The Most Dangerous Game

I recommend you read Zachary Keck’s article at the National Interest on the stand-off between India and Pakistan, undoubtedly the most dangerous confrontation in the world and most likely to produce a nuclear war, North Korea notwithstanding:

With the world’s attention firmly fixated on North Korea, the greatest possibility of nuclear war is in fact on the other side of Asia.
That place is what could be called the nuclear triangle of Pakistan, India and China. Although Chinese and Indian forces are currently engaged in a standoff, traditionally the most dangerous flashpoint along the triangle has been the Indo-Pakistani border. The two countries fought three major wars before acquiring nuclear weapons, and one minor one afterwards. And this doesn’t even include the countless other armed skirmishes and other incidents that are a regular occurrence.

There was one thing in the piece that irritated me. It was the last sentence of this paragraph which I’ve highlighted:

At an event at the Stimson Center in Washington this week, Feroz Khan, a former brigadier in the Pakistan Army and author of one of the best books on the country’s nuclear program, said that Pakistani military leaders explicitly based their nuclear doctrine on NATO’s Cold War strategy. But as Vipin Narang, a newly tenured MIT professor who was on the same panel, pointed out, an important difference between NATO and Pakistan’s strategies is that the latter has used its nuclear shield as a cover to support countless terrorist attacks inside India. Among the most audacious were the 2001 attacks on India’s parliament and the 2008 siege of Mumbai, which killed over 150 people. Had such an attack occurred in the United States, Narang said, America would have ended a nation-state.

I believe that’s

  1. a typographical error
  2. geopolitically incorrect and
  3. reflects a lack of understanding of what a “nation-state” is

Here’s the definition of a nation-state. A nation-state is a state whose citizens are culturally, linguistically, and ethnically homogeneous. Neither Pakistan, India, nor the United States are nation-states. Japan is a nation-state. Albania is a nation-state. The United States isn’t.

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