CNN —
The India-Pakistan crisis is the kind of international emergency that would have once prompted a full-court US press to calm things down and head off a bigger war.
But this latest round of fighting over and beyond Kashmir, the disputed Muslim-majority region, may be a test of the Trump administration’s bandwidth and limited ambition for global convening — and for the world without American leadership.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered a meh initial response to the fighting, which was sparked by a terror attack on Indian tourists that New Delhi blames on Pakistan-backed militants. “It’s a shame,” Trump said. “I just hope it ends quickly.” On Wednesday he went a little further, offering his help without showing much interest in getting involved. “I get along with both, I know both very well, and I want to see them work it out,” Trump said. “They’ve gone tit-for-tat. So hopefully they can stop now. … If I can do anything to help, I will be there.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been in touch with top officials from India and Pakistan in recent weeks — and since India’s strikes deep inside Pakistan on Tuesday, according to the State Department. But there’s no sign yet of a US effort to coordinate international mediation or crisis management.
This may be because the time isn’t yet ripe for diplomacy since everyone expects several steps up the escalatory ladder from both sides. Pakistan’s claim to have shot down five Indian planes may have satisfied its honor, but its leaders have said they will hit back at Indian military facilities.
The US response will be watched closely in the coming days because the second Trump administration has thrown away the US foreign policy playbook and left a vacuum where US multinational leadership used to operate.
Trump has no interest in building international coalitions and activating US alliances to achieve common goals. He’d rather flex US economic and military power to manipulate smaller countries to America’s advantage and sees no difference between allies and adversaries in his narrow win-loss worldview. It would be pretty weird to see a president who wants to annex Greenland, Canada and Panama mediate one of the world’s most intractable border disputes.
While Trump has made peacemaking a centerpiece of his new term, his efforts to defuse global hotspots as wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza have shown little progress. And his claim that Houthi rebels in Yemen have agreed to stop attacking international shipping after US airstrikes has yet to be verified.
Trump’s diplomatic pushes in Ukraine and over Israel’s war in Gaza, led by his inexperienced envoy Steve Witkoff, have been transactional attempts to get something for the US. He pressured the government in Kyiv into signing a deal on exploiting rare earth metal deposits. And he wants to move Palestinians out of Gaza — in what would be a neocolonial act of ethnic cleansing — so the United States can build “the Riviera of the Middle East.” There’s no obvious benefit for the US in Kashmir that would focus Trump’s attention.US peace efforts in the past — like Jimmy Carter’s brokering of peace accords between Israel and Egypt and Bill Clinton’s ending of the war in the former Yugoslavia — took months and years of slow-burning confidence-building and behind-the-scenes diplomacy at lower levels. There’s been none of that in the last three months and Trump’s not even trying. Tim Willasey-Wilsey of the Royal United Services Institute in London told CNN’s Isa Soares that the US had played a key role in cooling down crises in Kashmir in 2000, 2008 and 2019 but may not be so inclined now. “We now have a president in the White House who says he doesn’t want to be the world’s policeman,” said Willasey-Wilsey, a former British diplomat. “And also he’s probably more sympathetic to (Indian) Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi than he is to the Pakistanis.”
Debris of an aircraft lie in the compound of a mosque at Pampore in Pulwama district of Indian-controlled Kashmir, Wednesday, May 7, 2025.
Why Washington has always tried to stop Kashmir violence
Kashmir is a region in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent and is bordered by Afghanistan, China, India and Pakistan. Both India and Pakistan claim all of it, and each controls a part separated by a tense border called the Line of Control. China controls a third part of Kashmir.
The fuse for decades of conflict was lit by the departing colonial power Britain in the late 1940s when it divided India into two separate countries: modern India which is mainly Hindu and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Since then the rivals have fought three wars over Kashmir. In the last quarter century there have been multiple smaller skirmishes and outbreaks of fighting over the region.
In the most serious, Clinton intervened in the Kargil conflict in 1999 when US intelligence community was concerned the war could spread and go nuclear between two powers who had both recently tested nuclear devices. In recent years Pakistan and India have toned down nuclear brinkmanship even during times of tension over Kashmir. And as they become more mature nuclear powers, fears of a disastrous war with weapons of mass destruction have receded.
Still Washington has reasoned that preventing the Kashmir conflict from getting worse is worth the use of US power. This was the case in the first Trump administration when then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intervened to defuse a crisis between the South Asian rivals over Kashmir six years ago. “I don’t think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear war in February 2019,” Pompeo wrote in his memoir “Never Give an Inch.” The world is waiting for the next move over Kashmir. India justified its missile strikes on Pakistan-held Kashmir and Pakistan itself by saying it was hitting terrorist camps after the attack on mostly Hindu tourists in Indian Kashmir last month that killed at least six people.
Pakistan has vowed to respond after it says 31 civilians were killed in India’s strikes. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif warned in a national address that “perhaps they thought we would back down, but they forgot that … this is a nation of brave people”.
The potential for further escalation from India will grow if it feels it must respond to new Pakistan strikes. Political pressure to do so is high because the terror attack and loss of an Indian aircraft is a personal embarrassment to Modi. CNN has confirmed one Indian jet was shot down.
An army soldier stands guard on the rooftop of a mosque building damaged by a suspected Indian missile attack near Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, on Wednesday, May 7, 2025.
A new crisis in a new world
Apart from the Trump administration’s reluctance to play the traditional US global leadership role, there are other reasons why past diplomatic strategies may not work in a more fractured and chaotic world.
The Kargil crisis in 1999 drew the US closer to India, an emerging superpower. Every administration since has followed Clinton’s lead. And Trump is personally and politically close to Modi, a fellow nationalist.
The brutality of the attack on unarmed tourists in Kashmir has also got India sympathy — not just in Washington — and a sense it has the right to defend itself, even if the world is squeamish about Modi’s crackdown on Muslims in Indian Kashmir over the years. Pakistan has denied harbouring terrorist camps from where the attacks were planned on its soil. The attacks on unarmed tourists in Kashmir have also brought sympathy for India — not just in Washington — and a sense it can defend itself even if the world has many qualms about Modi’s crackdown on Muslims in Indian Kashmir in recent years. Pakistan has denied having terror camps on its soil from where the attacks were planned.
Meanwhile US has lost leverage over Pakistan since the end of the uneasy alliance in the war on terror and US exit from Afghanistan. Pakistan has now fully reverted to its old political alliance with China, so both South Asian rivals have a superpower ally.
“There’s no question there’s been a sea change in the US position in recent years,” Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CNN’s Becky Anderson on Wednesday. “India is one of the most important strategic partners for the US, whereas Pakistan’s importance … has really declined. I think the American expectation is that Pakistan will retaliate. And then they’re hoping at that point both sides can save face and find an exit ramp.”
In Washington’s absence, mediation might begin in the Middle East. Qatar for instance has played a key role in brokering ceasefires and hostage releases between Israel and Hamas. But the Qatari government — like Pakistan, a Sunni Muslim-majority state — expressed condolences and condemned the attack on Indian Kashmir. India’s media, which can be very inflammatory at such times, reported on a call to Modi by Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim al-Thani as a snub to the government in Islamabad.
Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani spoke separately to India’s external affairs minister and Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif. The Qatari foreign ministry said in a statement that the country had “full support” for all regional and international efforts to resolve issues between India and Pakistan.
Willasey-Wilsey argued that creditors of Pakistan, including the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have the leverage to impose restraint on Islamabad as Pakistan is in the midst of an economic crisis.
But unless things get much worse, international efforts to end the crisis won’t be led by the US.