Bilal sits down with Aseem to unpack why the Islamabad peace talks between the US and Iran yielded nothing—and what it reveals about Iran’s fractured post-war leadership. The US strikes decapitated Iran’s pragmatic IRGC elite, leaving power in the hands of younger, hardline regional commanders who neither need nor want Trump’s approval.
But the conversation quickly pivots to Pakistan’s squandered moment: instead of leveraging its geographic position and Gulf relationships to extract concessions from all sides, Pakistan undersells itself in the region. Aseem argues that Pakistan must tie its Iran-Gulf positioning directly to countering India’s water and security threats, through mechanisms like the Iran-Pakistan pipeline and a stronger naval presence in the Arabian Sea—a playbook Pakistan successfully executed for billions annually in the 1970s-80s.
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