Rise in India-Pakistan tensions shows why the world needs its US sheriff: Andreas Kluth

Key topicsKashmir violence sparks renewed India-Pakistan nuclear tensionsUS retreating from its role as crisis mediator in South AsiaGlobal stability at risk if America abandons leadership role.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Andreas Kluth.Much about this latest crisis between India and Pakistan appears to be déjà vu all over again: Terrorists kill innocents in the disputed region of Kashmir, one side “retaliates” in a surge of nationalist indignation, the other shoots back, and the world bates its breath to see how much further the two nuclear powers will escalate.But there are differences, and chief among them is the new and evolving role of the United States, in this hotspot as in the world. As Moeed Yusuf, a former national security advisor of Pakistan, put it to me: Neither the two adversaries nor anybody else knows whether “the sheriff wants to be sheriff anymore.” That sheriff is of course in the White House.In previous crises — this is the seventh — between India and Pakistan, including the one during the first presidential term of Donald Trump, America intervened as a more-or-less honest broker to get both sides down from their respective trees (and out of their nuclear missile silos). This American presence was so strong, Yusuf told me, that Islamabad and New Delhi factor US intermediation into their own crisis models. (Unlike Moscow and Washington during the Cold War, the two adversaries have no bilateral mechanism to prevent uncontrolled escalation.)This time, though, the White House has shown much less initiative, at least so far. As Trump said on Air Force One, he’s inclined to let both sides “get it figured out one way or the other.” That rhymes with his isolationist America First instincts, which predispose him to reject the idea that other people’s problems are in America’s bailiwick.This doesn’t mean the US has done nothing. Trump’s secretary of state and national security advisor, Marco Rubio, has been on the phone with both sides (as have the diplomats of other countries). But the US has no ambassador in either capital. And the White House seems content to be just one of several outside powers trying to contain the damage from afar, rather than leading an international effort..Read more:.India strikes deep into Pakistan for first time since 1971 as Kashmir tensions ignite decades-old rivalry.That’s a far cry from previous clashes between Islamabad and New Delhi since the subcontinent was so unhappily partitioned in 1947. In 2019 Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state at the time, was woken in the middle of the night, as he recalled in his memoir, “to convince each side that the other was not preparing for nuclear war” and to get them to stand down, which they did. During a clash in 1999, just a year after Pakistan officially joined India as a nuclear power, Bill Clinton downright summoned the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to Washington and insisted that Pakistan pull back its forces, which it did.The geopolitical context of US engagement shifted during these decades. During the early Cold War, Pakistan lined up with Washington and received American military hardware, whereas India stayed non-aligned and was equipped by Moscow. From the 1970s, when the Indians tested their first nuke and the Pakistanis started their covert fission program, the US intermittently sanctioned both. After the terrorist attacks on the US on Sept. 11, 2001, Washington drew closer to Islamabad because it needed help in Afghanistan (even though it never fully trusted the Pakistanis). In recent decades, the US leaned toward New Delhi, in hopes of making it a strategic ally against a menacing China.That rebalancing also shows in the military kit used by the two sides. These days, India buys more weapons from Western countries such as the US, France and Israel than from Russia. And China has replaced the US as Pakistan’s main arms merchant (even though Islamabad still treasures its American F-16 fighter jets).But China cannot replace the US as honest broker, says Lisa Curtis, a former national security official in several administrations, including Trump’s first. New Delhi sees Beijing as adversarial, because the two have their own border disputes. And even Islamabad doesn’t want to become more dependent on China. Other countries, such as Saudi Arabia (which hosts a huge diaspora of Indians and Pakistanis), can help at the margins. But when the stakes are nuclear, she thinks, only Washington can prevent the worst.In that sense, South Asia is a test case for world order. The circumstances in other hotspots — from the Korean peninsula to the South China Sea, the Middle East or eastern Europe — vary. But the antagonists in all these conflicts, dormant or raging, have traditionally looked to the US as “hegemon” to step in when disaster looms.Yusuf, who’s authored a book on the US role in South Asia, thinks that this moment is too perilous for the US to abdicate its role abruptly. And even if the crisis passes, the Trump administration must stick around to help Indians and Pakistanis build the crisis-control mechanisms they lack. “You need an anointed sheriff to knock on the door and say I have a warrant,” he told me. The Chinese don’t have a warrant. Trump does, but this “sheriff wants to retire and there isn’t a succession plan.”The immediate crisis is putting billions of South Asians in mortal danger. The larger global crisis that Trump has partially caused but not yet understood is putting everybody at risk. No problem — from climate change to pandemics or global anarchy — can be contained without American leadership. It’s understandable that the US no longer wants that role. But then it must work to create a new order to replace the Pax Americana. Especially when the ammo is atomic, simply walking away is not an option, neither for Trump nor any American president after him..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Rise in India-Pakistan tensions shows why the world needs its US sheriff: Andreas Kluth

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