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.
He declared that 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 neighbours 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 centres.
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.”
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