At the impossible table: The diplomatic maze awaiting the world in Islamabad

All eyes are on Islamabad this weekend as the city braces to mediate one of the most consequential, high-stakes peace negotiations since the culmination of the Second World War.

Starting today, American emissaries, led by Vice President JD Vance, will sit across the table from Iranian diplomats to negotiate a lasting settlement to a war that has rattled global power structures and stock markets alike.

On the face of it, it is a welcome development from where the world found itself on Tuesday. As daylight drew to a close, the world watched in anticipation as Washington backed itself into an impossible corner, promising to annihilate “a whole civilisation” if Tehran did not give a safe passageway to traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

But a last-ditch diplomatic breakthrough by Pakistan managed to pull both sides from the brink of a potentially catastrophic escalation of unknowable consequences.

For now, Islamabad seems to have bought both sides some time to turn a fragile truce into something akin to a durable agreement. It is, to put it mildly, a fraught endeavour.

For one, the United States must reckon with the fact that the Iran that sits across the table in Islamabad on Saturday is not the Iran that walked into Geneva in February.

When the US last met Iranian representatives in Switzerland two months ago, the Islamic regime in Tehran was uniquely exposed, perhaps for the first time in its 46-year history. It had barely weathered years of crippling sanctions, a cratered currency, and deafening international isolation. The Twelve Day War had laid bare the vulnerabilities in its ground and air defenses, and had set its nuclear programme back by decades.

The Axis of Resistance, the crown jewel of Iran’s deterrence capability, had been debilitated beyond repair, with supply lines to Lebanon and Gaza severed with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. And in January, nationwide protests had enfeebled the Ayatollah’s hold on power; the protests were suppressed eventually, but only by the skin of their teeth.

Over the past six weeks, the US and Israel amped up attacks across military installations and civilian infrastructure, expanded targets, and incrementally struck deeper into Iranian mainland, hoping they could batter Tehran into compliance. What they found instead was a country willing to stare the military might of Empire in the face, standing steadfast in its wake, and living to tell the tale.

For all its military bluster, it’s hard to shy away from the fact that the US has remained incapable of translating its wins on the battlefield to achieving its strategic objectives, whatever they may have been. Iran has managed to retain its nuclear infrastructure and enriched uranium stockpiles, thereby securing a compressed timeline to weapons capability should it make the political choice to cross that threshold. More consequentially, however, Tehran has credibly demonstrated its ability to choke global energy flows and hold the world economy hostage,........

© Dawn Prism