[Manishearth]

> what time point do we pick as the baseline such that actions that lead to changes after that are aggression but actions before that are the status quo?

Not just the point in time, there's also the level of aggression. Many wars have a set of ever-increasing nonmilitary conflicts leading up to them. If you're not defining aggression as a concrete military action, you have to choose a baseline for this too.

If you're allowing governmental-agression-that-may-incite-war to be counted as a "first aggression", then India is doing this right now in Kashmir. Yes, I know, that situation is more complex (and I'd prefer not to discuss it online; there's a lot of nuance lost and it's frustrating), but there are similarities in the situation.

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Anyway, the definition of "aggression" to be used in this context depends on the context of the original statement, which was the argument that India is less likely to be a security threat because it has never been the aggressor. In this context, it is about military aggression, the argument being that a country more likely to escalate a civil issue to war is more likely to escalate to nukes in this modern age. To be clear, I don't feel that India is at all likely to escalate to nukes, due to various other reasons (including possibly personal bias). But I don't think that "India was never the first aggressor" is a valid argument in support of that.