Great-power war enables regional powers to settle scores opportunistically

Evidence

Meanwhile, however, the war is having an impact on the major states of other civilizations. India seizes the opportunity offered by China’s being tied down in East Asia to launch a devastating attack on Pakistan with a view to degrading totally that country’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities. It is initially successful but the military alliance between Pakistan, Iran, and China is activated and Iran comes to Pakistan’s assistance with modern and sophisticated military forces. India becomes bogged down fighting Iranian troops and Pakistani guerrillas from several different ethnic groups. Both Pakistan and India appeal to Arab states for support—India warning of the danger of Iranian dominance of Southwest Asia—but the initial successes of China against the United States have stimulated major anti-Western movements in Muslim societies. One by one the few remaining pro-Western governments in Arab countries and in Turkey are brought down by Islamist movements powered by the final cohorts of the Muslim youth bulge. The surge of anti Westernism provoked by Western weakness leads to a massive Arab attack on Israel, which the much-reduced U.S. Sixth Fleet is unable to stop. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 880

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the youth-bulge argument made earlier in the book (Chapter 5 on demographics) which the text explicitly pays off here.
• QUESTION: Huntington assumes Iran would defend Pakistan against India within a China-alliance — worth checking the actual historical Pakistan-Iran-China security alignment he is modeling.