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India vs. Pakistan: Rising tensions in South Asia
Could tensions between India and Pakistan boil back over into military conflict? Last May, India launched a wave of missile attacks into Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, claiming it was targeting terrorist infrastructure. After four days of dangerous escalation, both sides accepted a ceasefire, putting an end to the most serious military crisis in decades between the two rival nuclear states. On GZERO World, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Khar joins Ian Bremmer to discuss Pakistan’s perspective and where the conflict stands now.
Khar argues India didn’t provide credible evidence to justify the attacks and that Pakistan’s response challenged the narrative of India’s conventional military superiority. She sees China as a stabilizing force in the region and says it’s important for Pakistan to maintain broader strategic relationships within southeast Asia and the West, including the United States. Though the conflict has cooled, nerves are still on edge in Delhi and Islamabad. Now, more than ever, Khar says, it’s crucial for Pakistan to continue to strengthen its military capabilities, including nuclear deterrence, to defend its sovereignty.
“The India-Pakistan region is home to one fifth of humanity, and to put them at stake because of political engineering happening in your own country is very callous,” Khar says, “The moment one nuclear state decides to attack another, you do not know how quickly you go up the escalation ladder.”
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Pakistan needs to stand up to India, says former Foreign Minister Hina Khar
After nearly eight decades of on-again-off-again conflict, India and Pakistan neared the brink of all-out war last spring. The intense, four-day conflict was an unsettling reminder of the dangers of military escalation between two nuclear-armed adversaries. Though the ceasefire was reached and both sides claimed victory, Delhi and Islamabad are still on edge and tensions remain high. On the GZERO World Podcast, former Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Khar joins Ian Bremmer to discuss Pakistan’s response to India’s strikes, which she believes were unjustified, and why Pakistan needs to defend itself from further aggression.
One fifth of the world’s population lives on the Indian subcontinent, and Khar says putting them at stake because of a political conflict is dangerous because “you do not know how quickly you can go up the escalation ladder.” Bremmer and Khar also discuss the US role in mediating the conflict with India, Pakistan’s domestic and economic challenges, its strategic partnership with China, and the dangers for global security if the world abandons a rules-based international order.
“As someone who was representing this country as foreign minister, I used to wonder, why were we reduced to eating grass to become a nuclear power?” Khar says, “And now, that is the only thing providing deterrence and security against a country which feels it can attack us anytime, any day.”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're publishedGraphic Truth: What’s behind the US inflation numbers?
US prices rose 2.7% over the 12 months until July 2025, a relatively steady rate despite the onset of President Donald Trump’s tariffs. But what’s behind this inflation figure? This Graphic Truth explores how the prices of various categories of consumer goods are changing.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting with Judiciary Officials in Tehran, Iran, on July 16, 2025.
Iran’s next act?
– By Willis Sparks
Iran’s government is in big trouble.
Twelve days of war earlier this summer demonstrated that Iran has little capacity to defend its cities or its nuclear facilities from Israeli and US strikes.
Meanwhile, its most potent proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — have taken bad beatings over the past year. Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s principal state ally in the Middle East, now lives in Moscow rather than Damascus.
And within Iran, no one knows exactly what will happen when the ailing 86-year-old supreme leader makes his final exit. Everyone in a position of power in Iran must wonder how a succession, which the country hasn’t experienced in 36 years, will affect his influence, power, and access to wealth. And simmering beneath all of that, the risk of civil unrest inside Iran is always present – it can be triggered by a single incident on the street or inside a police station.
But the regime still has a not-so-secret weapon, and it’s precisely the one that Israel and the United States attacked in June.
Despite those airstrikes, Iran still appears to have a nuclear program, though how much of one remains a matter of dispute. Just after the attacks, President Donald Trump called the US strikes “a spectacular military success” that had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s most important enrichment facilities. A US intelligence report published on July 17 asserted that 12 bunker-busting bombs dropped from US B-2 bombers had severely degraded Iran’s enrichment facility at Fordo and inflicted significant damage on other sites.
But other damage assessments have raised doubts about these conclusions. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank, said at the beginning of July that it was “highly speculative” to estimate Iran’s new breakout time (the time needed to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make one nuclear weapon), and assessed that, while “Iran has lost centrifuges at the three facilities that suffered damage, it also likely has an undeclared stockpile of centrifuges.”
The bottom-line: Iran still has options. If its leaders want to try for a bomb, they almost certainly can. And Iran’s wounded and humiliated regime now has every reason to race to build the only weapon that can guarantee its security.
If they do, that could force a big decision on Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: whether to take down the Iranian government itself. In the closing hours of the operation in June, Israeli fighter jets struck the headquarters of the paramilitary militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, killing hundreds of its members. That’s a direct attack on the core of the regime — and a reminder of what’s possible if Iran’s leaders try to rebuild the nuclear program.
Whether the next Iran-related emergency involves an even more destructive and direct US-Israeli attack on Iran, or a surge of destabilizing unrest inside the country, or both, we may remember June’s “12-day war” as the opening act of a much more consequential drama.
But one thing is nearly certain: the catastrophic events of the past two years have likely made a nuclear weapons program more valuable for Iran’s leaders, not less.
Activists of All India National Congress burn an effigy of US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi during a protest in Kolkata, India, after the Trump administration announced a 25% tariff on Indian goods, on August 1, 2025.
Why is India rebuffing Trump over Russian oil?
The days of “Howdy, Modi” are over.
Six years on from a gigantic rally in Houston, Texas, where US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi held hands, the two are fighting a war of words and tariffs.
The spat began last week when Trump, desperately seeking ways to pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine (Putin has ignored Trump’s demands to do so for months), slapped tariffs and threatened fines on India, the second-largest purchaser of Russian crude. The idea was to force Delhi to stop buying Russian oil, starving the Kremlin of revenue for its war machine. On Wednesday, Trump upped the ante further, announcing he would double India’s tariff rate to 50% later this month.
But Modi has so far refused to back down – his Foreign Ministry reiterated on Wednesday that Trump’s proposed tariffs are “unjustified and unreasonable.” Adding fuel to the fire, the leader of the world’s largest economy and the head of the world’s most populous nation are still feuding over whether the US helped broker a ceasefire between India and Pakistan in May.
So why is Modi now clashing head on with the man he once called a “true friend”?
Firstly, there’s a monetary component.
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, India only sourced 0.2% of its oil from Russia. Now, Moscow is responsible for roughly one third of all Indian oil imports, with Delhi profiting from a discounted price that resulted from sanctions.
“Indian refineries save about $1 billion a month by buying Russian crude,” said Eurasia Group’s South Asia Practice Head Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, a lower amount than previously – the Russian oil discount has diminished in recent weeks – but still significant.
While India requires this fuel for its own energy needs, it also uses the discounted oil to generate major revenues from exporting refined petroleum products in which crude in an input, like diesel and jet fuels. In this trade, Europe is one of India’s largest markets.
“Purchasing crude oil from Russia and refining it for the market (which includes European countries) has allowed India to not only profit from the purchases but maintain its political and economic relationship with Russia,” Manjari Chatterjee Miller, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told GZERO.
Secondly, India sees this as part of broader trade talks with the US.
The savings that India has made from buying Russian oil have been “useful,” per Chaudhuri, “but losing this would hardly break the bank.” More vital for India are the broader trade talks with Trump, with the next round of negotiations set for Aug. 25.
“There is a belief in New Delhi that Trump’s tariff threats are being used as leverage to extract concessions in order to secure a favourable trade deal with India, reflecting Trump’s proclivity to connect trade and non-trade issues,” said Dr. Chietigj Bajpaee, a South Asia expert at Chatham House.
The US leader has used the Russian oil purchases to justify the pressure on India, but he has another trade interest at hand: he wants Delhi to lower its notoriously high tariffs and grant the US access to its vast agricultural and dairy markets, per Chaudhuri.
Viewing Trump’s moves as a negotiating ploy, Modi sees little interest in backing down.
Thirdly, the Indian public doesn’t want to see Modi surrender to foreign pressure.
Trump’s words have piqued some in India, especially when he suggested that it had a “dead economy.”
“They’ve been seen as a little insulting, to be honest, and it has certainly worsened public opinion [toward Trump],” The Asia Group’s India Practice Chair Ashok Malik, who was a policy adviser in India’s foreign ministry, told GZERO. Modi, he added, now “has to press back.”
This isn’t so much about Trump but rather about rejecting foreign interference, according to Miller. India sees itself as fiercely independent, with a long history of “non-alignment” to any one global pole.
“For India to back down in the face of US tariff threats and essentially downgrade its relationship with Russia will also absolutely not play well among the Indian public,” said Miller. “Modi cannot be seen kowtowing to any US administration.”
Finally, India doesn’t want to lose Russia.
India values its decades-long relationship with Russia, principally because Moscow is a hedge against its chief Asian rival, China. Delhi has long had tensions with Beijing – over border disputes, technological rivalries, and China’s support for Pakistan. While relations with China have thawed a little this year – Modi is visiting China for the first time in seven years at the end of the month – India doesn’t want to anger Russia by bending the knee to Washington, as such a move would risk pushing the Kremlin even closer to Beijing.
“India has a larger interest in keeping links with Russia,” said Chaudhuri. “It believes [in] a combination of ‘respect and money’ that keeps Russia neutral when India and China clash (so far true) and provides other geopolitical benefits.”
The repudiation of US pressure, though, may still have consequences for India’s foreign policy.
“Unless Modi and Trump can reach an agreement,” says Miller “this is an incredibly destabilizing moment for the US-India relationship, and recovery will be difficult.”
US President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba participate in a news conference at the White House in Washington, D.C., USA, on February 7, 2025.
Enemies to allies: The US and Japan 80 years after Hiroshima
Eighty years ago this week, the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people, mostly civilians. It was the first and, so far, only use of nuclear weapons in war.
In Japan, remembrance ceremonies honor the victims and amplify the calls for peace from the hibakusha, the Japanese term for the 100,000 remaining survivors of the attacks.
In the US, by contrast, there is no official federal government commemoration. Former President Barack Obama remains the only sitting US leader to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance declined invitations to attend this year’s ceremony. The US public has mixed views on the bombings – 35% of Americans believe they were justified in order to bring a swift end to the Pacific phase of World War II, 31% say they were not, and the rest are unsure.
But after the war, the US and Japan moved, slowly and often uneasily, towards one of the strongest bilateral partnerships in the world. After Japan’s surrender in 1945, the US occupied the country, rewriting its constitution, demilitarizing its forces, and rebuilding its economy to keep it from falling under Soviet influence. The Cold War transformed former enemies into partners: Japan hosted US military bases, while Washington extended security guarantees under the 1951 US-Japan Security Treaty.
In recent years, that alliance has taken on renewed urgency. Faced with the increasing assertiveness of its longtime regional rival China, Tokyo has begun to edge away from strict pacifism toward what Eurasia Group’s Japan Director David Boling calls “a more realistic approach to defense.” In 2022, Japan announced a $287.1 billion re-militarization strategy over five years, doubling its defence budget to about 2% of GDP. In 2025, it passed a record-breaking $55 billion defense budget, and aims to eventually double its annual military spending, which would make it the world’s third biggest military spender after the United States and China.
For the US, Japan is not just a crucial counterweight to Beijing’s military ambitions, says Boling, it is an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Pacific and a trusted diplomatic bridge to Southeast Asia, where many countries are wary of being forced to choose sides and are more receptive to messaging from Tokyo than Washington.
And yet there are also fresh tensions in the relationship, as Trump has questioned the value of a US-Japan alliance in which the US is the overwhelming military power, and has targeted Japan with higher tariffs in order to rebalance their trade relationship.
Still, as Boling points out, divergences of opinion are only likely to go so far while both countries share a common concern:
“If the United States is going to have a successful approach to China on national security and on trade,” he says, “it needs Japan in its corner.”
Deputy head of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev delivers a speech during a session of the educational marathon “Knowledge. First” in Moscow, Russia, on April 29, 2025.
What We’re Watching: US-Russia tensions mushroom, Israeli minister prays by al-Aqsa mosque, Milei vetoes pension boost
US-Russia tensions escalate
Are the 1960s calling? A US president is repositioning nuclear submarines while Russia is carrying out previously scheduled anti-submarine drills – with China’s help – in the Sea of Japan. Donald Trump made the move on Friday after former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is now deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, called the threat of US sanctions, “a step towards war.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio played down Medvedev’s words on Sunday, but the tensions remain. US special envoy Steve Witkoff visits Russia this week ahead of the deadline that Trump imposed on Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the Ukraine war or face expanded sanctions.
Israeli minister’s provocative prayers in Jerusalem
In a move that is sure to ignite fury across the Arab world, far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Sunday visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, known to Muslims as the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, and prayed there. The move breaks a decades-long arrangement under which Jews can visit the compound, the third-holiest Islamic site that also sits on the same plot as the first and second Jewish temples, but not pray there. Ben-Gvir’s move came after Hamas released videos Friday of emaciated hostages held in Gaza. The move recalls then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit to the mount in 2000, a provocation that touched off the Second Intifada.
Argentina’s president vetos pension boost
The chainsaw stops for no one. Argentina’s ultra-libertarian President Javier Milei, who has already slashed billions from the federal budget, vetoed a proposal to increase pensions on Monday. “There is no money,” he said. It’s a risky move. Milei, elected in 2023, faces his first mid-term elections this fall. His cost-cutting has helped to tame Argentina’s notoriously high inflation, but the economy has struggled lately – the peso just posted its worst month since 2023 – and his cuts have generated some social backlash.A 3D-printed miniature model of US President Donald Trump in front of the Swiss flag in an illustration taken on July 23, 2025.
Swiss miss: Is Trump bashing Bern over Beijing?
On Thursday, US President Donald Trump announced 39% tariffs on Switzerland – the fourth-highest rate of all the duties that the American leader has imposed since April after Laos, Myanmar and Syria. Trump’s decision came after a thirty-minute conversation with Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter, which critics described as “disastrous” for the European. Yet for months, it seemed that negotiations between the two nations were moving in the right direction. So what went wrong?
Deficits, luxury goods and drugs
Trump says the sticking point is the US trade deficit with Switzerland, which stands at $38.9 billion. Keller-Sutter even suggested that the tariff number itself – 39% – was tied to that amount. The deficit is due, in part, to the American appetite for gold and luxury goods, including gourmet cheese, fine chocolates and high-end watches: the US is Switzerland's top foreign timepiece market, accounting for 16.8% of exports.
Americans also purchase lots of Swiss pharmaceuticals – they bought $35 billion last year, making this Switzerland’s largest export to the US. While the sector was excluded from the tariffs, Trump issued a separate letter to the CEOs of 17 drug manufacturers, including Swiss heavyweights Novartis and Roche, demanding that they lower their prices or face “retaliatory measures.” But the US could also be affected: Switzerland is its 6th largest investor, creating 400,000 US jobs, including thousands in the pharma and research & development sectors.
Then there’s China
Bern and Beijing’s deep economic relationship stretches back 75 years, when the then-Swiss president contacted Chinese premier Mao Zedong via telegram. Trade ties have been especially tight in recent years. Since 2010, China has been Switzerland’s largest trading partner in Asia and its third largest overall after the European Union and the US. In 2013, the two countries signed a free trade deal and, in 2022, Switzerland refused to join the EU and the US in sanctioning China for human rights violations against its Uyghur minority.
The pair converged more this year. In May 2025, Keller-Sutter met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Geneva and said the two countries would “upgrade” their trade deal. And just days before Trump’s Aug. 1 announcement, China’s top legislator Zhao Leji visited Switzerland, calling for the two countries to further advance their innovative strategic partnership.
Is Beijing the real target?
Switzerland’s long-standing relationship with China helped it host trade talks between Washington and Beijing in May that Trump hailed as a “total reset.” Ironically, those ties could now be a problem – and Switzerland might not be alone.
While most countries face a tariff of 10-15%, the US slammed China-friendly South Africa with a 30% duty. Canada is reeling under a 35% levy over claims that it is importing fentanyl from China through Chinese criminal gangs operating in Land of Maple Leaves. And Vietnam, which relies on Chinese fabric for its apparel industry, faces 20% tariffs, as well as a 40% levy on transshipments, which affects goods that transit through third countries to the US.
What can Switzerland do now?
Between now and Aug. 7, when the tariffs come into effect, the Swiss will continue to negotiate with Washington – they were reportedly readying a better trade offer on Monday. But they have few cards to play, having already reduced tariffs on US industrial goods to zero, and promising multibillion dollar investments in US plants. That leaves retaliation: the Swiss could cancel their order of F-35 fighter jets or implement other punitive measures. Or they can go the other way, and dial down their bromance with Beijing.