Donald 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 terrorism-financing 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.
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 South Asia”. He grovelled: “Mr President, I would like to salute you for your exemplary, visionary leadership. I think you are the man this world needs most at this point in time. The world will always remember you as a man who did everything—who went out of his way to stop seven and, today, eight wars.” And it worked.
As prominent strategic analyst Brahma Chellaney put it with characteristic bluntness: “Each time Trump chickens out, he uses Pakistan as a cover.” Pakistan provides Trump with what he most needs when his war policy hits a difficult lie: a face-saving alternative narrative. The war did not stall because the objectives were unachievable. The war paused because peace broke out, brokered by America’s important partner Pakistan, whose prime minister thinks Trump deserves the Nobel Prize. It is, as cover stories go, remarkably effective and costs Pakistan very little to provide. In a war that nobody can end cleanly, a country that talks to everyone becomes indispensable, regardless of its internal dysfunction. Pakistani defense planners calculated this correctly: mediation is an opportunity to gain strategic importance for Washington without significant cost, especially in a context where Islamabad needs to pivot toward the US without offending Beijing, which is Pakistan’s main economic and military ally. It is the perfect play for a country that has historically overplayed its hand.
The Iron Brother’s Gambit: Hand in Pakistan’s Elevation
Nothing in Pakistan’s strategic repositioning is adequately understood without understanding what China gains from it. Beijing declared explicit support for Pakistan’s role as mediator. China is adopting what analysts have called an “iron brother strategy” with Pakistan which uses Islamabad not merely as a bilateral ally but as a geopolitical launching pad to deepen its influence in the Islamic world and the Middle East. Foreign Affairs expert and author Saibal Dasgupta says, “It is clear that China has played a silent but crucial role. Iran has obviously agreed to accept Pakistan as a mediator after discussing it with China, its biggest ally. Pakistan has been Beijing’s intermediary in the Muslim world for a long time because Gulf countries are closely aligned with the US and it has financial and political influence over Pakistani politicians and military top brass through the $60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.”
Beijing is working to utilise Pakistan as a bridge to the Middle East, leveraging Pakistan’s historical, geographic, and religious weight in the region through diplomacy and mediation. China is Iran’s largest oil customer—approximately 20 per cent of its maritime oil imports come from Iran. It is also Pakistan’s largest infrastructure investor through the $60-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, whose viability depends on Gulf shipping routes that the Iran war has disrupted. China has every interest in ending the conflict on terms that preserve Iranian capacity, restore Hormuz transit, and leave American credibility diminished. It is quietly shaping the agenda that Islamabad presents to both sides. This is ‘wu wei’ in diplomatic form: achieving outcomes without appearing to act, directing traffic without appearing to hold the signal—Pakistan walks into the Islamabad Talks, hosts Vance and Kushner, delivers the American proposal to Tehran, secures the ceasefire, accepts Trump’s public thanks and Sharif’s Nobel nomination, and Beijing collects the strategic dividends of a US president who owes something to a Chinese-aligned state, an Iran that survives with its nuclear knowledge intact, a Strait of Hormuz reopening on Iranian terms, and a global perception that the diplomatic traffic of the world’s most dangerous conflict ran through a Chinese proxy rather than through Washington’s own channels.
Former Ambassador and author Rajiv Dogra says, “Let us start from Op Sindoor. There is no doubt that initially there was a huge shock in Pakistan. But they recovered quickly and decided to put all their diplomatic eggs in the American basket. But this time it was not the diplomats who were taking the lead, but an Army chief. Munir knew Trump’s weaknesses and offered him crypto, mines and even rare earth—some of which were either not there or were not marketable. Trump and his associates were naturally taken in and from then on the story was smooth for Munir and Pakistan. And they have carried forward that story ever since. The Iran War mediation efforts are a part of the same continuation. And since the 1970s, China has been the source of Pakistan’s strength. They even helped during Op Sindoor, and we should expect this brotherhood to continue at a steady pace, despite Pakistan’s stronger ties with America. But how long can Pakistan continue to ride two horses—US and China—remains to be seen.”
As analysts at The Diplomat noted: “Pakistan’s China-backed mediation effort should be seen not as a diplomatic breakthrough, but as an act of geopolitical opportunism.” The India dimension of all this is almost too painful for New Delhi to articulate publicly. India’s strategic nightmare has always been a two-front challenge: a hostile China to the northeast and a China-armed, China-backed Pakistan to the northwest. The country that India has spent 75 years trying to contain has been handed a seat at the very table where the rules of the post-American order are being written. There is a report that deserves its own paragraph for sheer audacity. Iranian military aircraft was parked at Nur Khan Air Base just outside Rawalpindi, which would mean that Pakistan, while hosting American peace negotiations, was simultaneously providing airport facilities to the Iranian military. Media analysts note this as the behaviour of a country that is playing both ends of the table with the confidence of a card shark who has correctly identified that nobody at the table can afford to call his bluff.
The Nineteenth Hole: Where Does This Leave Everyone?
A war launched with maximalist objectives is being concluded with minimalist outcomes. Sun Tzu wrote in Art of War that the supreme excellence in war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Though China has not subdued America, it has watched America subdue itself in the sand traps of the Gulf, in the NATO standoff, on the uncertain fairways of the Taiwan Strait while its own position grows steadily stronger. And Xi Jinping, who does not play golf, and would never dream of declaring his score before the round is finished, is content to wait for the final tally. Before the first American bomb fell on Iran on February 28, a quiet revolution was already underway in the plumbing of global finance—the slow, steady erosion of the petrodollar, the 50-year-old arrangement that has underwritten American global dominance more effectively than any army.
The story begins in 1974, when Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary William Simon struck one of the most consequential deals in postwar financial history. Saudi Arabia would price its oil in US dollars and recycle its petroleum surpluses into American Treasury bonds. In exchange, Washington would guarantee Saudi security. The petrodollar system financed US deficit spending, which sustained the military presence securing the Gulf and keeping global oil trade dollar-based. As Deutsche Bank put it, “The world saves in dollars in large part because it pays in dollars.” This system, as of 2026 is visibly cracking. The Iran war, Deutsche Bank warns, could be remembered as a key catalyst for “erosion in petrodollar dominance, and the beginnings of the petroyuan”. For Tehran and Beijing, elevating the Chinese yuan is a win-win: it allows both to skirt American sanctions while simplifying bilateral trade that has boomed under their 2021 strategic partnership. Now China settles roughly half of its foreign trade in yuan. Saudi Arabia, historically Washington’s most critical Middle Eastern ally and the linchpin of the petrodollar arrangement, now sits within BRICS and participates in mBridge—the Chinese-led central bank digital currency initiative designed to enable transactions outside the dollar system. Trump’s response to the de-dollarisation threat has been entirely characteristic and counterproductive.
Is America Abandoning Israel? Nobody in Washington Will Say It Out Loud
Is the US abandoning Israel for Pakistan? The honest answer is: not deliberately, not completely, but structurally and consequentially, yes. It is not abandoning Israel in the sense of withdrawing security guarantees, suspending arms transfers, or publicly denouncing the alliance. What is happening is something more insidious and harder to reverse: the US is allowing the architecture of the post-war settlement to be shaped by an intermediary whose interests are not Israel’s interests, and whose entry into the room was purchased with the kind of strategic positioning that Beijing has been engineering for years. The Carnegie Endowment’s analysis is definitive on Israel’s concerns: “Prolonged speculation about the capabilities and equipment that Iran has retained, and what it might do with them in deep mountain tunnels, will put both states on a glide path to the next crisis.”
J Robert Oppenheimer understood, the moment the Trinity test succeeded in 1945, that the knowledge of how to build an atomic bomb could not be unlearned. The physics of uranium enrichment exists in the minds of Iranian scientists who were trained under the Shah with American assistance. As the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation noted: “In 2018, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Despite periodic attempts to revive the deal since then, Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment, limited inspector access to its nuclear facilities, and is now closer to developing a nuclear weapon than before the deal.” This is the historical record on which Israel makes its case. The Carnegie Endowment suggests Iran is calculating the situation carefully: Israel concludes that the reconstitution has reached a threshold that requires military response, and acts. The question of how America behaves will define the US-Israel relationship for a generation. The least discussed but perhaps most historically predictable outcome: Iran never formally becomes a nuclear weapons state, and never formally relinquishes the capability to become one. It remains, like Pakistan before its 1998 tests, an acknowledged threshold state. Netanyahu told CBS in early May: “There’s still nuclear material, enriched uranium that has to be taken out of Iran. You go in, and you take it out.” Trump said he wanted to do it physically. Then Trump flew to Beijing and described Taiwan’s security as “neutral”. Then Trump negotiated with Iran through Pakistan.
What America Still Has: The Case for Residual Optimism
The great golf writer Bernard Darwin once wrote that golf is a game which “consists of a great number of failures and an occasional success, the failure and the success both attending what appears to the player to be precisely the same stroke.” What distinguishes the good golfer from the bad golfer, Darwin suggested, is not the absence of failure but the honesty with which the player accounts for it, and the willingness to adjust accordingly. By this measure, the Trump administration is the worst golfer in the history of American statecraft. It launched a war it cannot finish, and declared it finished. It allowed a Pakistani military establishment to host its most sensitive negotiations; a US president nominated by that establishment for a prize he has not won, and called the arrangement a testament to American diplomatic creativity. Beijing has not played a shot yet because it has not needed to. Its opponent has been playing the course against himself by double-bogeying every hole, replacing the scorecard, announcing birdies to the gallery, and wondering, with genuine puzzlement, why his handicap keeps rising. That gap between what America was, what it performs, and what it now is, is the central geopolitical fact of 2026. Every foreign minister in every capital in the world is measuring it, even as Washington insists it does not exist. Every central bank buying gold is expressing a view about it. Every ally building a contingency plan is acting on it. Every adversary probing for the limits of American commitment is testing it. The tee is set. The hole is a long par five. The fairway narrows considerably after the second shot. And Beijing, from the clubhouse, is still watching but not playing.
All Base, No Cover
On the morning of March 1, the day after the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, Iran struck back with a ferocity and precision that exposed the gap between the mythology of American military protection and the operational reality of American military protection. Iranian strikes damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at 15 US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. A Washington Post investigation that analysed satellite imagery recorded 217 damaged or destroyed structures and 11 damaged pieces of equipment, including hangars, barracks, warehouses, fuel depots, aircraft, radar systems, communications sites, air defense assets, at least one fighter jet, a dozen MQ-9 Reaper drones, two MC-130 tanker aircraft, helicopters, and an E-3 Sentry surveillance plane. NBC News reported that the damage was expected to cost billions of dollars to repair. A prominent Emirati commentator, Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, who has close relationships with the UAE’s leadership, posted on social media: “It is time to think about closing the American bases. As they are a burden and not a strategic asset.” He was not a crank or an outlier. He was a barometer. In a political culture where official positions are crafted with extraordinary care and dissenting views rarely surface in proximity to power, a well-connected academic speaking that openly about closing American bases represents something that the State Department’s diplomatic cables were simultaneously registering in clinical language. A set of State Department cables reported by Politico described concerns among diplomats about public perceptions that the US had abandoned Bahrain to focus on protecting Israel and that the protection racket, in other words, had revealed its actual terms: American forces in the Gulf were there to project American power and serve American-Israeli strategic objectives, not primarily to shield their hosts from the consequences of American decisions. This is the question that has broken open in the Gulf, and that cannot now be sealed back: what, precisely, is the American military presence in the region actually for? For decades, American bases guaranteed security. American carriers in the Gulf deterred aggression. American missile defense systems caught what managed to get through. The arrangement was transactional: oil flowed, bases were hosted, monarchies endured, and meanwhile were also genuinely protective. But now despite an arsenal of air defense systems—Patriot, THAAD, the most sophisticated missile interceptors in the American inventory—Iranian drones and missiles penetrated the defenses sufficiently to cause billions of dollars in damage across 15 bases. Gulf countries that agreed to host American forces had also, it turned out, agreed to become targets of Iranian retaliation for American decisions that Gulf countries did not make and did not uniformly endorse.