Peace Posturing

It was a spectacle only Donald Trump could conjure: a ceasefire between two nuclear-armed rivals, India and Pakistan, announced not through military commands or backchannel diplomacy, but via Truth Social, the US President’s personal megaphone on X.

On May 10, Trump declared that cross-border hostilities had ended while crediting himself for brokering peace and lauding the “strength, wisdom, and fortitude” of both countries. Hours later, gunfire echoed once again in Srinagar, laying bare the farce. New Delhi, unsurprisingly, dismissed the announcement. Trump’s intrusion into a volatile situation - India’s ongoing Operation Sindoor against terror camps in Pakistan-occupied territory - was not just premature but offensive. Washington had played no role in halting hostilities. That did not stop Trump from claiming otherwise, or from dusting off an old fantasy which is solving the Kashmir dispute.

This is not the first time the bombastic US President has fancied himself a peacemaker in South Asia. During his previous stint in the Oval Office, he offered to mediate between India and China after their violent border clash in Galwan, an offer that was rejected by New Delhi. Then as now, his grasp of regional dynamics was flimsy, his motives suspect and his execution theatrical. His latest Kashmir foray shows little has changed.

Beneath the bluster lies a familiar pattern. Trump’s foreign policy instincts are less rooted in strategy than in self-promotion. That his announcement coincided with India’s counter-terrorism operation only underscores his eagerness to hijack the narrative for personal gain.

Trump’s bombast also reflects America’s long, uneasy entanglement with Pakistan. As India launched Operation Sindoor, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, in a television interview, publicly admitted that his country had been fighting ‘America’s dirty war’ for years, yet another confession of the duplicitous role Pakistan has played as both ally and saboteur in Washington’s endless wars. This Faustian arrangement wherein American largesse has freely flowed despite Pakistan’s harbouring of extremists has bred a relationship based on mutual mistrust and reluctant dependence.

It is this fraught legacy that makes Trump’s fulsome praise for Pakistan ring hollow. His ceasefire theatrics are less about peace than about preserving a historically unreliable partner for future utility. Islamabad knows how to extract concessions; Washington, under Trump, has rarely resisted the bait. His boast of increasing trade with both India and Pakistan ‘substantially’ was unsolicited and unserious. Trump’s record as a self-declared global peacemaker is poor as evinced in the Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine conflicts. India must resist this pageantry. It cannot allow Washington to dictate terms or hijack its security agenda. Trump is not a stabiliser in South Asia. He is a meddler with a megaphone. Kashmir is not a reality-TV set and diplomacy is not a stage-managed finale for applause. Any lasting silence of the guns will come through hard-won regional understanding and not through the social media outbursts of a man who still imagines he can broker global peace from a keyboard.