Wednesday open thread: Trouble on the Subcontinent

I am writing this at 3pm PDT on Tuesday, May 6. By the time this posts, we might be in a dire situation.

India has launched a ballistic missile attack in response to a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir which targeted Hindu tourists. Twenty-six people died in that attack. India claimed that the attack was sponsored by Pakistan; the government in Islamabad denies this. In response, Pakistan has fired artillery across the Line of Control, the disputed border between the two states.

Both India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed states. It was always a better-than-even chance that the world's first nuclear war was not going to be between the United States and the Soviet Union, but between those longtime enemies.

Both nations were born in the blood of the 1947 Partition, where millions died on both sides. Whenever someone cavalierly states that we should let this or that red state secede, or that blue states should secede, I counter that the template for that "national divorce" will not be Czechoslovakia in 1992, but the subcontinent in 1947, or Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And now both nations, bitterly opposed to each other, have nuclear arsenals aimed at one another. In India you have a Hindu supremacist in Narendra Modi as prime minister, who will not blanche at giving the order. In Pakistan, the real power is in the military, which will also not hesitate to push the button.

In times like these, the world has usually looked towards the United States to start working to ratchet down tensions and avoid the unthinkable. This is the US right now:

Had Kamala Harris been elected, her Secretary of State would be on his or her way to South Asia immediately. Instead we have a man in the Oval Office offering the equivalent of "thoughts and prayers".

These are the imbecilic times in which we live. Because the American electorate consists of inveterate, incurious morons, we have this man in charge as two nations hurtle toward nuclear war. Perhaps both sides will settle for tit-for-tat exchanges of fire. But all this could easily go haywire. I don't foresee any other nuclear state entering the war. We won't be affected by fallout. But the world economy will collapse, and tens of millions will be dead in South Asia. And the economic fallout will also exact a death toll.

Human civilization is too interconnected and too fragile for its governance to be left to bigots and populists. We have the capacity to destroy ourselves in multiple ways. If the species is to survive, we cannot continue on this road.

This is your open thread.