President Donald Trump took office promising to make great deals with trading partners, foreign rivals and Democrats. After more than two years in office, his tactics have left him at intractable loggerheads with all three.
The United States has a long history of provoking, instigating, or launching wars based on dubious, flimsy, or manufactured threats….Today, the question in Washington—and surely in Tehran, too—is whether President Trump is making moves that will provoke, instigate, or inadvertently drag the United States into a war with Iran.
There’s a famous saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that measure, Washington has tested the limits of sanity with its strategy in Afghanistan: For seventeen years, it pursued the same policy while hoping in vain that it would produce the desired outcome. Recent months, however, have brought a much-needed course correction.
Pakistan on Sunday claimed India was planning new “action” between April 16 and 20, and summoned the Indian deputy high commissioner Gaurav Ahluwalia and issued a demarche warning New Delhi “against any misadventure”. Responding to the issue, the Ministry of External Affairs said, “India rejects the irresponsible and preposterous statement by the Foreign Minister of Pakistan with a clear objective of whipping up war hysteria in the region.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s recent landmark trip to Iraq was closely monitored and discussed from various aspects by the media and analysts around the world. Some observers put their focus on the bilateral aspect, talking about the importance of the visit in terms of Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, while others analysed it within the context of Iran’s plans to overcome the US sanctions…But a largely ignored — and yet very important — aspect of the Iranian president’s three-day visit to Iraq is the explicit and implicit implications of the trip for Iran’s policy in Syria.
Although propitious political circumstances made the Balakot crisis between India and Pakistan manageable, Pakistani terrorism remains the principal continuing threat to stability in South Asia. U.S. policy moving forward must relentlessly pressure Pakistan to crack down on jihadi groups or risk continuing crises in the region.
Though India and Pakistan’s exchange of fire late last month did not trigger a wider aggression, tensions remain dangerously high. Worse, larger historical and political forces all but ensure that the region will remain on tenterhooks.
With India and Pakistan having demonstrated they are comfortable engaging in increasingly provocative uses of military force under the nuclear umbrella, they will have an incentive in the future to go up a few more rungs on the escalatory ladder to try to achieve goals that couldn’t be achieved further down that ladder. Regardless of whether they succeed or fail, this much is true: With both sides now willing to climb higher up the escalation ladder, a future nuclear exchange could become a far less remote prospect.
There was once an uninhabited islet lying close to the Chinese side of the Ussuri River, which marks the border between Russia and China in the Far East. “Was,” because it has since attached itself to the Chinese bank in a defiant act of geographic irony. But during the turbulent spring of 1969 this little islet — called Damansky in Russian and Zhenbao Dao in Chinese — was the stage for a game-changing encounter.
Pakistan will return a captured pilot “as a peace gesture” to India, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said on Thursday, amid efforts by the United States to defuse a crisis between the two nuclear powers a day after both downed enemy jets.
Also Read: A time for restraint
