* Israel’s Gaza War

* Russia’s Role in the World

* Indo-Pakistani Conflict Still Simmering

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The West – Finally – Sours on the Gaza War

There has been no good news out of Gaza for months, since the US-brokered Israel-Hamas ceasefire collapsed (Chris Good/Fareed’s Global Briefing, May 22).

Recently, things have only gotten worse: Last week, an UN-backed report found that one in five Gazans faces starvation.

Following the announcement of a new Israeli offensive earlier this month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel will “take control” of the Strip.

Thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., a different kind of violence unfolded, directly related to the war in Gaza.

A soon-to-be-engaged young couple who worked at the Israel embassy was gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum.

Video showed the alleged gunman yelling: “Free, free Palestine,” as he was being detained.

Other headlines point to a changed international climate surrounding Israel’s war effort.

Significantly, Israel faces new pressure from European governments, which issued rare rebukes this week.

Israel also faces a chillier relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump had been viewed as a likely ally of Israeli hawks.

His stunning proposal to totally empty Gaza of Palestinians tracked with the goals of Israel’s ultranationalist far right.

More recently, however, Trump seems to have turned on Netanyahu, as Frida Ghitis wrote recently for the World Politics Review – snubbing the Israeli leader, for instance, by announcing new nuclear talks with Iran while Netanyahu visited the White House.

This month, Trump’s administration negotiated directly with Hamas to secure the release of an Israeli-American hostage, and Trump announced a US truce with Yemen’s Houthi militants soon after they stuck near Israel’s main international airport.

Trump’s willingness to engage in such diplomacy without first notifying Israel “is shaking up Israeli politics in the sense that the far right had a set of expectations about President Trump…

“that he would give the Israelis a blank check, allow them to do whatever they wanted, always take their interests into account,” longtime US Middle East diplomat and former Obama adviser Dennis Ross tells host Brian Katulis on the latest episode of the Middle East Institute’s Taking the Edge Off the Middle East podcast.

And now it turns out that is not the case, so they do not know quite what to make of it.”

Notable changes are underway in Europe, too, as Al-Monitor’s Ben Caspit writes.

“Three of Israel’s most important allies – Britain, France and Canada – issued an unprecedented statement condemning Israel for its campaign in Gaza, including threats of ‘concrete actions.’

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot warned that the European Union (EU) could revisit its association agreement with Israel, including free trade zones.

EU recognition of a Palestinian state is also on the table, as indicated by French President Emmanuel Macron recently.

Detailing those developments, CNN’s Catherine Nicholls also notes UK Foreign Minister David Lammy’s warning that the Gaza war appears to be “entering a dark new phase.”

Faced with a dire situation in Gaza, “which has been condemned for months by humanitarian organizations, Israel’s allies are beginning to change their rhetoric, with most of them placing the ongoing tragedy than on a political resolution to the conflict,” Le Monde’s Samuel Forey and Philippe Ricard write.

Writing under the headline “the Europeans wake up,” and suggesting Westerners have turned a blind eye to the suffering of Gazangreater emphasis on the humanitarian aspect because of their skin colour, Michael Young asserts on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Diwan blog that this new criticism of Israel comes too late.

“Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza has done perhaps more than anything else to undermine the liberal principles [leaders in the US and Europe] have tried to impose internationally, and to which they claim allegiance, Young writes.

“The damage has been done. Gaza stands as a critical juncture in the decomposition of Western liberal internationalist principles. But no one could have expected such principles to long survive once their purveyors began applying them so selectively.”

Bearish on Russia

When President Vladimir Putin hosted Russia’s annual Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9, celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II, columnist Owen Matthews wrote for the conservative The Telegraph that several signs reflected Russia’s current diplomatic isolation, political distance from the West and a broader fall from grace as a world-class geopolitical power.

In attendance were various national leaders, “from Chinese president Xi Jinping to a scattering of Central Asian leaders who still feel the need to pay fealty to their old imperial boss.

Units from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and from North Korea also joined the parade,” Matthews wrote, musing about “how far Russia has fallen from those glory days, no longer a world power but rather a vassal to the true superpower of China.”

In a Foreign Affairs essay, Andrei Yakovlev, Vladimir Dubrovskiy and Yuri Danilov espouse a similarly bleak view:

“Already well before 2022,” when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “the character of the Putin regime had changed significantly, as Putin moved away from the West…

“For years, the Kremlin had been building an ultraconservative, revisionist ideology centered on anti-modern values…

“After 2012, when Putin returned to the has on Russia’s elites, embracing an archaic militarism, and widening its repression of civil society…

“Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and especially over the past year, however, that evolution has gone much further…

“Putin had expected a quick and cheap victory, not a protracted war, the situation has forced him to accelerate the restructuring of Russia’s political, economic, and social systems to tighten his grip on the nation…

“Along with the progressing militarization of the Russian economy, these changes have created severe tensions within the regime.”

The US should take note, they write, as Putin has put Russia on a course toward “self-reinforcing and perpetual conflict with the West.”

India’s Failure to Deter Pakistan Will Fuel Future Cross-Border Attacks

The recent Indo-Pakistani fighting represents a significant escalation in the cross-border disputes that have periodically flared between the two sworn enemies.

Unlike India’s limited punitive strikes in the past, the latest Indian offensive pressed deeper into Pakistani territory.

India’s “Operation Sindoor” ranged far beyond Pakistani-administered Kashmir into Punjab, Pakistan’s heartland, hitting not just the facilities of terrorist militant groups but also military targets, including air bases.

In recent decades, fighting had mostly been confined to the border region around the disputed territory of Kashmir.

In May, Pakistan’s major cities and many big cities in northern India were on high alert.

With this background, Aqil Shah, a leading expert on South Asia and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, writes in Foreign Affairs that with its air and missile strikes, the Indian government of Narendra Modi hoped to demonstrate strength to a rattled and ultra-nationalistic public that wanted revenge for the gruesome and unexpected attack in Pahalgam, near the capital Srinagar in Kashmir (May 23).

By venturing deeper into Pakistan and hitting a broad array of targets, India also wanted to reestablish deterrence and discourage Pakistan’s military from backing militant groups active across Indian territory.

However, Shah is of the opinion that rather than deterring its rival, India precipitated a retaliation that ended up burnishing the Pakistani military’s reputation and boosting its domestic popularity:

“Paradoxically, India’s retribution has handed the Pakistani army its biggest symbolic victory in recent decades.”

Therefore, Shah concludes that this will hardly discourage Pakistan [or more precisely, the Army] from stopping the proxy war against India or risking future flare-ups between these two nuclear-armed states.

The Indo-Pakistani geopolitical situation can, therefore, be described as a strategic stalemate.

Pakistan’s Military Escalates

Aqil Shah is convinced that Pakistan’s military has long used proxies against India.

Thus, a group affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, which infamously staged a bloody attack on Mumbai in 2008, claimed responsibility for the April massacre in Pahalgam.

Soon after the attack, India took the unprecedented step of unilaterally suspending the Indus Water Treaty, an agreement brokered by the World Bank in 1960 to manage the flow of water critical for hydropower, irrigation, and agriculture in Pakistan.

Indian officials also vastly underestimated how much the Pakistani military needed to demonstrate its own war readiness and resolve, both to India and to its domestic audience.

The public image of the Pakistani army and that of its chief, General Asim Munir, had plummeted.

Munir had faced a severe backlash over the crackdown on Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan, the country’s former prime minister and most popular leader.

The brief Indo-Pakistani skirmishes revealed the limitations of India’s presumed air supremacy, renewing the Pakistani military’s confidence that it can hold its own in a limited conflict despite India’s conventional superiority.

The Pakistani military’s domestic legitimacy has now been restored.

It now presents itself as a triumphant force, guarding the country from Indian aggression.

Munir himself has emerged from the confrontation with India much stronger.

As a reward for his leadership in “defeating the enemy”, the country’s nominal civilian [and very weak] government has elevated Munir to the highest military rank of field marshal, making him only the second officer to hold that title after Muhammed Ayub Khan, the general who led the country for a decade after a military coup in 1958.

India has also not succeeded in reestablishing deterrence.

It had hoped that a punitive response, backed by the threat of economic coercion would now discourage Pakistan from engaging in proxy warfare.

Indian attacks on Pakistani militant sites did little to damage Pakistan’s jihadi infrastructure.

Aqil Shah writes that the military-run Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s most important intelligence agency, had ample time to relocate its prime assets to safety.

Moreover, planning and launching terror attacks on India is not dependent on fixed structures vulnerable to enemy fire.

Pakistan’s ISI out-foxed India’s RAW and, thus:

“Pakistan fully retains its capacity to use terrorism to rattle India.”

Munir himself had taken a visibly hard-line approach to India.

Less than a week before the Pahalgam attack, he had invoked the “two-nation theory”, or Pakistan’s founding idea that Hindus and Muslims are two distinct and fundamentally incompatible civilizations, at a convention in Islamabad.

In his own words: “Our religions are different, our cultures are different, our ambitions are different.”

Describing Pakistan as a “hard state”, he had vowed to continue backing the Kashmiris’ “heroic fight” against Indian occupation.

[He did not mention Pakistan-administered Kashmir].

The Pakistani generals are not about to change course, in spite of the possibility of nuclear war looming over any conflict between the two neighbors.

Pakistan’s “Nuclear Posturing”

As the weaker South Asian power (in conventional terms), it is not surprising that Pakistan has a penchant for nuclear posturing.

It has successfully used the spectre of nuclear war in its previous standoffs with India to precipitate a timely U.S. intervention.

In the latest round of fighting, Pakistan also resorted to nuclear signaling.

Ahead of India’s retaliatory attack, Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif warned the world in late April that Pakistan would consider using nuclear weapons if “there was a direct threat to our existence.”

After India hit key Pakistani air bases, including the strategically located Nur Khan base close to the army’s general headquarters and the country’s nuclear command centre, Pakistan did not just retaliate conventionally.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif immediately summoned the National Command Authority, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal and is tasked with approving the use of the nuclear weapons, to send a calculated message to India – and the world.

Modi has warned that Pakistan’s “nuclear blackmail” will not prevent India from striking against terrorist sanctuaries on its soil.

Thus, the ceasefire is by no means a lasting peace.

A single terror attack could destabilize the region by triggering another cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation.

Because of the existential threat to the whole South Asian region, the Indo-Pakistani conflict can no longer be considered a bilateral issue. SAARC must be resurrected.

The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com