Despite plenty of attempts to do better, the Trump administration had so far failed to achieve any foreign policy victory.
The ceasefire in Gaza which Trump imposed in January was soon sabotaged by the radicals in Netanyahoo's cabinet. The negotiations about peace in Ukraine are stuck around a yet be agreed upon ceasefire which does not solve the root problem. The war on Yemen, on Israel's behalf, was lost militarily. Iran, despite threats, has not moved on inch from its insistence on nuclear sovereignty. The tariff rage waged against China and everyone else is threatening to derail the U.S. economy.
All this makes today's win a special moment.
President Trump announced:
After a long night of talks mediated by the United States, I am pleased to announce that India and Pakistan have agreed to a FULL AND IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE. Congratulations to both countries on using Common Sense and Great Intelligence. Thank you for your attention to this matter! …
Details followed immediately:
Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio – 12:07 UTC · May 10, 2025
Over the past 48 hours, @VP Vance and I have engaged with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, including Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Shehbaz Sharif, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir, and National Security Advisors Ajit Doval and Asim Malik.
I am pleased to announce the Governments of India and Pakistan have agreed to an immediate ceasefire and to start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site.
We commend Prime Ministers Modi and Sharif on their wisdom, prudence, and statesmanship in choosing the path of peace.
Trump and his cabinet have thus achieved a notable and laudable victory. U.S. mediation has helped to deescalated a crises in South Asia that had threatened to turn into a full fledged (nuclear) war.
On Tuesday, April 22 2025, 26 people were killed when gunman opened fire on tourists in the Indian-occupied Kashmir:
A group of tourists were visiting a popular area — a meadow in mountainous Kashmir’s Baisaran Valley, known as “mini-Switzerland,” outside the town of Pahalgam — when militants emerged from a nearby forest and opened fire. Police said 25 Indians and one Nepalese citizen were killed. Since the group was in an area only accessible by foot or horseback, getting the injured to the nearest hospital was difficult, one witness told The Washington Post.
Indian media outlets attributed the attack to the Resistance Front (TRF), a militant group banned by New Delhi in 2023 as a terrorist organization, but there was no verifiable claim of responsibility.
Indian claims that the TRF has support from Pakistan. In consequence it announced sharp retaliatory measures, targeting trade and the critical Simla water agreement. It ordered to cut the Indus water lifeline into Pakistan.
Craig Murray explains why this was and is an existential threat to that country:
India’s Hindutva president, Narendra Modi, has used the Kashmir terrorism incident to abrogate the 1960s Indus Waters Treaty — a longstanding goal of Modi. The Indian version of the “terrorist attack,” most of whose victims were Muslim, has largely been accepted by Western governments without evidence.
False flags abound nowadays.
…
It is however certain that tearing up the Indus Waters Treaty is a long term Modi goal. The Indus River supplies 80 percent of Pakistan’s agricultural water and the supply is already insufficient, with disastrous salination of the lower reaches of the river as the sea creeps into the areas once occupied by the mighty flow. I visited the area of lower Sindh five years ago and witnessed the fields encrusted with white salt.
…
In early May India made a diplomatic push to justify military action against Pakistan. It however failed to provide any evidence that the terror attack had any relation with it. Indian colonial behavior in Kashmir has created a lot of bad blood with the locals and there are plenty of disgruntled folks who are willing to take justice into their own hands.
On May 7 India launched a 'special military operation' against Pakistan by striking "terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir".
The Indian air force indeed managed to hit a few targets. It however turned out that it also lost five fighter jet.
Pakistan's air force had used an airborne early warning and control airplane (AWACS) with a long ranging radar to direct beyond-visual-range air-to air missiles fired by its J-10 fighter jets to their targets. Such a highly integrated attack came as a surprise. Three Indian owned, French build Rafale jets and two Russian build MIG and Sukhoi fighters were lost to Chinese made PL-15 missiles.
In a detailed briefing the Pakistani air force explained how this was achieved.
The thus humiliated Indian military decided to escalate. Yesterday it lobbed a few missile towards some Pakistani military installations. Pakistan responded in kind. The results are unclear. Claims about damages from both sides are notoriously unreliable.
The war was threatening to escalate further. However both sides are short of ammunition needed for a large scale ground combat. Both sides have nuclear weapons. An Indian attack on the much weaker Pakistani military would soon be countered by tactical nuclear strikes.
In light of this both militaries emphasized that they were ready to stop firing if the other side would also do so.
Political rhetoric however was getting out of hand:
The way things are developing, the political elites who have climbed the high horse will have a problem to dismount when de-escalation becomes an imperative need. They are setting a trap for themselves.
The Economist headlined correctly:
Luck stands between de-escalation and disaster for India and Pakistan – Sooner or later, the luck will run out (archived)
Meanwhile the U.S. seemed to have washed its hands on the issue.
Just yesterday U.S. Vice-President JD Vance claimed that a war between India and Pakistan will be 'none of our business':
"We want this thing to de-escalate as quickly as possible. We can't control these countries, though," Vance said in an interview on Fox News show "The Story with Martha MacCallum."
"What we can do is try to encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit, but we're not going to get involved in the middle of war that's fundamentally none of our business and has nothing to do with America's ability to control it," he added.
The U.S. has good, if at times strained, relation with India and Pakistan. The militaries of both countries were ready to deescalate. The problem was to convince the politicians of each side that it was possible to disengage without losing face.
It now seems that the Trump administration has managed to do so.
The Times of India confirms the ceasefire but does not mention any U.S. mediation. The Pakistani side confirms that the U.S., the British Foreign Ministry and the Turkish government were all involved.
Achieving peace is a victory. A victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
Trump, Vance and Rubio may well claim this victory for themselves even as many others were involved in it.
But to achieve other foreign policy victories, real ones, will require more than a few phone calls.