President Donald Trump could soon face the ignominy of seeing American F-16 fighters flying alongside arch rival China’s J-10 and JF-17 warplanes piloted by Pakistanis against his Indian partners.

The risk of ignominy arises because Trump designated India as a “Major Defense Partner with Strategic Trade Authorization-1” during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s February visit to the White House.

That butts heads with Pakistan’s “major non-NATO ally” status since 2002, granted in anticipation of services needed during America’s ill-starred conflict in Afghanistan.

Now, the nascent Pakistan-India war has revealed a new more worrisome danger.

Under military chief Asim Munir, the nuclear-armed nation is rapidly falling into the iron grip of China’s ambitious Xi Jinping, who Trump and US Congress see by bipartisan consensus as the most high-risk challenger of American power and disrupter of world stability.

Yet, Trump seems unphased by the war although both countries are significant nuclear powers. His early comment was, “They’ll get it figured out one way or the other. I’m sure of that.”

This might be a mistake because Xi seems to be using Munir as a war proxy to scuttle India’s growing friendship with Washington as a first step to longer term ejection of US military assets from South Asia and the Indian Ocean.

In this perilous context, only forceful diplomatic pressure by Trump on Munir to pull back quickly from the casus belli of this war can save Pakistan from turning into a Chinese dependency and being trapped in an anti-Western belt comprising China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

Delhi will never accept US mediation in the Pakistan war. Nor will it ever be willing to treat Beijing as an enemy. There are too many civilization links with China over 7,000 years and they never had a war until 1962, when Chinese soldiers briefly attacked small undefended Himalayan territories in India by surprise.

But Delhi would accept pressure by Trump on Munir to definitively end Pakistan’s well-documented policy since 1948 of infiltrating Islamic terrorists into India as a state-authorized but deniable weapon. This is the chief casus belli but Islamabad continues to deny such charges.

A successful Trump could then benefit from an unprecedented opportunity to build a new security architecture free of state-sponsored terrorism for South Asia and the Indian Ocean with his friend Modi’s help.

That would be a big gain for Trump because India is pivotal for his vision of Indo-Pacific security and peace, which has bipartisan support in Washington.

Since Beijing is the major financial investor and weapons supplier to Pakistan, the current war could easily escalate to regional scale and draw China in covertly.

Perhaps, hubris sparked by China’s admirable economic and military successes in recent decades has set Xi on a very high-risk path aimed at containing its huge neighbor.

He may be using Munir in an attempt to bleed India through war and Pakistan-sponsored terrorists to coerce Delhi’s acquiescence to his ambitions of Asian hegemony.

He may also be trying to bleed Islamabad through a destructive war with a larger military power to impose enough economic dependency on Pakistan’s generals to do Beijing’s bidding.

Although Xi has called for de-escalation, he may prefer to see a war to evaluate Chinese warplanes and weapons in actual combat. He has reportedly already delivered high-performance missiles to Islamabad to arm it for a prolonged war.

First reports indicate effective performance by Pakistan’s China-made warplanes firing PL-15 air-to-air missiles and France’s best Rafale warplanes firing the latest meteor missiles, US and India-made missiles, and Russia-designed warplanes and munitions. Reportedly, at least one Rafale has been shot down.

If Xi’s weapons demonstrate credibility, this war will have profound implications for American deterrence of a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, protection of treaty allies Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and stability in the South China Sea and Indo-Pacific.

More importantly, it could birth a China-Pakistan defense axis that permits direct Chinese access to the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean through Pakistan’s Gwadar Port.

That would have profound implications for South and West Asia, including the safety of America’s Indian Ocean bases of Diego Garcia and US aircraft carrier groups plying in and out of the Persian Gulf, where the longest shoreline is with an emerging Beijing ally, Iran.

These prizes are too grand for Xi to let Pakistan, a failing, impoverished and unstable state, to become anything but Beijing’s satellite.

However, the way to avoid all of that is quite easy. Trump simply needs to use coercive diplomacy on Munir and his intelligence services to permanently abandon their 75-year-old strategy of infiltrating terrorists into Indian territory.

In one stroke, that would completely eliminate casus belli between Delhi and Islamabad and dismantle China’s grip over Pakistani elites.

Pakistan and India would be at long-term peace particularly as they share almost identical cultural mores and are home to almost equal numbers of Muslims many with cross border family affiliations.

But Trump must make a clear choice. He could continue Washington’s self-interested habit of hedging bets by playing both sides in periods of military tensions. Or he could finally act upon repeated US intelligence assessments that Pakistan is a fraudulent ally and acolyte of Islamic terrorists with American blood on their hands.

He could choose to clearly tilt towards India, his emerging great-power partner, by giving due respect to the value it brings to his table. Beyond contributions to the global combat against terrorism, it is a pivotal military power, an influential friend of the Global South and reliable partner indispensable for helping to safeguard the world’s most vital sea lanes from the South China Sea across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and Horn of Africa.

The current bipartisan opinion in Washington holds that Modi is a reliable leader of a stable, fast-progressing and genuine democracy whereas Pakistan has mostly been ruled by corrupt military dictators who have driven it to failed statehood, widening internal conflict, Islamic fundamentalism and bankruptcy.

India is actively helping the US to build peace in the Indo-Pacific and patrol vital ingress to the Red Sea against terrorists and pirates jeopardizing the Horn of Africa. Beyond that, India is also a competent emerging actor and positive influence to maintain balance in the sharpening competition in the Arctic region as China expands its encroachment.