There is one thing that has historically linked Republican President Donald Trump to Democratic President Bill Clinton forever: the impeachment that was brought against them and failed in the Senate. There is another one that few people here know about: in 1999, when the Kargil war broke out between India and Pakistan, it was Clinton who personally stopped it a few months after the fateful Senate vote that saved his presidential term.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, a longtime CIA officer who served on the National Intelligence Council in the 1990s and was close to the president, claimed that he had never seen the usually mild-mannered, gentle Clinton so adamant. Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan, a country that the United States had been helping during the Cold War to contain the Soviet Union almost from the very beginning of Pakistan’s existence, insisted on a meeting at the White House. And he received an unprecedentedly cold reception in the Oval Office (though as far away from the cameras as possible - those were different times). Clinton categorically insisted that Pakistani troops return to the line of contact, otherwise the United States would place the blame for the war solely on Pakistan, with all the ensuing consequences. Exactly a year earlier, nuclear tests - first in India, then in Pakistan - seemed to have put an end to the American president's hopes of establishing friendly relations with India... but the Kargil crisis paradoxically helped him. The then Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was pleased that the United States, instead of supporting Pakistan as usual, forced it to withdraw its troops. For the first time in decades, New Delhi and Washington began to speak almost humanly. However, Clinton's efforts did not help for long: already in 2002, half a million troops gathered on both sides of the Line of Control, which again had to be separated by tense negotiations lasting many weeks, in which the administration of his successor, George W. Bush, took part. They also involved the self-proclaimed successor to the Soviet Union, Russia, which was already led by Vladimir Putin.

Since then, the United States has had four presidents, and when Donald Trump (who seems genuinely jealous of the Kremlin's permanent ruler) returned to the White House, he inherited another Indo-Pakistani escalation in addition to the two wars that began under his predecessors, the Ukrainian-Russian and Israeli-Palestinian ones. On Thursday, in an interview with Fox News, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who personally flew to India last month, said that this confrontation does not concern America, so Washington will not intervene. But in a matter of hours, on Friday morning, the situation changed dramatically due to “disturbing intelligence data,” according to CNN. The TV channel's sources did not go into details, but if it was enough for Vance to personally call Indian Prime Minister Nadendra Modi, there was nothing else but the possibility of nuclear escalation.

What Clinton could not afford to do, realizing the scale of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, Trump easily does: he is the first to announce a truce between New Delhi and Islamabad on his own social media. Pakistan is the first to accept: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif personally thanks Trump, Vance, and Secretary Rubio for their contribution to peace and stability in the region. Instead, India's official statements do not recognize any role of the United States in the announced ceasefire and boil down to the fact that the parties themselves agreed to stop hostilities. Within a few hours, mutual accusations of the ceasefire breach were flying from both sides. It is difficult to place the blame for the current conflict entirely on the Indian prime minister, who revoked the special status of the disputed, predominantly Muslim region of Jammu and Kashmir, thereby inciting Islamist resistance. But his reaction to the attack is revealing. After an unknown group gunned down 25 tourists and one local boy who tried to protect them, it could have supported the region's economy, which was immediately hit by other tourists refusing to come to places where they could be killed. Security measures could have been strengthened. But Nadendra Modi, by putting the blame on Pakistan, has quite deliberately locked himself into a military confrontation: a new war means a new round of nationalism, on which his own popularity is based. For the same reason, Trump attacks migrants: his voters like it when he attacks migrants. That is why India closed the border, sharply reduced diplomatic ties, and eventually announced that it was withdrawing from the Indus Water Treaty. Pakistan, which is geographically lower than its southern neighbor, could not help but react. So, theoretically, India could well lead to a humanitarian crisis in Pakistan by building dams... though it risks flooding for itself. In any case, water threats cannot be realized in a few days, but the military escalation has happened, India launched the first operation, calling it a retaliatory strike against the terrorist attack, and each of the parties calls each subsequent step a just retaliatory strike. After a truce is declared, each side presents it at home as a victory.

As long as the disruptions to this truce on both sides are not so significant as to lead to a new escalation, it can also be sold to American voters as a victory for American diplomacy. After all, it is the perception of voters, not the real state of affairs, that interests any populist, especially Donald Trump. He is trying to do the same with his chaotic attempts to resolve the Ukrainian-Russian war. Even in the face of Putin's direct refusal to sign a ceasefire, and his mocking invitation to negotiate in Istanbul (where, at the end of March 2022, Ukraine was offered demilitarization, rejection of NATO, constitutionally enshrined neutrality, and the rights of the Russian language), Trump does not take the once-promised tough approach against Russia. On the contrary, the American president writes: "A potentially great day for Russia and Ukraine. Think of the hundreds of thousands of lives that will be saved if this endless bloodbath finally, hopefully, ends. It will be a whole new and much better world. I will continue to work with both sides to make that happen. The U.S. wants to focus on Rebuilding and Trade instead. A huge week ahead." The announcement of a huge week is disturbing: going into negotiations with Russia in ‘22, with the United States as a strategic ally behind it, was much easier for Ukraine (even if it didn't seem so at the time) than going to the table with the US twisting Ukraine’s arm. Unlike Pakistan, whose military capabilities are not comparable to India's, we do not have the equalizing argument of one hundred and sixty (or even more) short- and intermediate-range nuclear warheads. And our wars are different: the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan is centered around Kashmir, while the existence of a democratic, truly independent Ukraine is unacceptable to Russia because it undermines the existence of Russia itself. But this does not matter to the Trump administration, whose special envoy to Russia does not even take an American interpreter with him, using a Russian one. What is important, as we can see from the reaction to India's reconciliation with Pakistan, is at least some basis for immediately declaring an American victory.

And if it doesn't work, you can always switch to some other, simpler global conflict.