Published by The i paper (8th May, 2025)
Six years ago, Mike Pompeo was serving as secretary of state in Donald Trump’s first administration when he was woken up during a trip to Vietnam for an urgent phone call. An Indian government minister on the line told him that Pakistan had begun preparing its nuclear weapons to strike India, so they were discussing “escalation” plans. The American diplomat begged his caller to hold fire, then frantically worked the phones to Delhi and Islamabad, alongside national security adviser John Bolton, to convince each of the two nations they were safe from imminent nuclear attack.
Fortunately, their desperate efforts paid off. Pompeo later wrote in his memoir that the world had little idea how close these two nuclear-armed nations came to seeing their long-running regional dispute tip into a cataclysmic conflagration. “The truth is, I don’t know precisely the answer either; I just know it was too close,” he admitted.
This anecdote underlines why many analysts believe the bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan –thought to possess at least 300 nuclear warheads between them – is the planet’s most dangerous political fault-line. And at its heart lies Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan region carved in two along a ceasefire line during the partition of India in 1947, and claimed by both countries.
Pompeo’s nightmare has an eerily familiar ring to it amid current events. His 2019 intervention followed a suicide bombing that killed 40 paramilitary police in Indian-administered Kashmir. This led to Indian air strikes on Pakistan to target a purported Islamist training camp, with one of their jets being shot down and the pilot captured. Such retaliations are carefully calibrated. They are intended to be robust enough to satisfy domestic rage without provoking war. But Kashmir has already sparked two of the three post-partition wars between these countries. Now we are back in the danger zone.
India fired missiles deep into Pakistan in the early hours of Wednesday morning, killing at least 26 people in the strongest aerial assault on the country for half a century. It claimed to be targeting “terrorist infrastructure” after last month’s slaying of 26 people, mostly Hindu men allegedly picked out for slaughter in front of holidaying families, near the town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir.
So the deadly dance begins again, teetering along the brink of calamity.
In 2019, Pakistan responded with a retaliatory air strike. Now it denies involvement in terror and says a “heinous act of aggression will not go unpunished”. India, which has already suspended a key water-sharing agreement between the two countries, is holding civil defence drills to test preparations for the attack. Pakistan claims to have shot down five enemy jets, and the two sides continue to fire artillery shells across the border in Kashmir.
As so often, shifting patterns of global superpower politics can be detected in the background with traditionally non-aligned India, anxious about the rise of China, edging closer to the United States in recent years while Pakistan has been turning to Beijing for aid and arms.
These nerve-jangling events could hardly have come at a worse time. For a start, they involve two of the world’s nine known nuclear powers at a time when three others – Israel, Russia and its ally North Korea – are engaged in active fighting. Three more – Britain, France and the United States – are openly assisting nations at war. Meanwhile, China is surreptitiously aiding Moscow’s war crimes in Ukraine. And the world’s dominant superpower in Washington, rattled by the threat from this rising behemoth, suddenly looks weak under an infantile President who seems to have abandoned the global fight for freedom while upsetting traditional US alliances.
Yet there is a grinding war in Europe, which has dragged on for three grim years after Kyiv found itself on the front line of an epochal fight between democracy and dictatorship – then fought back against invasion with such impressive fortitude. Russia – emboldened by Western pusillanimity over Ukraine and now assisted by White House appeasement – has been launching “grey zone” sabotage attacks and spreading toxic disinformation across Europe to corrode democracy. From the Baltic States to Britain, Poland to Scandinavia, countries are beefing up defences and dusting off emergency evacuation plans amid jitters over another world war.
In the Middle East, Israel has gone on the rampage with members of its hard-line government openly talking about destroying and ethnically cleansing Gaza. This is the latest gruesome twist in Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians after last year’s atrocities by Hamas. Regional tensions are on the rise here too as Egypt and Jordan insist they will thwart any exodus of refugees onto their land, while the West stays largely silent over the misery being unleashed by their ally and their arms.
There are also two awful conflicts in Africa, largely ignored by the rest of the world despite the bloodshed and sexual violence. Yet in both Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, outside powers are stoking horrors with their money and guns while pillaging mineral wealth that these shattered countries cannot afford to lose.
This week, we have been remembering the end of the Second World War, when more than 70 million people were killed during such a dark period of history that spilt blood across the planet. Yet is it any wonder that so many people fear we might spiral towards another hideous global conflict when we see such scary turbulence, weak democratic leadership and divided societies? One recent poll found that about half the people in countries such as Britain, France, Spain and the US believe that another such conflict is “very” or “fairly” likely within the next decade.
How sad that we failed to learn the lessons of the past with the need for strong defences, resisting dictatorship and determined superpower diplomacy of the kind seen six years ago to prevent nuclear war erupting between India and Pakistan. Look around the world: it is hard not to conclude that we live in truly perilous times.