This month, Kashmir moved up the troublesome leader board after some terrorists murdered a group of Indian tourists
The links between the Pakistan government and the terrorists is uncertain
By Tom Arms | London
Fifteen years ago there were probably three major hotspots in the world: The Korean Peninsula, the Middle East and Kashmir. All three of them involved nuclear weapons.
Ranked in terms of potential flare-ups, the Middle East was at the top followed by Korea because the United States was heavily involved in both those disputes. Kashmir was well down the list because it was mainly a bilateral issue between India and Pakistan, although China also had a foothold in the picture postcard mountain region. Kashmir, however, seemed more manageable than the other two hotspots.
This month, however, Kashmir moved up the troublesome leader board after some terrorists murdered a group of Indian tourists. The links between the Pakistan government and the terrorists is uncertain. What is known is that Pakistan is controlled by the army and the army is control by General Asim Munir, an Islamic scholar who recently referred to Kashmir as “the jugular vein of Pakistan.”
The government of Narendra Modi does not need much to encourage it to go after Pakistan. It did so this week by threatening to cut Pakistan off from vital water supplies and by launching a surgical strike 70 miles inside Pakistan in the important Punjab region.
Pakistan responded by shooting down Indian war planes and by firing the opening shots in South Asia’s first drone war.
Then, both sides appear to have taken a step back to catch their breath and review the situation. Pakistan has said it will respond to the latest fighting “at a time and place of its choosing,” which is usually interpreted a step towards a ceasefire.
All of this would be encouraging if the world had not moved on in the past 15 years—and not in a good way. For a start, in Ukraine, Europe is the middle of its first major conflict involving Russia since the end of War Two. On the other side of the European land mass, North Korea is nuclear-armed and equipped with the missiles to deliver them and China is making increasingly bellicose moves around Taiwan and the South China Sea.
In the Middle East, more than two million Gazans are being starved to death by an Israeli government who appears determined to condemn the region to perpetual war.
In Europe a string of populist and “illiberal” political parties and governments are dividing electorates and driving them away from cooperation towards narrow nationalist-focused policies.
And finally, in the United States, voters have elected a president who is splitting the Western Alliance, relinquishing America’s leadership role and allying his country with autocratic and populist governments whose positions run counter to 250 years of tried and tested American values.
The world has changed dramatically in the past 15 years. A weakened and over-extended West and an unwilling America means that the revival of old conflicts in Kashmir can boil over faster and more dangerously than before.
World Review
World ReviewWhat’s in a name? If you’re the Pope, quite a lot.
With 2,000-years of history, the incoming Bishop of Rome is able to choose a name from among his 266 predecessors whose career best reflects his values.
American-born Robert Prevost has chosen to be known as Pope Leo XIV. This is an important nod to Pope Leo XIII, who led the church from 1878 to 1903 and is generally regarded as the father of modern Catholic social teaching. He called for the church to address social and economic issues, and emphasized the dignity of individuals, the common good, community, and taking care of marginalized individuals.
In the midst of the Gilded Age, Leo XIII defended the rights of workers and said that the church had not just the duty to speak about justice and fairness, but also the responsibility to make sure that such equities were accomplished.
Prevost’s choice of the name Leo invokes the principles of both Leo XIII and his immediate predecessor, Pope Francis. In his own lifetime he has aligned himself with many of Francis’s social reforms, and his election appears to be a rejection of hard-liner right-wing Catholics in the U.S. and elsewhere who have used their religion to support far-right politics.
Leading the American pack as a self-appointed moral arbiter of the Catholic community is Vice-President JD Vance. Shortly after taking office in January, Vance began to talk of the concept of ordo amoris, or “order of love.” He claimed it justified the MAGA emphasis on family and tribalism and the mass expulsion of migrants.
Vance told Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel, “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after all that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
The Pope’s job is to be a moral arbiter and interpreter of Christian doctrine. Much more so than that of any politician, all of whose morals are generally regarded as suspect. On February 10, Pope Francis responded to Vance in a letter to American bishops. He said the vice president was wrong. “Christians,” wrote the Pope, “know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity,” he wrote. “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups…. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by…meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”
“Worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth,” Pope Francis wrote.
He acknowledged “the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival,” but he defended the fundamental dignity of every human being and the fundamental rights of migrants, noting that the “rightly formed conscience” would disagree with any program that “identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.” He continued: “I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of good will, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters.”
The next day, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who described himself as “a lifelong Catholic,” told reporters at the White House, “I’ve got harsh words for the Pope…. He ought to fix the Catholic Church, concentrate on his work and leave border enforcement to us.”
As an American-born pope in the model of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV has the power to present himself as a moral alternative to MAGA in the same way as Polish-born Pope John Paul II countered the Soviet empire. He has already re-tweeted Pope Francis’s criticisms of Vance. This would explain the furious response to the new pope by the MAGA crowd. Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer close to the ear of Donald Trump, Pope Leo, wrote “another Marxist puppet in the Vatican.” Influencer Charlie Kirk suggested he was an “open borders globalist installed to counter Trump.” Kirk is probably right. Is that such a bad thing?
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Thank you, thank you, thank you, is what Donald Trump should be saying to Sir Keir Starmer this week.
The British Prime Ministers has given the US president the opportunity to claim his first bilateral “breakthrough” in the post-tariff negotiations.
In reality, it is nothing of the kind. At best it is a skeletal framework upon which the minimum of meat has been hung to allow the president to claim success for his bully-boy tactics.
Many more months of negotiations need to be done before there is a proper US-UK trade deal. More talks are needed pharmaceuticals and steel. Food standards, says Sir Keir, will not be relaxed as the White House claims and there is no agreement on the important digital services sector.
Britain had been facing a 25 percent tariff on cars. That has been cut to 10 percent but capped at 100,000 vehicles a year (the same number as exported in 2024). Any cars above the 100,000 export figure face a tariff of 27.5 percent. US c\r manufacturers are unhappy with this arrangement because US-owned car plants in Mexico and Canada face an even higher tariff.
A US-UK trade deal was always going to be low-hanging fruit for the Trump Administration. Partly because the trade between the two countries is evenly balanced. Partly because the US and UK are heavily invested in each other’s economies and largely because the intelligence, military, legal and political links mean that there really is an Anglo-American “Special Relationship.”
But Trump should not fool himself. Brits do not like him. An opinion poll out this week shows that 73 percent of the UK public disapprove of MAGA and the man in the White House. The British government do not have the luxury of approving or disapproving. Circumstances dictate that His Majesty’s Government holds its nose, puts on a fixed smile and get on with the business of diplomacy.
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We are the prisoners of our past. In the case of Germany, that country’s unfortunate history with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party are pushing the country towards banning the far-right Alternativ fur Deutschland.
This week Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (aka Bundesvergassungsschutz) confirmed that the every branch of the AfD was “extremist” and as such appears to fall foul of Article 21 of The Basic Law (Germany’s constitution) which says that “parties, that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.”
To complete the legal circle requires a ruling from the Federal Constitutional Court which can hear the case if it is petitioned by the Bundestag.
The move has outraged America’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) crowd. Vice President JD Vance earlier this year attacked Germany for suppressing freedom of speech and made a point of snubbing Chancellor Olaf Scholz and meeting AfD leader Alice Weidel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio denounced this week’s report as “Tyranny in Disguise.”
But the German lawmakers are sensitive to the belief that their countrymen are susceptible to anti-democratic far-right political forces. That is, after all, how Hitler came to power in 1933.
In response to Rubio, the German Foreign Office, wrote on X: “This decision is the result of a thorough and independent investigation to protect our constitution and the rule of law… We have learnt from our history that right-wing extremism needs to be stopped.”
It should also be pointed out to the Trump Administration that it is in danger of throwing stones from within glass houses. The Communist Party was never formally banned in the US as such, but the Communist Control Act of 1954 made it illegal to belong to the party and thousands of people lost their jobs as a result.
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Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and the author of “The Encyclopedia of the Cold War” and “America Made in Britain.”
