by Post-conflict equilibrium holds after May 2025 four-day confrontation; analysts describe situation as stable deterrence; neighbors prefer different word
NEW DELHI / ISLAMABAD
India-Pakistan relations remain what Chatham House Senior Research Fellow Gareth Price describes as “precarious” — a word choice that usefully distinguishes the current state from both “stable” (implying robust peace) and “crisis” (implying imminent conflict), occupying the diplomatically accurate middle ground of a relationship that has enough structural deterrence to prevent catastrophe and enough unresolved grievances to make catastrophe continuously available as an option that neither side fully rules out.
The May 2025 four-day military confrontation — India’s most significant cross-border exchange with Pakistan since the Kargil conflict of 1999 — concluded with a ceasefire attributed by both governments to “strategic restraint” and by outside analysts to the combined deterrent effect of external pressure from the United States and the Gulf states, and the mutual understanding that both countries possess nuclear weapons and that the escalation ladder has a top that neither leadership wants to reach. The distinction between “we chose to stop” and “we stopped because the alternative was unacceptable” is politically significant and strategically unimportant; the outcome is the same either way.
Terror Attacks in Both Capitals: The November 2025 Context
Terror attacks in both New Delhi and Islamabad in November 2025 did not trigger military action, which analysts describe as evidence of both governments’ commitment to stability and which strategic deterrence theory would predict as the expected outcome — major terror attacks with unclear attribution creating pressure for response while also creating the conditions where misattribution or disproportionate response could trigger escalation neither side can fully control. The decision not to respond militarily reflected, per Chatham House analysis, “a degree of strategic restraint fuelled by external pressure and the threat of nuclear weapons.”
“Fuelled by external pressure and the threat of nuclear weapons” is not a formula that produces confidence in the relationship’s underlying stability — it produces confidence in the deterrence architecture’s short-term reliability, which is a more limited and more fragile assurance. It means the relationship is stable as long as the deterrence architecture holds, the external pressure maintains its force, and no actor — state or non-state — does something that makes the costs of restraint exceed the costs of response. All three conditions have held since November 2025. None of them can be assumed to hold indefinitely.
Hyper-Nationalist Rhetoric: Both Sides, Unhelping
Indian and Pakistani domestic politics both reward nationalist rhetoric about the other country, creating a structural dynamic in which politicians seeking to mobilize their base have incentives to make statements that, while domestically popular, reduce the diplomatic space available for relationship management. Modi’s “tough-on-security” credentials — built through the 2019 Balakot airstrikes and the 2025 confrontation — create political expectations that any future significant Pakistani provocation or terror attack will require an Indian military response. Pakistan’s domestic politics similarly constrain Pakistani leadership’s flexibility on India-related positions.
The combination of nuclear deterrence (which prevents total war), conventional military capability (which allows limited confrontation), and domestic nationalist politics (which rewards escalatory rhetoric) creates what strategists call a “stability-instability paradox”: nuclear deterrence makes total war improbable while conventional confrontation remains available and domestically rewarded, producing a relationship that is simultaneously deterred from catastrophe and continuously vulnerable to crises that could escalate toward it.
The Silver Lining: Restraint Works, Until It Doesn’t
The optimistic assessment of India-Pakistan relations in 2026 is that the restraint displayed in November 2025 demonstrates that both governments have internalized the deterrence logic sufficiently to choose de-escalation even under significant domestic pressure. The pessimistic assessment is that restraint is easier to maintain when the triggering event is ambiguous, the external pressure is strong, and the election calendar creates political space for patience. A major, clearly-attributed, high-casualty attack in a different political context might produce a different calculation.
The Indian Ministry of External Affairs describes its Pakistan policy as “we want normal neighborly relations, but the onus is on Pakistan to create conditions for that.” The Pakistani foreign ministry describes its India policy in terms with structural similarities and opposite attribution. Both positions have been held for approximately thirty years. Both are sincere. Both are insufficient to produce the normal neighborly relations that both governments say they want and neither government has produced. This is the definition of precarious.
Non-State Actors and the Escalation Risk
The Chatham House analysis of India-Pakistan relations specifically flags “the unpredictability of non-state armed groups” as a key escalation risk — which is the diplomatic way of noting that both governments face the challenge of maintaining restraint in response to attacks that may be carried out by groups whose relationship to the Pakistani state is ambiguous, contested, and deniable. India’s position is that Pakistani state agencies maintain connections to militant groups that conduct attacks in India; Pakistan’s position is that it does not control all actors in its territory and that India uses the militant accusation to avoid engaging with the underlying political dispute. Both positions contain elements that outside observers find at least partially credible, which is the specific difficulty of the attribution problem in cross-border terrorism: the evidentiary standard that would convince a neutral international tribunal is rarely met, the evidentiary standard that convinces each government’s domestic audience is different, and the political cost of restraint rises with the body count regardless of the legal attribution. Managing this asymmetry is the permanent diplomatic challenge of the India-Pakistan relationship, and it will remain so regardless of which specific governments are in office on either side.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
