Julian Spencer-Churchill
On April 22, 2025, 26 tourists and civilians were killed in a terror attack in Pahalgam as part of the interminable Kashmir insurgency, which has claimed 40,000 lives since 1987. On May 6, as part of Operation Sindoor, Indian missiles struck suspected base camps for Kashmirri insurgents in Pakistan in the cities of Muzzafarabad, Kotli and Bahawalpur. India has also escalated the armed stand-off to include the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, against which Pakistan responded by threatening the abandonment of the 1972 Simla Agreement. Given the centrality to Pakistan of the Punjab Rivers and the Indus, which pass through India from the Himalayas of China, the National Security Council has warned that an interruption of those waters would be an act of war. Any escalation to nuclear conflict, given that both states are most likely equipped with approximately 170 boosted fission nuclear warheads with maximum yields of 50 kilotons, would set a imitable precedent for nuclear war.
The strategic concern with India is that, of all the great powers, it is closest to consolidating domination over its neighbors in its region. Only the U.S. has ever achieved the status of regional hegemon, which it attained in the 1890s when Great Britain abandoned Canada to its fate. China, separated by the sea, Brazil, disconnected by the Andes, and as a yet non-expansionist Nigeria, all outnumber their regional neighbors in population. According to University of Chicago Professor John J Mearsheimer, in his The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, countries are tempted to start wars to conquer their own continental regions, even if there is a low prospect of success, because the security payoff is tremendous. These were the motives of the Hapsburgs, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and now Communist China.
The U.S., which is the only country ever to have achieved continental hegemony, pays very little for the cost of its local defense because of the protection of the Oceans. In what is called a strategy of offshore balancing, Washington is then able to project power to support smaller countries draining the resources of the regional hegemonic candidates on other continents. This thereby increases the cost of any retaliation against the U.S., such as the costly Soviet backing of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada during the Cold War. Pakistan, a growing democracy, has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be a reliable offshore ally of the U.S. during the Cold War and the Global War on Terror. Pakistan-based U-2 aircraft overflew the USSR from bases in Peshawar and coordinated with Israel for the transfer of small arms to the mujahidin in Afghanistan in the 1980s, while India leaned significantly farther than the anti-Western Non-Aligned Movement, to cooperate with Moscow.
No comments:
Post a Comment