On May 14, 2025, Daniel Markey spoke with South Asian Voices Editor-in-Chief Akriti Vasudeva Kalyankar and Associate Editor Elizabeth Zazycki on U.S. involvement in terminating the India-Pakistan crisis, President Donald Trump’s recent comments on the Kashmir dispute, and the implications of these developments for Washington’s ties with New Delhi and Islamabad going forward. Markey is a senior fellow with the South Asia and China programs at the Stimson Center. Prior to joining Stimson, he served as a senior advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace, where he focused on India politics, South Asian security, and China’s regional policies.
There is a lot of debate on the role the United States did or did not play with respect to crisis mediation or termination in the recent India-Pakistan crisis post Pahalgam. What is your assessment of the U.S. role in this crisis? How does it compare to/differ from the 2019 Pulwama/Balakot crisis?
DM: My bottom-line assessment is that the United States played an important role in enabling the two sides to pull away from this conflict. But Washington acted without coercion or incentives, as both sides had narrower goals for this conflict than a desire to actually go to war.
With that in mind, I have a few thoughts on some similarities and differences between U.S. involvement in 2025 and 2019.
In terms of similarities, U.S. involvement in both cases came a bit late in the crisis. By that, I do not mean that the United States was not attentive in earlier stages, but only that in both cases, it shifted gears from a principal concern about demonstrating support to India to a principal concern of ending a potentially nuclearized crisis.
Unfortunately, the United States did not focus sufficiently on urging restraint in the early stages of either crisis. This is especially troubling in the 2025 crisis, because the U.S. government should have learned lessons from the past. In both 2019 and 2025, Washington’s early messages were confusingly mixed, which created a type of a “green light” opportunity for India to undertake its initial punitive operations against Pakistan.
In the 2019 Balakot incident, the first message came from John Bolton, then U.S. National Security Advisor, in his statements and how they were interpreted by the Indian government. In the 2025 post-Pahalgam response, mixed messages came from how Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments were interpreted by the Government of India, and the comments initially made by Vice President JD Vance about this conflict being one in which the United States should not have a direct role. Those mixed messages created uncertainty in the region about what the United States would do and when and certainly encouraged India to see the United States as broadly supportive early in the crisis.
Only later, when senior U.S. officials become concerned about a nuclearized crisis, did the United States follow up with much more focused efforts at indirect mediation. In 2019, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo played a leading public role, and in 2025 it appears that Secretary Rubio was the main diplomatic point of contact. Once these U.S. officials appreciated the stakes of the crisis, they shifted gears quickly to try to end the crisis.
The U.S. regional position in 2019 was different from 2025. In 2019, the United States enjoyed a closer relationship with India than with Pakistan, but that asymmetry has only been further exacerbated over the subsequent six years. If anything, India in 2025 had even more reason to believe that the United States would support its position, and Pakistan had more reason to suspect a lack of U.S. sympathy. Oddly, however, in the end, in 2025 it appears that the United States, by jumping into this crisis, did more to help the Pakistani side than it did to help India’s side. Currently, many Indian commentators are especially upset by that reality.
There’s been reporting suggesting that some “alarming” intelligence is what forced the United States into more active facilitation in this crisis. In the regional context, that generally means something nuclear-related. Yet, it does not seem from official evidence available so far that India hit any Pakistani bases or facilities that would have had any nuclear weapons or material. What is your current sense of what that reported alarming intelligence was?
DM: This is the type of key question that policy analysts will try to answer in the weeks and months to come. As of now, there is no evidence of concern that India hit or was going to hit a Pakistani nuclear facility, inspiring a Pakistani nuclear response. There were generalized concerns of the possibility of escalation, which may have been sufficient to alarm Washington. My working hypothesis is that US concerns had something to do with India’s ability to evade Pakistan’s air defenses and hit Pakistani targets, even if they were not nuclear targets. That could inspire incredible alarm on Pakistan’s side, because the implication would be that if India were to decide that it wanted to hit Pakistan’s nuclear targets, it could, and it could do so with a degree of impunity, potentially leading Pakistan to say or do things that would make the United States, in turn, very alarmed. However, we will see what the evidence shows over time.
What levers do you believe the United States used for de-escalation vis a vis Pakistan and India, if any? Currently, there is speculation that trade or IMF considerations could have been leveraged.
DM: Similar to what I said at the outset, I am not convinced the United States used a lot of leverage to make the ceasefire happen. What I see is a crisis that was going beyond India’s initial mission objectives and beyond where Pakistan was comfortable. Both sides had their own reasons, which have nothing to do with the United States, to desire a ceasefire.
If Pakistan and India wanted to fight a nuclear war, I do not believe that any country would have sufficient incentives to stop them. Fortunately, we were in a situation where both sides wanted to pull back and where the United States and other countries, it seems, could provide—at least for Pakistan—sufficient diplomatic cover to allow it to extract itself with honor. India, for its part, could also frame the entire episode as a success. Now, I am afraid that the way that the Trump administration is framing the ceasefire—taking credit and raising expectations of talks over Kashmir—is dimming the “win” from the Modi government’s point of view. But at the time, India felt like it was actually having much greater military success than it did in 2019 and could make a very strong case to its people that it had achieved its initial objectives.
While the Indian government may be frustrated with Washington currently, they appreciate that in the medium and the long term it is worthwhile to work with the United States, despite qualms about arms sales or our overall trustworthiness. If and when the United States has arms or other high tech equipment to sell India that India feels it cannot get anywhere else, then the two sides will be back to business.
What are the short, medium, and long-term implications of this crisis for the U.S.-India and U.S.-Pakistan bilaterals?
DM: Short term implications have everything to do with the immediate resolution of this particular crisis. Narrowly, from every perspective, the ceasefire is a good thing.
Medium-term, though, this U.S. mediation has set up expectations that will be very difficult to live up to. For Pakistan, the Trump administration and President Trump himself have now suggested that the Washington will be facilitating, potentially mediating, some kind of further dialog between India and Pakistan. Pakistan has wanted this for quite some time and India has no intention of actually participating in such talks. So someone’s expectations will go unmet, most likely Pakistan’s. Prior to the crisis, the Trump administration had virtually no Pakistan strategy in place and had not given a lot of thought to this matter. Once the president’s attention moves to other issues and the broader US foreign policy bureaucracy weighs in, the broader strategic significance of the Indo-U.S. relationship will likely be appreciated, as in prior administrations, and the pressure will be off India to participate in a meaningful conversation with Pakistan.
Over the longer term, I am convinced of two things. First, as I said, the United States will revert to seeing India as the most important strategic player in the region, and that will come to dominate the U.S. role in the region. Second, this conflict has proven that the United States is still relevant to crisis management in South Asia, whether Washington wants it or not, or whether even the vice president believed it 48 hours before the United States got deeply involved. We are still a major player in South Asia. While other countries may be involved in diplomacy, Washington’s technical ability to see and hear things that are happening on the ground, to give confidence to one or both sides, and in doing so, to provide guarantees required to implement a ceasefire is something the United States can monitor, if not police.
There is already a lot of commentary from Indian analysts on how New Delhi is upset by President Trump’s repeated mention of wanting to help settle the Kashmir dispute, and various experts have pointed out that the India-Pakistan hyphenation is back, which Delhi has fought for years to avoid. What do these developments mean for U.S.-India relations?
DM: While India is reportedly furious, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. President Trump is famously mercurial, and is known for taking a maximalist position in negotiations of various types before retreating to a lesser position. Here, the maximalist position is that the United States is going to force some kind of a peace deal between India and Pakistan. Tomorrow’s minimal position may be that the United States is glad that nuclear war was avoided everyone can go back to focusing on trade. While the Indian government may be frustrated with Washington currently, they appreciate that in the medium and the long term it is worthwhile to work with the United States, despite qualms about arms sales or our overall trustworthiness. If and when the United States has arms or other high tech equipment to sell India that India feels it cannot get anywhere else, then the two sides will be back to business.
Does this crisis create an opening for improvement of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship?
DM: In my view, the United States has very little sympathy for Pakistan, and in that way, has really come around to an Indian point of view of Pakistan as a problem rather than a useful partner, much less what we used to say—that Pakistan is a major non-NATO ally! However, Pakistan is still a nuclear-armed state that matters in the region, so Kashmir will continue to be an issue.
However, I do not see the United States trying to help resolve the problem of Kashmir or Pakistan becoming a major U.S. interest. Given Washington’s lingering deep frustrations with Pakistan and the persistent concerns about the direction that Pakistan continues to be on, both with respect to China as well as Pakistan’s development of long range, potentially nuclear-tipped missiles, Pakistan is still seen as more of a problem than a country with whom the United States wants to have a renewed, deeper partnership.
How do these competing narratives on U.S. mediation in the recent India Pakistan crisis illuminate evolving and mounting challenges of third-party intervention and conflict resolution in this increasingly multipolar world? Some are calling this a structural diplomatic shift, in which the United States has to share the mediation stage with countries in the Gulf. Are you seeing it as a shift of balance of regional and global power dynamics? And what are its implications?
DM: It is now widely appreciated that the United States has passed the unipolar moment. There are a lot of other middle powers now eager to get involved in international mediation or diplomacy in the heat of a crisis. Now, to be clear, in prior crises, other countries played a role too. The UK has historically played a role, and China has played a role, both in the past and in the recent crisis.
Given Washington’s lingering deep frustrations with Pakistan […] with respect to China as well as Pakistan’s development of long range, potentially nuclear tipped missiles, Pakistan is still seen as more of a problem than a country with whom the United States wants to have a renewed, deeper partnership.
This time China made some public comments about restraint, but early in the crisis Beijing tried to show its support to Pakistan. In this way, it represented something of a mirror image of the United States, which showed early support to India then also shifted its emphasis to restraint. It is unknown what China was saying privately, but it is undeniable that they are an important actor, even diplomatically, and Beijing would have had cards to play with Pakistan especially.
Another major point is that the diplomatic environment of this crisis, even more than in 2019, reflected the disparate media landscape. Trump’s own posting on Truth Social reflected his desire to take credit for this ceasefire. He did so ahead of statements that were coming out of the region itself, which is pretty shocking. It also highlights the lengths which may now be required to make sure your message is the dominant narrative in these disparate media environments, even if you are the United States.
So, what is different is the extent to which the storyline or narrative for a crisis is manufactured publicly—including on social media—and is therefore less controlled by traditional, behind the scenes, slow-moving diplomatic agreements. Now cutting through the din and posting something online reaps certain benefits. Social media was the dominant form of communication throughout this crisis as well as for information sharing, which because of misinformation and disinformation is a very scary prospect going forward for carefully managing a crisis as it evolves.
Views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
Also Read: SAV Q&A on Third Party Intervention Post Pahalgam Pt 2. For more analysis on Pahalgam and its aftermath, read our entire series here.
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Image 1: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Image 2: Z3144228 via Wikimedia Commons
