escalation was always rational
With India-Pakistan, crises spiral not from madness but from structure
TLDR: After a deadly terrorist attack in Kashmir, India and Pakistan are again locked in crisis, but the underlying game has changed.
Nuclear weapons have not induced restraint; they have warped the structure of conflict beneath them.
Today’s escalation risks are not the product of irrational leaders, but of a strategic environment where bounded rationality, degraded communication, and multi-domain escalation pressures systematically drive both sides toward danger.
Understanding this dynamic is critical not just for predicting outcomes today, but for recognizing how crisis stability in South Asia is eroding — and why future confrontations will be harder to manage.
I approach this topic drawing on research I conducted over two decades ago for my thesis, Blind Man’s Bluff: Nuclear Weapons in the India-Pakistan Rivalry (2001), which examined early post-nuclearization crisis dynamics.
While I do not work professionally on South Asia policy today, the analytical frameworks and crisis models I studied and created then remain relevant—and, in some cases, even more urgently applicable now.
The current crisis confirms and updates many of those earlier insights: nuclear deterrence still constrains full-scale war, but instability at the political, economic, and sub-conventional levels is increasing, making future crises harder to manage and more prone to escalation.
Why This Crisis Feels Different
On April 22, 2025, militants opened fire on a group of Indian tourists near Pahalgam in Kashmir, killing twenty-six civilians. In the days that followed, the crisis between India and Pakistan escalated rapidly. India suspended its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty — a bedrock agreement that had survived even full-scale wars — and moved to downgrade diplomatic ties. Pakistan responded by closing its airspace to Indian carriers, recalling diplomatic staff, and warning that any interference with river flows would be treated as an “act of war.”
For many observing this confrontation — whether in South Asia or abroad — the immediate question is why crises like this seem to recur so predictably, even decades after both countries became nuclear-armed states? Perhaps more urgently: why does each return to the brink feel harder to manage, more structurally unstable than the last?
This is a question I have been thinking about for over two decades. In April 2001, I completed my thesis, Blind Man’s Bluff: Nuclear Weapons in the India-Pakistan Rivalry. At that time, only a few years after India and Pakistan’s nuclear tests, the strategic thinking around South Asian crises still carried a kind of Cold War optimism: that nuclear deterrence, however tenuous, would ultimately induce restraint, prevent major escalation, and stabilize the rivalry.
Drawing heavily on game theory and primary research with decision-makers on the ground, my research argued that nuclear weapons would not prevent future crises, but instead change their character: by shifting incentives, warping escalation ladders, and creating dangerous illusions of maneuver space. I argued that far from stabilizing South Asia, nuclear deterrence might encourage lower-level provocations under the shadow of strategic restraint — a dynamic known as the stability-instability paradox.
Two decades later, the patterns are clear.
Nuclear deterrence has indeed held at the strategic level.
But the logic underneath it: the structure of conflict, the nature of signaling, the risk of escalation — has not remained stable. It has evolved, in ways that traditional deterrence models fail to capture.
Today, crises between India and Pakistan are not simply repetitions of earlier confrontations. They are playing out on a different escalation structure, under different pressures, with different risks — especially as India’s global strategic position strengthens and Pakistan’s diplomatic isolation deepens.
To understand the current crisis, and the risks it carries, requires more than recounting troop movements or diplomatic statements.
It requires a clear analysis of how incentives have shifted, how signaling has deteriorated, and how rational actors operating under bounded information and domestic political constraints can still be pulled toward escalation.
This essay draws on my early research into South Asian nuclear crisis behavior, updated through the lens of twenty-four years of evolved realities.
Using basic game theory models and strategic analysis, I will explain:
Why India-Pakistan crises recur despite nuclear deterrence.
How the underlying escalation ladders have changed since the early 2000s.
What new structural risks now exist, particularly with the introduction of water security as a weaponized domain.
And why the future of crisis stability in South Asia is more fragile than conventional wisdom suggests.
The goal is not just to predict how this particular confrontation will end, but to help readers, especially those from or connected to South Asia, like I am, understand the deeper dynamics that will shape the future.
How India-Pakistan Crisis Behavior Evolved After Nuclearization
The basic structure of India-Pakistan crises since 1998 has remained deceptively familiar: a triggering event, usually involving violence or terrorism; public and political pressure for retaliation; mobilization or calibrated military moves; and eventual de-escalation before full-scale war breaks out.
The 1999 Kargil conflict, launched by Pakistani forces and militants infiltrating Indian positions along the Line of Control, came barely a year after both countries tested nuclear weapons. Despite intense fighting, the conflict remained geographically constrained. Crucially, international pressure—particularly from the United States—played a decisive role in compelling Pakistani withdrawal, reinforcing an early belief that nuclear deterrence would induce caution.
In 2001, the terrorist attack on India's Parliament triggered Operation Parakram: a year-long military standoff involving massive troop mobilizations on both sides. Despite repeated fears that conventional war would break out, both countries ultimately refrained from crossing major escalation thresholds. Nuclear deterrence operated less by calming tensions than by creating a zone of extreme caution at the highest levels.
The 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which Pakistan-based militants killed more than 160 people, tested this structure again. Under intense domestic pressure, India refrained from military retaliation, focusing instead on diplomatic isolation of Pakistan and mobilization of international opinion. The heavy involvement of U.S. diplomacy was again critical to crisis management.
A subtle but important shift occurred with the 2016 Uri attack and 2019 Pulwama bombing. In both cases, India chose calibrated military responses—cross-border strikes on militant infrastructure and, in the case of Balakot, an airstrike inside Pakistani territory. These actions introduced a new dynamic: the idea that limited conventional strikes could be conducted under the nuclear threshold without necessarily triggering strategic escalation.
Despite public rhetoric, both sides remained careful.
In 2019, after the Balakot strike and subsequent Pakistani retaliation, backchannel communications helped contain the crisis. No large-scale conventional war followed.
Throughout these crises, three stabilizing mechanisms helped prevent escalation from spinning out of control:
Functional backchannels, allowing leaders to clarify intentions privately even as public rhetoric escalated.
Third-party mediation, particularly from the United States, pushing both sides toward restraint at key moments.
Mutual tacit understandings: an implicit awareness of where true red lines lay, especially regarding major territorial seizures or direct attacks on strategic assets.
The presence of these stabilizers did not eliminate crises.
But they shaped them, providing structure, off-ramps, and a sense of the boundaries within which competition could occur.
Today, however, those stabilizers have eroded.
The structure of escalation itself is shifting — and the assumptions that guided past crisis management are no longer reliable.
It is important to note that crisis escalation between India and Pakistan has historically not been symmetrical.
While terrorist attacks in India, especially those attributed to Pakistan-backed groups, have reliably triggered bilateral and international crises, attacks inside Pakistan, including high-casualty events attributed to separatist groups or Islamist militants, have not produced similar external escalations.
Even when Pakistan has alleged Indian involvement, as in Balochistan, its accusations have generally been confined to diplomatic channels and domestic narratives, without triggering the same pattern of military signaling, mobilization, or global mediation.
This asymmetry in crisis behavior reflects deeper imbalances in how the two states perceive and project strategic vulnerability, and how the international community responds to their respective claims.
What’s Different Now: The New Sources of Instability
Although the basic crisis pattern between India and Pakistan — a terrorist attack, political pressure, signaling of force, and eventual de-escalation — has remained recognizable since 1998, the strategic environment surrounding that pattern has changed profoundly.
Several new factors distinguish the 2025 crisis from earlier episodes, and each of them introduces new escalation risks.
1. The Weaponization of Water
India’s suspension of participation in the Indus Waters Treaty represents a fundamental shift in the tools being used to exert pressure.
Until now, water had been treated as a protected domain, a rare area of functional cooperation, even amid wars and major crises.
Weaponizing water introduces a new dimension of existential threat for Pakistan, whose economy and food security are critically dependent on the Indus river system.
This shift is more dangerous than conventional military action in some respects.
Water disruption threatens the internal stability of the Pakistani state itself, and the political survival of its leadership, making any perceived Indian moves in this area trigger far sharper escalation incentives than a border skirmish or limited airstrike.
The Indus system was once an invisible stabilizer, an unspoken buffer against total breakdown. That assumption is now eroding.
2. The Collapse of Crisis Communication Channels
In earlier crises, backchannel diplomacy played a critical role in managing escalation. Even at the height of public confrontation, Indian and Pakistani officials — and sometimes intelligence agencies — maintained unofficial lines of communication to clarify intentions, create off-ramps, and de-escalate behind the scenes.
Today, those channels are largely defunct or deeply mistrusted.
Years of political hardening, reduced diplomatic staffing, and deteriorating bilateral relations have hollowed out the infrastructure of crisis management.
Without trusted backchannels, both sides are forced to communicate through public moves and media signaling — a far less reliable medium prone to distortion, misinterpretation, and unintended escalation.
This communication vacuum increases the probability that actions intended as calibrated pressure will be misread as preemptive escalation, pulling both sides further up the crisis ladder faster than in the past.
3. India’s Strengthened Global Position vs. Pakistan’s Isolation
Perhaps the most important structural shift is the widening gap between India and Pakistan’s global strategic positions.
India today is viewed as a major economic and geopolitical actor, closely aligned with key powers such as the United States, Japan, Australia, and European nations.
Its role in the Indo-Pacific balance of power, its participation in groupings like the Quad, and its expanding economic partnerships have fundamentally changed its diplomatic standing.
Pakistan, by contrast, is increasingly isolated.
Its relationships with traditional allies have weakened; it faces growing skepticism in Washington; it is economically fragile; and it is plagued by persistent domestic security challenges, including insurgencies and political instability.
Its alignment with China remains important but is insufficient to offset broader diplomatic marginalization.
This asymmetry affects crisis dynamics in two ways:
First, India faces less international pressure to show restraint.
Past crises often triggered urgent external calls for de-escalation from Washington and other capitals. Today, India’s global partners are more likely to view its responses — even strong ones — as legitimate self-defense rather than destabilizing aggression.
Second, Pakistan has fewer tools to shape international narratives or leverage third-party mediation.
Its threats or escalations are less likely to elicit global sympathy or support, narrowing its strategic options and increasing the temptation to escalate in asymmetric ways to force international attention.
In short, the global playing field is no longer balanced.
This imbalance increases the risk that Pakistan, perceiving strategic marginalization, may take riskier moves to reassert relevance — while India, perceiving greater strategic insulation, may pursue harder measures without fearing immediate diplomatic consequences.
4. Shifts in Crisis Perception: From Local to Systemic Risks
In earlier crises, escalation was often viewed as an isolated bilateral problem.
Today, in a world marked by great power competition, fragile global supply chains, and growing regional security linkages, a major South Asian conflict would have systemic effects far beyond the subcontinent.
Energy markets, global trade, strategic military postures — all could be affected by a major escalation.
Yet paradoxically, despite the higher systemic risks, the immediate diplomatic pressure to de-escalate is weaker than it was twenty years ago.
The combination of greater potential systemic consequences and weaker immediate external mediation represents a dangerous paradox at the heart of the 2025 crisis.
The old crisis management playbook is still being invoked rhetorically. But the ground underneath it has shifted — and with it, the risks of escalation are far less manageable than they once were.
Game Theory and the New Strategic Trap
The 2025 India-Pakistan crisis is not simply another repetition of past confrontations.
It represents a structural shift in how escalation unfolds, a shift that is best understood through a game-theoretic lens. At its core, the crisis is shaped not by emotional reactions or irrational leadership, but by the incentives, constraints, and information gaps that systematically push both sides toward escalation.
Each government confronts a stark strategic choice set.
For India, the decision is between restraint — limiting its response to diplomatic, economic, and symbolic measures — and escalation, applying direct pressure through limited military strikes or manipulating critical resources such as water.
Pakistan similarly faces a choice between restraint — relying on diplomatic protest and symbolic gestures — and escalation, whether through military mobilization, cross-border operations, or intensified sub-conventional warfare.
These choices produce four fundamental strategic scenarios:
In theory, mutual restraint offers the least costly outcome: sustained tension without major escalation.
But mutual restraint is politically fragile.
For India, the domestic political costs of perceived weakness after civilian casualties are steep.
For Pakistan, restraint in the face of existential threats, particularly if India moves materially against river flows, could trigger internal instability or a loss of regime credibility.
If India escalates while Pakistan restrains, New Delhi may successfully impose costs and signal deterrence strength.
But the destabilization risks within Pakistan — political, economic, and military — could create a different kind of escalation spiral, even if Islamabad initially chooses not to respond.
If Pakistan escalates while India restrains, Islamabad may hope to regain strategic initiative, but at the cost of reinforcing Indian perceptions that restraint invites further violence, making harsher retaliation in future crises more likely.
The most dangerous scenario: simultaneous escalation, is made more probable by the breakdown of trusted communication channels.
Without reliable ways to signal intent or clarify actions, each side may assume the worst about the other's moves, and escalate preemptively rather than risk being strategically outmaneuvered.
This dynamic: rational actors trapped by a structure that rewards escalation under uncertainty, is a classical game-theoretic failure mode.
Incomplete information, asymmetric incentives, and bounded rationality produce a system in which even prudent leaders can find themselves sliding toward outcomes no one desires.
The evolution of the escalation ladder since the early 2000s compounds this instability.
Earlier crises unfolded largely within conventional military domains: mobilizations, limited strikes, artillery duels.
There were understood rungs to climb, and mutual signaling was more direct.
Today, escalation moves across multiple domains simultaneously: military, water resources, economic sanctions, cyber operations, and diplomatic expulsions.
Actions that might once have been interpreted as "measured" are now imbued with existential stakes, particularly from the weaker party’s perspective.
Signaling clarity has degraded severely.
A move that India views as calibrated, such as suspending participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, may be seen by Pakistan as an existential assault requiring immediate and forceful response.
Symbolic Pakistani retaliation may be read by India not as defensive signaling, but as evidence that pressure must be escalated further to be effective.
Strategic nuclear deterrence still operates at the very top of the escalation ladder.
Neither side wants, or benefits from, full-scale war.
But beneath that ceiling, the structure of interaction has shifted.
Bounded rationality, fragmented escalation ladders, and decayed signaling mechanisms have created an environment where escalation is more likely to occur horizontally across domains — in ways that leaders cannot fully control once the dynamic begins.
In effect, the game has changed: the fundamental logic of deterrence persists at the strategic level, but the shape of the playing field beneath it has warped, and rational actors are now operating on a board where risk is both more subtle and more explosive than it appears.
The Future: Escalation Risks and Possible Scenarios
Given the structure of incentives and information failures outlined above, the current crisis can plausibly evolve along several different pathways.
Each pathway reflects not only the immediate decisions made by leaders in New Delhi and Islamabad, but also the deeper game-theoretic dynamics shaping how those decisions are perceived, misperceived, and responded to.
The first and least destabilizing possibility is mutual restraint, where both sides consciously limit their actions to diplomatic protests, economic pressures, and rhetorical signaling.
In this pathway, escalation is avoided not because the incentives favor it, but because leadership choices manage, for the moment, to suppress those incentives through deliberate strategic patience.
This outcome remains possible — but fragile. It would require a level of communication clarity, domestic political discipline, and external diplomatic pressure that has so far been lacking in the 2025 environment.
More likely are asymmetric escalation pathways, in which one side escalates while the other exercises temporary restraint.
If India moves forward with measures that materially alter water flows or undertakes calibrated military strikes across the Line of Control, and Pakistan initially holds back, the strategic balance could shift quickly.
Islamabad's domestic political actors — particularly the military establishment — may view delayed or insufficient retaliation as a risk to internal stability, pushing Pakistan toward belated escalation under worse conditions.
Alternatively, if Pakistan retaliates early through sub-conventional means — for example, covert support for proxy attacks, cyber operations, or intensified cross-border activity — while India seeks to maintain diplomatic pressure, New Delhi would face strong domestic demands for more forceful military or economic action.
In either asymmetric path, escalation pressures do not disappear; they are simply deferred and redistributed over time.
The most dangerous scenario remains simultaneous escalation: a dynamic where both sides move aggressively at the same time, across multiple domains, without effective signaling or off-ramps.
In this environment, escalation is not linear.
It is lateral, dynamic, and difficult to contain: a water-related coercive move could trigger cyber retaliation, which in turn leads to border skirmishes, which then invite conventional airstrikes — each move justified internally as a defensive necessity, but perceived externally as proof of offensive intent.
Such a crisis spiral would be harder to stop than in past episodes like Kargil or Balakot.
The absence of trusted backchannels, the weakened influence of traditional third-party mediators, and the growing domestic political entrenchment on both sides all mean that escalation pathways, once triggered, are more likely to continue through multiple stages before external or internal pressures force a reconsideration.
Even if the current confrontation eventually de-escalates, the structural dynamics exposed during this crisis will not simply reset.
The weaponization of new domains like water, the breakdown of communication norms, and the normalization of limited cross-domain coercion are now part of the strategic environment.
They will shape the baseline of the next crisis — and the one after that.
In this sense, what we are witnessing is not simply another India-Pakistan crisis.
It is the emergence of a new crisis architecture: one in which the risks of escalation are embedded not just in leadership miscalculation, but in the structure of strategic interaction itself.
Understanding this is essential not merely for predicting the next move, but for recognizing how the region’s strategic environment is evolving — and why the stabilizing assumptions of the past are becoming increasingly obsolete.
What It Means for South Asia and Beyond
The presence of nuclear weapons was once thought to impose a kind of automatic caution on the India-Pakistan rivalry — to discipline crises, to enforce restraint, to create natural ceilings on escalation.
Two decades of history show that this was a dangerous oversimplification.
Strategic nuclear deterrence has held at the very highest levels.
Neither side has crossed the threshold into full-scale war since 1998.
But beneath that ceiling, the shape of conflict has shifted.
Escalation ladders have fragmented, signaling has degraded, and crisis management structures have eroded.
Far from suppressing conflict, the presence of nuclear weapons has allowed lower-level provocations, retaliations, and competitions to metastasize under a falsely reassuring shadow of strategic stability.
The 2025 crisis illustrates this evolution in stark terms.
India’s growing global stature and Pakistan’s deepening isolation have altered the diplomatic and strategic incentives that once contained crises.
The weaponization of existential domains like water introduces new risks that are harder to calibrate and easier to misinterpret.
And the decay of backchannel communications leaves both sides more vulnerable to escalation by misperception rather than by design.
This crisis, regardless of how it ends, will leave behind a changed landscape.
Each successful act of calibrated pressure, each escalation that avoids total disaster, reinforces the belief on both sides that maneuvering below the strategic threshold is viable — even advantageous.
Over time, this normalization of risk accumulates systemic fragility: leaders believe they are managing crises successfully, even as the structural safeguards that prevent disaster grow weaker.
For those in South Asia, and for those with personal, professional, or emotional ties to the region, this reality demands a deeper reckoning.
The cycle of provocation, retaliation, and escalation is not the product of irrationality or emotional volatility.
It is the logical, if tragic, outcome of a system whose incentives reward aggressive signaling and whose communication failures amplify worst-case assumptions.
Avoiding future catastrophe will require more than tactical crisis management.
It will require rebuilding stabilizers — restoring channels of communication, insulating existential domains like water from political weaponization, and rethinking escalation models to reflect the realities of today's multi-domain contests, not yesterday’s simpler military ladders.
The stability of South Asia was never guaranteed by the mere existence of nuclear weapons.
Its future stability will depend, increasingly, on whether leaders and strategists can recognize the evolving architecture of risk — and act deliberately to rebuild the spaces for restraint before they are permanently lost.
Adil Husain is the Managing Director of Emerging Strategy, a global strategic intelligence firm that advises mid-market and multinational companies on navigating complex international environments. He brings over two decades of experience analyzing strategic decision-making in global markets, informed by living and working extensively in the United States, China, and Southeast Asia.
This analysis draws in part on original research Adil conducted over two decades ago in his thesis, Blind Man’s Bluff: Nuclear Weapons in the India-Pakistan Rivalry (2001), which examined crisis behavior and deterrence dynamics in South Asia following nuclearization.
While his professional focus today is international business strategy rather than South Asia security policy, the crisis frameworks he studied and created remain highly relevant to understanding the escalation risks now emerging in the region.
You can contact Adil here or connect with him on LinkedIn for more insights.
Insightful read, Adil!
Well researched and well structured presentation. Thanks.