Regional crisis and Pakistan’s strategic response

2026-03-04 - 20:23

THE US-Iran war has started and much is being said written about it here in Pakistan. There are two critical dimensions to the current geopolitical moment that Pakistan and the world is largely overlooking — and both converge on one figure: Donald Trump. The Domestic Angle: The first dimension is entirely domestic and it is not receiving the attention it deserves. There is a deliberate strategy at play aimed at the 2026 midterm elections. Trump is engineering conditions under which he could declare a national emergency and potentially postpone or disrupt the midterms. The first attempt involved deploying armed forces into various US states. That effort has been stumped by the people and the courts. So now we appear to be moving to step two — creating a wartime environment on the global stage that would justify declaring a state of emergency at home. Beyond the emergency rationale, there is a well-established historical pattern in American politics: the country rarely removes a sitting wartime president. That political reality is not lost on this administration. The International Angle: The second dimension is geopolitical and it is where things become far more complex and dangerous. With some regional actors, the calculus has been relatively straightforward — decapitate the leadership and the remainder either collapses or falls into line under pressure, as the US accomplished in Venezuela. But Iran is an entirely different matter. Iran is not a fragile structure held together by a single leadership tier. It is a deep, layered state with entrenched military institutions, ideological foundations and redundant chains of command. You can remove the top leadership — numbers two, three and four. But the replacements are already formed, already committed and the system does not collapse. It continues. Iran has endured decades of pressure, sanctions and confrontation. It has survived each time. And critically, it retains the ability to activate asymmetric pressure points across the globe — small, surgical strikes in multiple theaters simultaneously, executed in ways that are difficult to attribute and harder to counter through conventional means. The Missing Dimension: China, Russia and the New Architecture of War: What is perhaps surprising is the posture of China and Russia. Neither has stepped forward as a full counterweight to American escalation, though one of them is clearly not neutral. Russia, consumed by its war in Ukraine, has receded into the background. China is watching, calculating and saying very little publicly. But their absence from the foreground should not be mistaken for indifference. For now let’s accept that Russia and China are not a deterrence. However, the assumption that overwhelming American military hardware translates automatically into deterrence no longer holds either. Iran has developed one of the most sophisticated drone programs in the region, battle-tested through proxies across multiple conflict zones. The Russia-Ukraine war has demonstrated precisely this point: a diminished power can fight a superpower to a bloody stalemate for years through asymmetric tactics, attrition and drone technology. Shock-and-awe is increasingly expensive, increasingly counte able and increasingly beside the point. This is not the world of Desert Storm. Not even 2003. This is a world where a mid-tier military power, backed by decades of sanctions-forged self-sufficiency and genuine technological ingenuity, can project meaningful force in ways that do not play to American strengths. What Should Pakistan Do? Pakistan finds itself in an acutely uncomfortable position — and it cannot afford to sleepwalk through this moment. Iran is not a distant crisis. It is a neighbour. Pakistan shares a long, porous border with Iran, deep historical and cultural ties and a significant Shia population. Any serious conflict involving Iran will not stay contained on the other side of that border. The economic consequences, the refugee pressures, the sectarian reverberations — all of it lands in Pakistan’s lap whether Islamabad wants it to or not. Pakistan’s instinct in moments like this has historically been to defer to Washington, particularly when financial lifelines from the IMF and bilateral pressure from the US are in play. That instinct must be resisted this time. Quiet complicity in an escalation that destabilizes your immediate neighborhood is not a neutral position — it is a costly one. What Pakistan should do is pursue active, principled diplomacy. It is one of the few countries that maintains functional relationships with both Iran and the Gulf States, has credibility in the Muslim world and is taken seriously enough by China to serve as a quiet interlocutor. That is a rare combination of assets at a moment when back-channel communication could genuinely matter. Pakistan should also be unambiguous domestically and internationally: it will not be a staging ground, it will not be a logistical corridor and it will not be silently complicit in any military action against a neighboring Muslim country. That position protects Pakistan strategically while preserving its relationships on all sides. The broader message from Islamabad needs to be clear — de-escalation is in everyone’s interest and Pakistan is willing to play a constructive role in achieving it. Standing on the sidelines while the neighborhood burns is not a foreign policy. It is an abdication. The Bottom Line: When you combine a domestic political strategy dependent on sustained crisis, an adversary in Iran that does not fit the regime-change template, a drone-transformed battlefield, the quiet but watchful presence of China and Russia and a Pakistan that must choose its posture carefully — it is very difficult to see how the current US approach ends well. The assumptions driving this strategy appear to be based on a playbook that no longer applies. The world has changed. The weapons have changed. The political landscape has changed. And the costs of miscalculation have never been higher. Pakistan, more than most, cannot afford to find that out the hard way. —The writer is a former Senior Advisor to the Government and a sector development specialist.