India and Pakistan are currently engaged in a competition for escalation dominance. While New Delhi is preparing for a limited conventional campaign against Pakistan, Islamabad is pursuing limited nuclear options to deter India. Together, these trends could increase the likelihood of nuclear conflict. India, for example, might conclude that it can launch an invasion without provoking a nuclear reprisal, while Pakistan might believe that it can employ nuclear weapons without triggering a nuclear exchange. Even if war can be avoided, these trends could eventually compel India to develop its own limited nuclear options in an effort to enhance deterrence and gain coercive leverage over Pakistan.Despite persistent tensions, recurring crises, and one minor war, South Asia has arguably been less volatile than many observers anticipated when India and Pakistan became nuclear-armed powers. Consistent with the logic of the stability-instability paradox, the possibility that a direct confrontation might lead to a nuclear exchange has seemingly reduced incentives on both sides to initiate large-scale conflicts or escalate small-scale clashes, even though a nuclear deterrent has also emboldened Islamabad to support militant groups engaged in terrorism, subversion, and insurgency against New Delhi. Nevertheless, two interrelated trends are undermining this fragile equilibrium: India's efforts to extend its conventional military advantage over Pakistan, and Pakistan's growing reliance on nuclear weapons to counter India. 1 1 For a recent discussion of these trends, see Charles E. Costanzo, 'South Asia: Danger Ahead?' Strategic Studies Quarterly 5/4 (Winter 2011), 92-106.
Restore American Leadership U.S. foreign policy today is failing every test by which a great power's foreign policy can be judged. America is not feared by her enemies, nor trusted by her friends. Neither the American people nor the world-at-large understand any more the purposes of American power, or, even worse, the principles that shape them. Indeed, after a decade and a half of conflict in the Middle East and South Asia, some Americans have concluded that the best thing to do is to pull back from the world and its troubles. Some argue that America's role as guarantor of global order is no longer necessary, history having "ended" with the Cold War; others think that "nation-building at home" is some kind of alternative to engagement abroad. But through all this white noise of confusion and dismay, one thing stands out as clearly as it has since the end of World War II: a strong United States is still essential to the maintenance of the open global order under which this country and the rest of the world have prospered since 1945; that the alternative to America's "indispensability" is not a harmonious, self-regulating balance of independent states but an international landscape marked by eruptions of chaos and destruction. Clearly, and understandably, past policies have had their successes and failures because to lead is to choose, and to choose in the world as it is, is inevitably to sometimes err. Indeed, This article was adapted from Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World published by the John Hay Initiative.
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