In his 2026 State of the Union address, U.S. President Donald Trump repeated a familiar refrain celebrating his role in ending the May 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan—the deal he has said he is most proud of. He declared that but for U.S. efforts to pull both sides back from the brink, the conflict “would have been a nuclear war.”

Trump’s claims rankled New Delhi, which has long insisted that its disputes with Pakistan are purely bilateral and don’t require the mediation or intervention of outside powers. But the president had a point. The May 2025 crisis, in which the neighbors exchanged intense cross-border fire for four days, was the most serious fighting between two nuclear powers in decades. It marked a significant expansion of conventional conflict below the nuclear threshold, with drones, missiles, and artillery striking an unprecedented number of sensitive targets, including military bases and urban centers.

Far from being chastened by the scale of the fighting, military planners in India and Pakistan have instead spent the last year drawing lessons about how to inflict greater damage on each other in future conflicts. Both sides have concluded that the next major clash will turn on their ability to strike faster, farther, and in greater volume than they have in the past. They are putting those lessons into practice by acquiring new capabilities, expanding indigenous development programs, and enacting major structural reforms to improve the speed and coordination of their forces.

They also appear increasingly convinced that, should the conflict erupt again, more intense conventional fighting would not risk nuclear escalation. Shortly after the May crisis, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a “new normal” in which India would “strike precisely and decisively” and “not tolerate any nuclear blackmail.” In response to Indian Army Chief Upendra Dwivedi’s warning that Pakistan should avoid provocations if it wants to “remain on the world map,” Pakistan’s military threatened to “shatter the myth of geographic immunity, hitting the farthest reaches of the Indian territory.”

Yet despite their confidence and bluster, the continued risk of escalation in a region home to a quarter of the world’s population should not be underestimated. Even if precision-strike warfare makes the deliberate use of nuclear weapons less likely than in a ground combat scenario, the introduction of novel systems, targets, and domains increases the risk of inadvertent nuclear use.

If and when it comes, the next crisis between India and Pakistan is likely to prove more dangerous, more destructive, and more difficult for Washington to manage. Both sides have historically shown considerable caution in managing crises and avoiding uncontrolled escalation. But India and Pakistan climbed new rungs of the escalation ladder in the last conflict without serious repercussions, emerging both more determined to exact meaningful costs on the battlefield and more confident in their ability to do so.

Washington’s traditional role in facilitating de-escalation will remain critical. Yet Trump’s comments will make mediation more difficult. To prevent the backlash in India from stopping crucial diplomatic outreach, the United States and its partners must prepare for a future crisis that looks nothing like the last. Developing and testing a playbook for rapid decision-making, while supporting quiet channels of substantive engagement between New Delhi and Islamabad, could help prevent the next spark from becoming a true conflagration.

DIPLOMATS OF LAST RESORT

A heinous terrorist attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Pahalgam Valley triggered the May 2025 crisis. On April 22, gunmen killed 25 Indian citizens and one Nepali national, targeting many at close range for their Hindu faith, according to multiple reports. As videos of the attack spread on social media, Modi threatened to pursue the terrorists and their backers “to the ends of the earth” and promised a “punishment bigger than they can imagine.” India blamed Pakistan for the attack and enacted a series of punitive diplomatic measures, including suspending the Indus Waters Treaty, the water-sharing agreement the two sides have maintained since 1960, closing the Attari-Wagah border crossing, expelling Pakistani military advisers, and cancelling visas.

Two weeks later, India targeted nine sites across Punjab province and Pakistan-administered Kashmir with precision-guided artillery, drone, and missile strikes. The attacks struck deeper into Pakistani territory than any since the 1971 India-Pakistan war, hitting two major cities in Punjab associated with anti-India terrorist groups. Pakistan countered by downing several Indian fighter jets. After two days of tit-for-tat drone attacks, in which Pakistan tested India’s air-defense systems and India destroyed a radar site in Lahore, fighting reached a crescendo when India struck at least 11 military sites across Pakistan, including the Nur Khan Airbase in Rawalpindi, adjacent to the headquarters of the agency that oversees Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. With over 70 casualties, the episode marked the most intense fighting between India and Pakistan since the 1999 Kargil conflict, a limited war that erupted after Pakistani forces crossed the Line of Control into Indian-held territory.

At first, Washington took a relatively hands-off approach to mediation. On May 8, shortly before the most intense exchange of fire, U.S. Vice President JD Vance told Fox........

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