There is a ritual quality to Pakistan’s annual budget exercise that has grown almost theatrical in its predictability. The finance minister rises. Revenue targets are announced with conviction. Tax-base broadening is pledged. The IMF nods approvingly from Washington. The press covers it for two days. Then the lobbyists who were in Islamabad the week before the budget speech collect their exemptions, the salaried class discovers its withholding has increased, and the country proceeds to do exactly what it did the year before — borrow to survive, reform to perform, and grow barely enough to matter.
Op-Ed
From ‘effing crazy’ to ‘great friend’: The theatre of Trump’s Middle East and why it should terrify us all
There is a particular kind of presidential humiliation that arrives not with a single catastrophic event but in the accumulated weight of contradictions — the triumphant declaration that quietly curdles into farce. Donald Trump is living inside one of those moments now, and the remarkable thing is that he seems barely to have noticed.
The Art of the Climbdown
How Donald Trump launched a war he couldn’t win, handed Iran a new weapon, and now finds himself negotiating a deal that looks remarkably like the one he blew up seven years ago
The Isolation That Backfired: Narendra Modi’s Most Consequential Foreign Policy Failure
It was September 2016, dusk settling over Kerala, when Narendra Modi made the kind of promise that sounds powerful from a lectern and haunts a legacy for years. Thumping his fist, addressing thousands of supporters, India’s prime minister turned directly toward Pakistan and issued a declaration that would come to define not just his foreign policy but its ultimate verdict. “India has been successful in isolating you,” he said, “and we will intensify those efforts. We will make sure that you are isolated around the world.”
The Art of the No Deal: Trump’s Iran Gamble Is Consuming Itself
There is a particular kind of political theatre that only Donald Trump can produce — one where spectacle and genuine crisis become so thoroughly entangled that it grows almost impossible to distinguish posturing from policy. This week’s cabinet meeting at the White House offered yet another masterclass. Asked whether he would accept a short-term arrangement allowing Iran and Oman to jointly oversee passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the President of the United States responded with characteristic economy of thought. “Oman will behave just like everybody else,” he said, “or we’ll have to blow them up.”
Trump’s Abraham Accords Gambit Is Not Diplomacy – It’s a Distress Flare
Three months after launching a war he couldn’t win, Donald Trump is trying to reframe catastrophic strategic failure as the dawn of a new Middle East. The silence from Muslim leaders on that Saturday phone call told us everything we need to know
The Deal Trump Couldn’t Make — and Now Can’t Afford to Lose
On Saturday, Donald Trump announced, with his characteristic fanfare and his characteristic imprecision, that a peace deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated.” The Strait of Hormuz would reopen. A memorandum of understanding was being finalised. Details would come “shortly.” The president, it appeared, was on the cusp of something historic.
Fifty-Six Days of Ceasefire, Zero Days of Clarity
There is a particular cruelty to diplomatic purgatory — that uncertain space between war and peace where the bombs have temporarily stopped falling but nothing has actually been resolved, where envoys shuttle between capitals under the weight of catastrophe that neither side quite has the nerve to either prevent or complete. That is precisely where the United States finds itself today, fifty-six days into a ceasefire that is not really a ceasefire, negotiating a peace that neither party appears structurally capable of making.
A year of fragile truce: both sides learned exactly the wrong lessons from May 2025 war
A year ago this week, missiles and drones lit up the night skies over Punjab and Kashmir, and for four days the world held its breath. Two nuclear-armed neighbours, locked in the oldest and most dangerous rivalry on the planet, traded blows in a conflict that was neither quite war nor quite peace. India called its operation Sindoor; Pakistan answered with Bunyanum Marsoos. More than 70 people died. Then, on 10 May 2025, a ceasefire was announced – brokered, with characteristic self-congratulation, by Donald Trump. The guns fell silent. The underlying grievances did not.
An Unwinnable War
President Donald Trump’s announcement on Tuesday evening that the United States would suspend “Project Freedom” — the naval escort operation launched only days earlier to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — came wrapped in the usual language of strength. “Great progress” had been made, he said. Toward a deal, Pakistan had asked, “tremendous military success.” The blockade of Iranian ports would remain. And the decision directly contradicted the message his own senior officials had spent the day delivering: that the ceasefire held, that Iranian actions remained below the threshold for renewed fighting, and that the operation was both limited and necessary to free 20,000 stranded sailors and restore the flow of one-fifth of the world’s oil. This is not the decisive leadership the administration projected when it joined Israel in Operation Epic Fury in late February. A superpower that helped kill a supreme leader and promised generational destruction of Iran’s capabilities has now blinked after one day of real pushback in the Strait. It is the acknowledgment, however reluctant, that military pressure has run into the hard limits of geography, economics, and politics. The Strait of Hormuz still carries one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. Iran’s threat to mine it, patrol it with fast boats, and harass shipping has turned that waterway into the single most effective lever Tehran possesses. The United States, for all its air power and naval presence, has been unable to break that grip without risking the very global economic disruption it set out to prevent.