SAV Q&A with Johann Chacko: South Asian Security in Shifting Global Landscape |
Over the past year, South Asian security dynamics have evolved amid persistent interstate rivalries, domestic political turbulence, and the rapidly shifting global political landscape. On January 28, South Asian Voices spoke with Johann Chacko about the most important factors shaping regional security today, including the state of the India-Pakistan relationship and the role of external actors like the United States and China. Chacko is an experienced researcher, commentator, and teacher of politics and international affairs; currently, he is a doctoral researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a research fellow with Knology, and the South Asia Columnist for The National News.
How would you characterize the evolution of U.S. policy toward South Asia, and Pakistan and India in particular, in 2025? How have these shifts impacted regional political and security dynamics in the region? How might you expect these key relationships to evolve in the year ahead?
To answer that, you first have to pull back and see how South Asia fits into U.S. security and foreign policy more generally, and how it’s done so over time. I would argue that South Asia has never been a “first-principles driver,” even if there have been times where it has been an area of significant focus or even been center stage.
In that sense, quite often the policy towards India and Pakistan is a reflection of what the United States wants in Afghanistan, or what it wants with China. So, because China and Afghanistan have been first-principles drivers, when those things change, then policy towards India and Pakistan changes: that’s the lever that’s moved.
The Trump administration came into office with a fairly good idea of what it wanted to do in the world. It sometimes seems opportunistic because events are emergent, but the priorities, I think, were already clear to them, and one of the big shifts was on China. You see it in the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) that was released in December, and now the U.S. National Defense Strategy that’s just been put out—and it’s a massive shift. It’s the first time in a decade where China isn’t being described as an ideological competitor or a threat to global stability. It’s seen as an actor whose trade and economic practices are threatening the vitality of the U.S. economy and therefore the foundations of U.S. power, but with whom competition is fundamentally economic. The U.S. strategic goals in Asia are about deterring conflict.
I think that shift has changed the role that Washington hopes for from India and Pakistan. On the whole, Pakistan read the room earlier than India. That’s part of the reason why we saw the aftermath of the 88-hour air war in May play out the way it did. Pakistan understood that U.S. interests had shifted. India took a little longer to figure it out—that in itself is interesting.
This is where Afghanistan ties in as well. What you might think of as the long “war on terror” did not begin after 9/11, it actually started after the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998. That’s when U.S. counterterrorism focus shifted to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden was based. That then required engaging with Pakistan. From that period until the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the dynamics between India, Pakistan, and the United States fundamentally shifted. From that point onwards, whenever India chose to confront Pakistan, usually over terrorist incidents taking place inside India, this ultimately benefited the United States because Indian pressure on Pakistan was useful to the United States as something they could leverage to get counterterrorism cooperation and institutional change within Pakistan.
But the moment that focus shifted—once the United States was no longer waging a major counterinsurgency inside Afghanistan, once Pakistan was no longer a major site of counterterrorism operations—then suddenly the way that India-Pakistan conflicts play out starts to look more like an earlier period, like say the early post-Cold War period, where the United States tends to play a much more even-handed role when crisis breaks out.
China also appears to be playing an increasingly influential role in regional affairs, from the continued deep partnership with Pakistan to inroads in Bangladesh and détente with India. In your view, how does China impact regional political and security dynamics? Moreover, how should we think about the interaction between Chinese and U.S. interests in South Asia, particularly amid shifts in U.S. policy toward the region?
Because the United States is no longer focused on strategic competition with China, this actually opens up space for countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh to continue to maintain a close military relationship with China without jeopardizing their relationship with the United........