Brace for impact 

President Donald Trump’s decision to reinstate the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz may have dealt the final blow to the Islamabad Accords. The agreement, assembled through painstaking diplomacy by Pakistan, Qatar and other regional partners, had offered the clearest available path away from a wider regional war. That opening now appears to be closing.

Trump had initially permitted negotiations to continue despite previously declaring the peace process over. That ambiguity allowed mediators to keep the diplomatic channel alive. The renewed blockade, however, signals that Washington has returned to coercion at precisely the moment when restraint was most needed.

Pakistan has done what it could. It brought parties together, kept communication open and invested political capital in preventing escalation. It should continue those efforts. But mediation cannot succeed when the principal actors treat diplomacy as a tactical pause rather than a strategic objective.

The deeper problem is the absence of coherence in Washington. Trump’s confidence in Vice President JD Vance appears inconsistent, while pro-Israel figures within the administration, including Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, have repeatedly favoured a harder line. The result is a foreign policy in which competing factions pull in different directions and negotiated commitments remain vulnerable to internal sabotage.

Iran has hardly been a model of restraint. Tehran could have responded with greater patience and maturity. Yet its defiance is not difficult to understand. The country has just buried its leader amid a mass public mobilisation that demonstrated support for both the regime and the late Ayatollah. Under those circumstances, threats of regime change were always likely to strengthen hardliners rather than weaken them.

The original strategy has failed. The Iranian state has not collapsed. It appears more entrenched, more defensive and more willing to absorb economic pain. Continued military pressure is therefore unlikely to produce the political transformation its advocates promised.

Israel remains the clearest beneficiary of prolonged conflict. Even as relations between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu weaken, Israel continues to secure the strategic outcomes it seeks. The United States, by contrast, faces higher energy prices, disrupted trade routes, military exposure and another open-ended regional commitment.

Pakistan must persist with diplomacy, but it must also recognise the limits of mediation without credible partners. With Hormuz again under blockade and rational compromise increasingly absent, Islamabad’s economic managers can no longer plan around a quick settlement.

They must brace for impact.