While the world has been focussing its attention on Ukraine and Gaza, potentially the most dangerous flashpoint of all has received insufficient attention: India versus Pakistan and the dispute over Kashmir. Equally, many media hours have been devoted to Donald Trump’s latest folie de grandeur, a new plane courtesy of the Qataris. In recent weeks, it has been amusing to read the fulminations of many American liberals and academics. Asked who is the worse man, Trump or Hitler, many of them would ask for time to think.
Obviously, plane-gate is a bizarre business. This is not how Presidents ought to behave. But at the same time, there is an area in which this one has been acting exactly as a good President should. He has been trying to prevent Pakistan and India from going to war. Ukraine may be soluble. A two-state solution for Palestine may not be impossible, though not in the form of Mar-a-Gaza. But Kashmir? A solution there may be beyond the powers of the human mind.
Yet there is one reason for comfort, though of a melancholy order. India and Pakistan may hold back for plunging over into the fiery depths – because of mutually-assured destruction. After all, that is what has saved Europe during the past 80 years. In 1945, Europe was full of dry tinder, unexploded ordnance, millions of people with grievances and a vast potential agenda for ethnic conflict. The churches prayed for peace. Many decades later, they are still praying. Looking at the current conflicts, many people are uttering the same refrain: when will mankind learn to renounce war and embrace peace? Although those many people all have a point, they need not give way to despair.
There is indeed no sign that mankind is capable of learning that lesson. Given all the forces which would have encouraged a third terrible war in Europe, it would have been almost impossible to avoid, but for the nuclear deterrent. If it had been used, the third war would not only have been terrible. It would have been terminal. As it is, uranium has done more than the Eucharist ever could to preserve humanity. The Eucharist has not erased mankind’s capacity for sin. But uranium has mitigated the consequences.
Returning to Kashmir, many years ago I happened to be sitting in Prince Hassan of Jordan’s garden when the news came through that the Pakistanis had conducted their first nuclear tests, successfully detonating a series of bombs at the Chagai test site. Prince Hassan is one of the wisest men whom the modern Middle East has produced. He combines geopolitical insight and great humanity: a living exemplar of the Abraham Accords, and a secular apostle for peace.
The news from Pakistan filled him with gloom. which I shared. So, it appeared, did all men of good will, everywhere.
But not quite all. Returning to London, I discussed the matter with a friend who has not only been brooding over the vast deep of geopolitics for many decades, but who never succumbs to the conventional wisdom. Robert Salisbury wondered whether it was undesirable that the Pakistanis should have a bomb. There was chronic tension between India and Pakistan. It was assumed that India’s conventional forces were significantly stronger and it seemed quite likely that they would shortly take advantage of that to crush Pakistan, which would have turned it into a failed state: a quagmire of terrorism and evil. That would have been one-sided destruction. When the destruction was mutually assured, the temptation to act in that way was drastically diminished.
A few years later, when Jack Straw was Foreign Secretary, there was a flare-up, with threatening growls emanating from Delhi. Straw tried to explain patiently the illogicality of nuclear powers going to war. Eventually, the Indians flipped, along the lines of: How dare you talk to us like this? You are no longer our colonial masters, stop patronising us. Straw then called in Condoleezza Rice so that she could take over the fire-hoses.
Then the Foreign Secretary made a crucial contribution. He stated that unless they absolutely had to stay, British citizens should leave Delhi and the Punjab. Someone said at the time that it was as if he had touched the Indian leadership’s hearts with an icicle. They looked out of their smart offices in Delhi and wondered to themselves: in a week’s time, could all this be a nuclear wasteland? The crisis passed.
It now seems that Trump has taken over the Rice/Straw role. If that is true, it is greatly to his credit. But what happens next in this sinful, fallen world? Man has created weapons which could destroy the planet. In so doing, he has deterred himself from using them. It is an equilibrium of sorts. Perhaps it is the only one which we can ever attain.
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