MAGAZINE Voices Devdutt Pattanaik Debashis Chatterjee Ravi Shankar Anil Bhasin Dr Deepali Bhardwaj Mata Amritanandamayi Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment NEW DELHI may 24 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Ai generated America Made in Pakistan By toadying up to Donald Trump and cosying up to the Gulf sheikhs, canny Islamabad has leveraged its Iran ceasefire talks to get a seat at the global high table D By RAVI SHANKAR onald Trump’s favourite game is golf. Any golfer is sure to recognise the rhythm of the Trump administration’s Iran policy: the confident drive off the first tee, a big swing, enormous noise, followed at great distance by applause from watchers. Then the fairway begins to narrow, the rough appears, the sand traps multiply and somewhere around the seventh hole the game stops. By the back , nine, the scorecard bears little relationship to the actual strokes taken. Trump launched the Iran war on February 28 with the geopolitical equivalent of a 350-yard drive: assassination, simultaneous airstrikes, maximalist rhetoric about never allowing Tehran to acquire nuclear weapons. It was the kind of opening shot that fills the gallery and empties the driving range. “Obliterated,” he declared on Truth Social. “Total victory The .” professional calls this “finishing strong”. The amateur calls it “close enough”. The strategic analyst, watching Trump’s Iran negotiations from Jerusalem, calls it a whiff: a swing which completely misses the ball and hits nothing but air. The world now is an explosive golf course where America’s caddy Pakistan is the lead putter in West Asian geopolitics. On May 18, the Iranian foreign ministry said, “Last week, despite the United States having publicly announced its rejection of the plan, we received a series of corrective points and considerations from the Pakistani mediator,” and that from the day after the American positions were sent via Pakistan, “the process is continuing via Pakistan,” it concluded. Captain America How Iran Destroyed Its Gulf Trust Drone strikes on Gulf infrastructure, including the one near the Barakah nuclear facility in the UAE, reinforced the message that such attacks are not primarily military operations. They are political communications. Every drone that penetrates Gulf airspace and reaches its vicinity delivers the same dispatch to every ruler in the region: your American protector cannot guarantee your sanctuary The . infrastructure of your modernity is reachable. Choose your relationships accordingly America has chosen . Pakistan to shelter its West Asia policy The transformation of . Pakistan’s global standing in the space of 18 months is among the most remarkable geopolitical reversals of the current era. As recently as 2022, Pakistan was a country appearing on terrorismfinancing watchlists and cycling through IMF bailout packages with metronome regularity Its political . system had imploded. It was described as perhaps the most dangerous country on earth with a nuclear arsenal wedded to institutional fragility, endemic political violence, and a military that runs the state without formally being the state. Islamabad’s role as the lead mediator in the West Asia ceasefire is a strategic repositioning executed with considerable skill by Pakistan’s military The strong personal ties . between Trump and Field Marshal Asim Munir are “a crucial factor”, as Chatham House noted. Munir was invited to a private White House lunch; the first time a US president had hosted Pakistan’s army chief unaccompanied by political leadership. He was invited back to the Oval Office. He attended the retirement ceremony of the head of US Central Command. Former Ambassador Dilip Sinha, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in Geneva, says, “India underestimated the speed and scale of Pakistan’s diplomatic rehabilitation in West Asia and Washington. Op Sindoor exposed Pak vulnerabilities and diplomatic isolation. It has worked on both since then. Turning to China for weapons, sending troops to Saudi and mediating with Iran are all signs of a rejuvenated Pak. The co-working arrangement between Asim Munir and Shehbaz Sharif is also the result of the Indian threat.” Pakistan’s role as a 1971-style intermediary when it had facilitated the Nixon-era rapprochement between Washington and Beijing is being explicitly invoked in Islamabad. The parallel is apt, though the lesson that history teaches is also sobering: Pakistan expected that its 1971 role would translate into American support preventing the secession of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. It did not. “A wise leadership in Islamabad,” Chatham House pundits observed drily, “would not hope for too much from any fresh promises made by the current administration in Washington.” But why, precisely, is Trump vacillating on Iran? Why has the president who launched a war with “zero enrichment” as his stated condition ended up negotiating moratoriums that give Iran enrichment capacity for a decade that goes against the interests of its closest ally, Israel? Why does the man who promised to destroy Iran’s nuclear programme appear to be just settling for a freeze of it? The answers are multiple, overlapping, and none of them are particularly flattering. All meanings begin and end with Pakistan. Iran air strikes in the UAE Drone strikes on Gulf infrastructure, including the one near the Barakah nuclear facility in the UAE, reinforced the message that such attacks are not primarily military operations. They are political communications From Pariah to Player Pakistan’s Extraordinary Reinvention Pakistan now has a seat at the global table it has never previously occupied. It has signed a major bilateral defense pact with Saudi Arabia and deepened ties with Turkey and Egypt. There are discussions of a quadrilateral security alignment among Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey A former pariah is now a . convener of world affairs; a problem country is now the solution-provider. The country whose military chief was previously synonymous with causing instability is now the man whose personal relationship with the American president is shaping the ceasefire terms of a Gulf war. As the Council on Foreign Relations noted, the Trump administration’s pivot to Pakistan has been explicitly facilitated by the collapse of US-India relations as a product of Trump’s tariffs and H-1B restrictions. New Delhi found both intolerable, as also Trump’s insistence on claiming credit for mediating the India-Pakistan clash after Operation Sindoor. Having burned the relationship with the world’s largest democracy and its most strategically significant partner in the Indo-Pacific, Washington has turned to Islamabad. In a single geopolitical pivot, it managed to reward its most difficult regional relationship and punish its most promising one simultaneously . The Nobel Handicap How Flattery Became Geopolitics Donald Trump has, if news reports, Congressional speeches, and editorials are to be believed, the particular vanity of a man who has spent his entire public life in pursuit of formal recognition—the EGOT (Emmy , Grammy Oscar, and Tony) of , American politics, the man who desires the Nobel Peace Prize. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif obliged Trump by nominating him twice—once for brokering the India-Pakistan ceasefire and once for the Gaza deal—describing him in a public ceremony as the “Saviour of Turn to page 2