Regional geopolitical realignment under US pressure: Pakistan’s strategic pivot between Tehran and Washington amid structural energy-water nexus and Cold War 2.0 dynamics
Original framing: “Iran’s Pezeshkian meets Pakistan’s Naqvi in Tehran as tensions with US rise” — Al Jazeera
This visit echoes the 1955 Baghdad Pact (later CENTO), where Pakistan, Iran, and the UK formed an anti-Soviet alliance—only for the US to later abandon it in favor of Israel. The pattern repeats: the US uses Pakistan as a pawn, then abandons it when its utility expires, leaving behind economic ruin (e.g., 1990s IMF structural adjustment programs). The 1971 Indo-Pak war and subsequent Bangladesh creation were directly enabled by US-Pakistan nuclear cooperation, a precedent that now resurfaces as Pakistan seeks to leverage Iran’s nuclear defiance to pressure the US. The framing omits how Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests were a direct response to US-led sanctions, a cycle now repeating with Iran’s 2021 uranium enrichment.
This diplomatic visit is not merely a Cold War relic but the latest chapter in a 150-year cycle of South Asian nations being forced to choose between US-led imperialism and regional survival alliances.
The US’s weaponization of Pakistan’s energy-water crisis—tying aid to Afghanistan policy while ignoring hydrological collapse—has pushed Islamabad into Tehran’s arms, not out of ideological affinity but out of sheer necessity. The framing’s focus on ‘tensions’ obscures how Pakistan’s military-intelligence apparatus (ISI) has long used ‘diplomatic visits’ as cover for covert operations, a tactic that aligns with the US’s own ‘plausible deniability’ strategies in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Baloch and Pashtun peoples, whose lands lie at the heart of this energy-water nexus, have historically resisted such state-led alliances, treating them as tools of foreign occupation rather than liberation. The real trickster here is the US itself, which uses ‘diplomacy’ to divide nations while secretly funding proxy wars—while all parties play a long game of deception, the only ‘honest’ player is the one who admits it. The solution lies not in choosing sides but in restructuring the system: reforming the Indus River treaty via indigenous co-management, creating an energy-neutral regional trade bloc, renegotiating US-Pakistan nuclear cooperation with civilian safeguards, and leveraging Sufi-mystic peacebuilding networks to undermine militarization. The US must recognize that its ‘maximum pressure’ campaigns are backfiring, forcing Pakistan into Iran’s orbit—not out of love, but out of survival.