Opinion - Another barrier to nuclear war between India and Pakistan has fallen

Yahoo

19-05-2025

India's recent military strikes inside Pakistani territory are not just another tit-for-tat reprisal in a long-standing regional dispute. They signal something far more consequential: the end of New Delhi's strategic patience and the beginning of a far riskier approach to cross-border conflict.
The strikes were calibrated and limited in scope. But they were also unmistakably a gamble. India now believes it can respond militarily to Pakistani-backed attacks without triggering full-scale war. That's quite a wager.
But escalation in the nuclear age is not a policy. It's a risk calculation with millions of lives on the table.
The immediate trigger was a deadly ambush in Indian-administered Kashmir that killed 26 civilians. India blamed Pakistan-based militant groups. Pakistan, of course, denied involvement.
But this time, India launched a military operation that struck a number of targets across the Line of Control and in Pakistani territory — sites identified by New Delhi as linked to the terrorist groups responsible. The strikes were brief but pointed, carried out with precision-guided munitions launched from India's Rafale fighter jets.
This isn't unprecedented. India launched 'surgical strikes' in 2016 after the Uri attack and conducted an airstrike in Balakot in 2019 following the Pulwama bombing. But the strategic environment has shifted. The region is more brittle and great power attention is scattered. The expectations of restraint that once loosely governed Indo-Pakistani crises, always fragile, are now barely holding.
Something fundamental has changed. India has set a new threshold: It will no longer absorb attacks without a kinetic response. That shift is real — and dangerous.
It means the subcontinent now depends more than ever on crisis management rather than deterrence. And South Asia is ill-equipped for that. There is a hotline between the two militaries, but its use has been sporadic. There are no institutionalized arms-control frameworks, no strategic dialogue with teeth and no mutual confidence-building measures that function under pressure. For decades, nuclear deterrence in the region has relied more on shared fear than structured restraint. That may no longer be enough.
The worst-case scenario for a future conflict easy to imagine. Pakistan retaliates — either through proxies or directly. India hits back again. The ladder of escalation gets steeper, faster. Political leadership on both sides becomes trapped by domestic expectations. And both militaries are trained to move quickly once hostilities begin.
Then there's the nuclear question. Pakistan has always refused to adopt a 'no first use' doctrine. India maintains one in principle, but it has come under increasing rhetorical strain in recent years. The entire structure of nuclear deterrence on the subcontinent rests on ambiguity, improvisation and the hope that cooler heads will prevail in time. That's not a doctrine — it's a risk, renewed with every fresh crisis.
This moment also fits a broader pattern. The use of limited, cross-border force is becoming normalized. Israel strikes Syria and Lebanon routinely. Turkey operates in northern Iraq. The U.S. continues armed drone operations from Africa to the Middle East. India, too, has now clearly decided that its security requires periodic demonstrations of resolve.
But South Asia isn't like these other arenas. This is not a peripheral battlefield — it is a nuclear flashpoint.
If war breaks out in earnest, it won't stay local. It would convulse the global energy market, destabilize already fragile Muslim-majority states and force the U.S. into an impossible strategic corner. China would not sit idle. Whether as a mediator or opportunist, Beijing would use the chaos to assert its influence in a region it already sees as a key frontier.
A ceasefire imposed by the U.S. has stopped the conflict for now, with many in Pakistan claiming victory and celebrating the military. But the real test is whether either side understands that the illusion of controlled escalation is the most dangerous illusion of all. Once violence begins, it has its own momentum. Political leaders and military planners may think they can channel it, but history is merciless with those who mistake proximity to war for mastery of it.
We should not mistake the quick end to this crisis for stability. Both sides have learned they can go further next time. And if they do, it won't take much — a single misreading, a single overreaction — for everything to unravel in a catastrophic nuclear exchange.
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C.
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