Be Thankful Trump Is President to Prevent an India-Pakistan Nuclear War Over Kashmir

If they think of Kashmir at all, for Americans it’s likely the Led Zeppelin song. But you should be thankful President Trump is in the White House as nuclear powers India and Pakistan go at it in another war over the disputed province and a terrorist attack India blames on Pakistan. In 2019 Trump defused a previous contretemps.

The London Times just headlined, “Will Trump help India and Pakistan pull back from brink of war? Trump was pivotal in defusing the crisis between the nuclear-armed rivals down six years ago. Does he have the bandwidth to intervene this time?”

The curious thing is America has been close to both countries. Pakistani ties go way back into the start of the Cold War, when they sided with America, while India, although a democracy (most of the time), sided with the Soviet Union. In fighter and test pilot ace Chuck Yeager’s great autobiography, he recounts his time there in the late 1960s when, as an Air Force general, he was our military attaché to Islamabad. That’s why a lot of their equipment is American.

But Pakistan also has been close to China, India’s rival, and lately has been buying almost all its weapons from Beijing. While India has switched its arms buys from Russia to America, France and Israel. Yet China and India now are less antagonistic and the major members of BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – the economic cooperative group.

I’m a non-interventionist since the end of the Cold War, but the nuclear weapons inevitably mean U.S. involvement. It would have been great if Trump had been able to attend the Victory Over Hitler celebrations May 9 in Moscow and huddle with Putin and Xi and run a Zoom call with Modi in India and the military boss who runs Pakistan, Gen. Syed Asim Munir. But that didn’t happen because Trump hasn’t been able to end Biden’s War on Russia (what the Ukraine War really is).

I’ve mentioned before how there now are four major powers, the Quad Powers: the U.S., Russia, China and India. They all have nuclear weapons, large populations and capable conventional armies. If this stupid Ukraine War were over, the U.S. and Russia could pressure India to cool it, while China did the same for Pakistan. Instead, over the Ukraine quagmire, Russia and China are joined at the hip against the United States and its NATO vassals.

But imagine if Biden still were president. He’d confuse Kashmir with cashmere sweaters. Or if Kamala had won, her mother was Indian, so the Pakistanis wouldn’t consider her a neutral arbitrator. That and she’s a simpleton. And the way things were as Biden left office, by now she might have gotten us into our own nuclear war with Russia.

Curiously, in 1965 it was Soviet Premier Alexi Kosygin who brokered a peace between India and Pakistan. LBJ apparently was too busy getting us stuck in the Vietnam War and wrecking the USA with his Great Society. That was a nasty war. But both belligerents were not yet nuclear powers. Now they are.

1965 was a year after Khrushchev was pushed aside in Moscow, but before the better-known Leonid Brezhnev had become the head of the collective leadership. That also shows the change from today, 60 years later. The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia still is here, no longer socialist, but quasi-capitalist like almost every country, but its size reduced by half.

Meanwhile, the United States still is struggling to move into a post-Cold War world, with our ruling elites still thinking Russia is the Soviet Union, when it’s not. It’s more like a modernized Czarist Russia, which like almost all countries suffers a declining birth rate that’s the real major problem, but which no one can solve.

If the India-Pakistan war is resolved without too much damage, maybe one good result can be shocking people awake about how the only path forward is peace.