Why May 2025 War Was Not a Deterrence Failure

There is a category error sitting at the heart of Sadia Tasleem’s recent critique of Pakistan’s nuclear posture, and once you spot it, the rest of her argument starts to unravel. She looks at what happened in May 2025, a conventional Indian strike inside Pakistani territory followed by a calibrated Pakistani response, and calls it proof that deterrence failed. But that conclusion only works if deterrence was ever supposed to mean something it was never designed to mean.

Full spectrum deterrence and full spectrum security are not the same concept, even though Tasleem’s framing treats them as interchangeable. Security, in the absolute sense she seems to be measuring against, would mean total immunity from any form of aggression, conventional or otherwise. No nuclear doctrine anywhere in the world promises that, and no serious strategist has ever claimed it does. Deterrence operates on a narrower and more realistic premise. It exists to shape an adversary’s calculations about how far they can push before consequences become intolerable. It sets a ceiling. It does not guarantee an empty room below that ceiling.

Judged by that actual standard, rather than the inflated one Tasleem applies, May 2025 looks quite different. India carried out a strike, yes. But it stayed conventional. Pakistan’s response stayed calibrated rather than escalatory. Both sides operated the entire time inside a shadow cast by nuclear capability that neither wanted to test directly. The threshold held. That is not a footnote to the story. It is the story.

Consider what the alternative would have looked like without that nuclear shadow shaping decisions on both sides. Conventional military disparities between India and Pakistan are not new information, and they have not disappeared. In a purely conventional calculus, stripped of any nuclear dimension, the incentives for deeper escalation, sustained offensives, and expanded objectives would look very different for New Delhi. The fact that the conflict stayed contained within tight, deliberate limits is not incidental. It reflects exactly the kind of restraint that full spectrum deterrence is built to produce, restraint born from both sides understanding where the line sits and choosing not to cross it.

Tasleem’s thesis essentially asks deterrence to do a job it was never assigned, then declares it defective for not doing that job. This is a bit like arguing that a smoke detector failed because a kitchen fire still started. The device was never meant to prevent cooking accidents. It exists to trigger a response before things spiral beyond control. Nuclear deterrence functions on a comparable logic: it cannot prevent every provocation or limited skirmish, but it dramatically raises the cost of allowing any confrontation to escalate past a certain point. May 2025 stayed below that point. That outcome deserves to be read as deterrence working under genuine pressure, not deterrence collapsing.

There is also a pattern worth naming honestly. Tasleem’s academic work sits within a broader current of scholarship that has, for years, approached Pakistan’s nuclear program with an underlying skepticism about its legitimacy and necessity, regardless of the specific crisis under discussion. That prior orientation matters, because it shapes how ambiguous events get interpreted. A crisis that ends without nuclear escalation can be read two ways: as evidence deterrence succeeded, or as evidence that deterrence never really mattered in the first place, since disaster was supposedly avoided through other means anyway. Scholars already inclined to doubt Pakistan’s strategic rationale tend to gravitate toward the second reading almost automatically, not because the evidence demands it, but because it confirms a conclusion they arrived at long before May 2025 happened.

That is not rigorous analysis. It is argument by preexisting conviction, dressed up in the language of strategic studies. Genuine deterrence theory asks precise questions: What actions did the adversary avoid? What escalatory options were on the table and left untaken? Where did decision-makers on both sides draw their own red lines, and did those lines hold? Tasleem’s piece skips past these questions in favor of a simpler, punchier claim, one that generates attention precisely because it challenges an assumption many Pakistanis hold dear, but one that does not survive contact with how deterrence actually functions in the real world.

May 2025 was not a clean, bloodless non-event, and nobody serious is claiming it was. Real strikes happened. Real risks were run. But the outcome, limited force, calibrated response, an intact nuclear threshold, is precisely the outcome deterrence theory predicts when it is working as intended under real strain. Calling that a failure requires redefining success into something no deterrent relationship, anywhere, has ever achieved. The more honest question, the one Tasleem’s piece never quite gets around to asking, is not whether Pakistan’s nuclear posture prevented conflict outright. It is what that posture constrained once conflict began. On that question, the answer from May 2025 is clearer than her article allows.