The violent crisis between India and Pakistan is exactly the kind of international emergency that would once have prompted a full-on US diplomatic drive to cool tempers and head off a wider war.

But this latest fighting over and beyond Kashmir, the disputed Muslim-majority region, may become a test of the Trump administration's bandwidth and limited aspirations for global convening — and for the world without American leadership.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered a passive initial response to the fighting, set off by a terror attack on Indian tourists that New Delhi blames on Pakistan-backed militants. "It's a shame," Trump said. "I just hope it ends quickly." On Wednesday, he went a little further, offering his good offices without showing much enthusiasm for becoming involved. "I get along with both, I know both very well, and I want to see them work it out," Trump said. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been in touch with top officials from India and Pakistan. But there's no indication so far of a broadening US effort to coordinate international mediation or crisis management.

This may be partly because the time is not yet ripe for diplomacy, since everybody expects several steps up an escalatory ladder by both sides.

The US response will be closely watched in the coming days because the second Trump administration has thrown away the US foreign policy playbook, leaving a vacuum where US multinational leadership once operated.

Trump has little interest in building international coalitions and activating US alliances in pursuit of common goals. He's keener to flex US economic and military power to manipulate smaller nations to America's advantage and sees little difference between allies and adversaries in his narrow win-loss worldview. In any case, it would be rather incongruous to see a president who has expansionist designs on Greenland, Canada and Panama mediating one of the world's most nettlesome territorial disputes.

Residents living along the Line of Control (LoC) take shelter inside a degree college in Uri. PHOTO: AFP

While Trump has made peacemaking a cornerstone of his new term, his efforts in defusing global hotspots as wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza have shown little progress.