In the latest series of articles reflecting on the anniversary of the May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis, Syed Ali Zia Jaffery examines how misperceptions, weak crisis-management mechanisms, emerging technologies, and geographical proximity could make future India-Pakistan crises dangerously prone to nuclear brinkmanship. The views expressed belong solely to the author of the article and do not necessarily reflect their government’s position, any affiliated institutions, or that of BASIC. BASIC welcomes other contributions on this topic from a range of perspectives, including from Indian experts and authors. Please get in touch if you are interested in submitting an article.
In her latest report entitled, Unpacking the May 2025 India-Pakistan Crisis: Mutual Perceptions, Nuclear Escalation Risks, and De-escalation Pathways, Mhairi McClafferty uses two frameworks to understand the contours of escalation and de-escalation during the May 2025 crisis. One of those is developed by scholars Mark Bell and Julia McDonald in their article, ‘How to Think About Nuclear Crises’. Bell and McDonald’s compelling work has enriched the scholarship on crises, not least by introducing four models. According to McClafferty, the May 2025 India-Pakistan crisis had some elements of the brinkmanship model–characterised by both low incentives for nuclear use and low crisis controllability, as well as by the generation of risks through miscalculation or loss of control. She argues that India’s strikes on the Nur Khan base–a place not too far away from Pakistan’s nuclear command, control, and communication (NC3) infrastructure–coupled with the pace of escalation and “the potential for technical failures and misperceptions, created conditions where escalation could have become inadvertent and potentially uncontrollable”. She also expresses concerns over the likelihood of future crises moving towards the brinkmanship model, primarily due to weakening guardrails on escalation. The dangerousness that McClafferty discusses in her report points to the pitfalls associated with resorting to brinkmanship–a concept that undergirds Bell and McDonald’s model.
In a crisis-prone South Asia, brinkmanship and the risks it engenders need reimagining. This necessity emanates from the characteristics of brinkmanship. The concept of brinkmanship was introduced by Thomas Schelling. In his classic The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence (Harvard University Press, 1960), Schelling treats brinkmanship as a solution to the problem of threat credibility. Dubbing it a competition in risk-taking, Schelling thinks of brinkmanship as a process that could enhance the danger of mutual disaster. To Schelling, that disaster could happen due to either or both sides losing control, resulting in mutual disaster. The expectation is that, fearing mutual annihilation, belligerents with low resolve will climb down from the brink. To surmise, brinkmanship is centered on deliberately creating the conditions for uncontrollable escalation, hoping that the other side will stand down amid shared risks.
Since the overt nuclearisation of South Asia in May 1998, high-stakes crises, including last year’s, have, to varying degrees, raised the prospect of major, uncontrollable escalation. For instance, both the 2019 Pulwama-Balakot crisis and the May 2025 crisis had the ingredients for rapid escalation. Had Pakistan refused to return the Indian pilot in 2019 or chosen to use ballistic or cruise missiles in 2025, both crises might have escalated in unpredictable ways. Therefore, in South Asia’s fraught milieu, the mere initiation of a crisis should be termed brinkmanship. Various factors make this argument reasonable.
First, in the absence of any dialogue, let alone a bilateral crisis management mechanism, between the two countries, misperceptions will become more pronounced. This phenomenon, in and of itself, will make it difficult for both parties to identify, to use Schelling’s metaphor, the slope. So, while one side might manipulate risks to demonstrate resolve, the other side might misconstrue it as a calculated attempt to escalate further. This misinterpretation could lead to miscalculation.
Second, India and Pakistan walked away from the May 2025 crisis with different lessons and as a result, no shared understanding of risks has emerged out of the crisis. India thinks that it has taught Pakistan a lesson, carving out more space for violence below the nuclear threshold. Pakistan, on the other hand, argues that its deterrence is strong and it can give a befitting response to India in the conventional realm. These divergences might make both sides see the brink quite differently. If both sides enter the next crisis with these opposite readings, brinkmanship will put the already eroded restraint under more stress. Simply put, an action that produces recognisable risks of things going awry may not necessarily force either side to back down. If anything, in the quest to find face-saving narratives and avoid reputational damage, they may decide to fight on, making de-escalation harder to achieve.
Third, with brinkmanship being one of the strategies of communicating resolve, the growing salience of emerging and disruptive technologies in India-Pakistan crises will become particularly problematic. Future crises will likely feature the rapid and widespread employment of artificial intelligence-enabled weapon systems. This will not only augment the destructive, destabilising aspects of key weapons but also reconfigure the informational environment. All of this will automatically have an impact on how signals are sent and received. As a result, the communicative value of brinkmanship will not remain immune to these effects. The brink will become hazier, with both sides finding it harder to ascertain how sturdy the boat is. Schelling argues that a deliberate attempt to rock the boat creates genuine risks that it could capsize, drowning everyone. This could increase the level of violence, making crisis management and terrorism a gargantuan task.
All of this is tied by one constant: geography. Schelling introduced brinkmanship during the height of the Cold War, which was marked by the absence of geographic contiguity. India and Pakistan are geographically inseparable, making both the loss of control and the risk of losing control later untenable for de-escalation. This structural reality of South Asia, as well as compressed decision-making timelines and the fog of war, makes crisis onset a part and parcel of brinkmanship.
With past crises not having terminated entirely because of fears of mutual disaster, it is reasonable to conclude that brinkmanship does not serve any useful purpose in South Asia. It could, however, lead to uncontrollable escalation. Therefore, instead of toying with the idea of resorting to brinkmanship or achieving the elusive escalation dominance, the focus should be on crisis prevention.
Syed Ali Zia Jaffery is Deputy Director, Center for Security, Strategy and Policy Research, University of Lahore, and Associate Editor, Pakistan Politico. Ali was a Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington, DC. Ali regularly writes on strategic issues for national and international publications, to include Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Routledge, South Asian Voices, The National Interest, The Atlantic Council, Asia-Pacific Leadership Network (APLN), CSIS, The Diplomat, Dawn, and 9DashLine, among others. Ali is an alumnus of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project’s Nuclear History Boot Camp. He is also an alumnus of the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO). He often shares his perspectives on major strategic developments on national and international media. His research interests lie in the fields of nuclear deterrence, strategic stability, and geopolitics. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on foreign policy, national security, arms control and disarmament, and non-proliferation. He was also a Graduate Research Assistant at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.