JD Vance’s ‘none of our business’ remark on India-Pak tensions echoes Trump-era foreign policy, says Michael Kugelman

After US Vice-President JD Vance remarked that the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan is “none of their business,” a Washington DC-based South Asia expert Michael Kugelman has said the comment reflects a “broader shift in American foreign policy”.  Kugelman, a prominent analyst and Director of the South Asia Institute at the Wilson Centre, suggested that Vance’s statement aligns with the Trump administration’s general stance on global affairs.

“I think on the whole, the read I have of what JD Vance said is that it really reflects the Trump administration's broad view of foreign policy,” Kugelman told media. “That is, that the US should not be over-extending itself in international affairs.”

He added that while Washington might support de-escalation in principle, it is unlikely to devote serious diplomatic resources to mediating the conflict.

“It’s happy to express its desire for India and Pakistan to de-escalate, but the US is not going to expand significant levels of bandwidth to try to get the two sides to de-escalate,” Kugelman said. “That would be a significant change from the first Trump administration.”

'None Of Our Business'

Earlier in the day, US Vice-President JD Vance said that the conflict between India and Pakistan was "fundamentally none of our business," even as he and President Donald Trump encouraged both nations to de-escalate tensions.

“What we could do was try to encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit, but we were not going to get involved in the middle of a war that was fundamentally none of our business and had nothing to do with America's ability to control it," Vance said in an interview with Fox News.

"You know, America couldn’t tell the Indians to lay down their arms. We couldn’t tell the Pakistanis to lay down their arms. And so, we were going to continue to pursue this through diplomatic channels,” he added.

Vance, who has long advocated for reduced US involvement in international conflicts, also said: “Our hope and our expectation was that this was not going to spiral into a broader regional war or, God forbid, a nuclear conflict. Right now, we didn’t think that was going to happen.”

His remarks came as Pakistan launched a failed attempt to target military establishments in Jammu, Pathankot, and several other Indian cities.