’s second inauguration and the initiation of a global trade war, the rate at which the United States’ soft power diminishes has only accelerated, and with it the shift towards multipolarity. This was evident on 8th May when the Vice President, JD Vance, claimed the rising tensions were “none of our business” and did not wish for the United States to get involved. This stance is consistent with Trump’s “America First” policy which calls for an end to the United States’ role as a mediator in foreign conflicts.
Ultimately the United States did choose to get involved. Based on some undisclosed “critical intelligence”, the Vice President, accompanied by the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, initiated diplomatic talks between India and Pakistan on 10th May. Within less than 48 hours, the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that the Trump Administration felt forced to completely reverse their stance. This is the crux of the issue. That delay of less than two days will influence the strategic landscape of the sub-continent for decades.
Over the past 25 years, a norm has emerged between India and Pakistan. This repeated pattern of terrorism in India followed by a limited strike on Pakistan, which in turn causes a retaliation against India, is not sustainable. It is at this point that we must address the elephant in the room: the political element of such incidents. Without delving into the messy domestic politics on either side of the border, we can build a rough image of the political gains each side is trying to make by understanding one very simple strategic principle: when attacked by an external force, the people of a country will exert pressure on the political class to take action. In a democratic system, the people can simply vote in the candidate who promises to take action. In a non-democratic system, the ruler understands the political legitimacy they receive by defending the nation against a foreign threat and is incentivized towards aggression. In either case, we cannot expect the entire population of a country to have an in-depth understanding of the country’s vital strategic interests or the principles of deterrence theory. We can only expect them to understand that they have been threatened and to feel positively inclined towards those they believe guard them from such threats. Therefore, in the future we can expect that, should a similar incident occur, the decision making on both sides will be politically influenced.
As mentioned, this has been the norm for the past 25 years. The reason it has been relatively stable is that, in the past, India and Pakistan’s leaders could reliably predict that foreign powers would rush to mediate the issue. By providing an “exit ramp” which either side could take without suffering political losses domestically, the international community disincentivized the Indian and Pakistani political systems from fostering a culture of strategic restraint. While the use of nuclear weapons is a red line neither side would consider crossing, anything below that is an option given the safety net provided by international mediation.
So, what does the two-day gap in the United States’ mediation tell us about the state of the international system today? One possibility is that President Trump is indeed committed to shifting American foreign policy away from issues that he believes they have no direct stake in. The other, more likely, possibility is that the Trump Administration, due to its straining of relations with traditional American allies, lacks the diplomatic capital needed to coordinate an international effort to bring about a resolution to such crises. In such a situation, without a global hegemon to coordinate efforts and a united power bloc to enforce them, individual countries would find it more beneficial to simply issue statements and formulate their own stances on the issue rather than being part of a larger movement to diplomatically influence two countries towards peace.
In the future, the politically influenced leaderships of India and Pakistan may find themselves in another tit-for-tat situation, gradually retaliating their way up the escalation ladder until they reach a point of no return only to find that the international system lacks the unipolarity needed to create a coordinated effort which can successfully mediate such a conflict. This shift in the geopolitical environment, which resulted in a delayed diplomatic intervention by the international community, is partially responsible for the intensity of the exchange we witnessed on 9/10th May and paints a dire picture for the future of South Asia in a multipolar world.
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