PAKISTAN’S role as a mediator between warring nations is both unusual and commendable, but after the failed US-Iranian talks in Islamabad earlier this month, there is no guarantee it will pay the desired dividends. At the time of writing, neither side had showed up for a second round of talks. There was still scope for hope that the recalcitrants would have second thoughts. Iran was understandably miffed when the US attacked and boarded one of its tankers. It’s hardly the kind of action that facilitates peace parleys. But the purported author of The Art of the Deal appears to believe that holding a gun to someone’s head is the best way of achieving the aggressor’s goals.
Not for the first time, Donald Trump has threatened attacks on civilian infrastructure such as power stations and bridges if no deal is agreed. We might have been in a different situation had the US reciprocated Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s conciliatory announcement about permitting all commercial shipping to transit the Strait of Hormuz by lifting its naval blockade. Instead, Trump declared that the blockade would remain until a deal was concluded. Araghchi was overruled by the IRGC, the opening was rescinded, and the squeeze on global oil and fertiliser supplies remains in place. The global economy could soon be on life support. In the event of an international depression, Trump will no doubt blame Iran, refusing to acknowledge that his idiocy in taking the Israeli bait is the chief culprit.
Previous US presidents were also exhorted by Benjamin Netanyahu to devastate Iran. They were marginally wiser. Even Trump in his first term refused to follow the advice of his national security adviser, the obnoxious John Bolton, to rain hellfire on Iran after being informed how many lives it would cost. But there is video evidence that even 40 years ago, Trump, then merely a property tycoon, couldn’t understand why the Reagan regime couldn’t simply grab Iran’s oil.
He hasn’t learned much in the intervening years, which might help to explain why the ‘diplomats’ he dispatches to patch up rifts in the imperial order are ignorant about the art of diplomacy. Real estate tycoons Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (the latter being Trump’s son-in-law, with no other official designation) have been messing up diplomacy for more than a year. Iran recognised their intellectual inadequacy after two rounds of negotiations were interrupted by US-Israeli belligerence.
The US-Israeli folly will weigh heavily on the region.
Perhaps as a concession, Trump added his vice-president to the party that attended the first round of Islamabad negotiations. As if three stooges would be better than two.
J.D. Vance has been a flop as a frequent emissary to Europe, where a growing number of nations have gradually been learning from Spain how to pluck up the courage to resist the nonsense flowing from what has for far too long been mistaken as their American benefactor. The EU has hitherto been horrendous in its refusal to challenge the Israeli genocide against Palestinians, but even that tendency might slowly be shifting. Giorgia Meloni’s Italian government, for instance, has taken up cudgels against not only the unwarranted US-Israeli aggression against Iran but also Trump’s diatribes against the pope, as well as the photographic evidence of an Israeli soldier taking a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus Christ in Lebanon.
Israel has vowed to investigate that particular action. The far more egregious crimes it has committed against Lebanese citizens remain unquestioned, of course. The Gaza playbook has been deployed in terms of both wanton destruction and ethnic cleansing. That’s unlikely to be challenged either in Islamabad or at the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Washington, where both sides are trying to work out how to destroy Hezbollah, the force that emerged from the rubble of the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 1982 — a continuation of what had been going on since the early 20th century.
Whatever the outcome of the talks between Tel Aviv and the US-Saudi-installed government in Beirut, it’s hard to imagine this particular Israeli neighbour ever being free of the burden of its proximity to a genocidal state. Patterned on both the Nazi anti-Jewish playbook and South African apartheid, that tendency will persist as long as Israel can count on the US as its godfather.
West Asia will never be the same again, although it’s unclear how long it might take for Israel, the US and the Gulf states (particularly the UAE and Bahrain) to learn their lessons. The consequences of the US-Israeli folly will weigh heavily on the region for long.
The outcome can’t be predicted. But in the unlikely event of a long-term peace deal, at least some of the credit will be due to Pakistan, despite its questionable deference to the White House.
Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2026
