Is Hormuz, Israel’s Suez but Pakistan’s Second Act?

Start with the uncomfortable question nobody in Washington wants to ask directly: how is this not a defeat for Israel?

Trump reposted Shehbaz Sharif’s offer to host US-Iran peace talks, and Bannon’s WarRoom picked it up within the hour. That’s the tell. When Pakistan’s diplomatic positioning lands on the most watched MAGA platform in America, amplified by the President himself, the “Second Act” isn’t a thesis anymore. It’s the news.

In 1956, Britain and France attacked Egypt alongside Israel. Militarily, they won. The Egyptian army collapsed. The canal was taken. Then Washington intervened, sterling cracked, and within weeks they withdrew — humiliated, permanently diminished, never again operating as independent great powers in the Middle East. They won the battle and lost the century. (As an aside, PM Modi made his allegiances clear from the very start of this conflict; the bombing was reportedly postponed for his visit to Washington. India, like Britain and France in 1956, has picked its side. The question is whether it has picked the winning one.)

That is the template. Now run the present war through it. Israel spent two years engineering this confrontation. Then, at the exact moment diplomacy began to work, the bombs fell. Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, a cautious, establishment figure from a cautious, establishment country, said it plainly: nuclear negotiations were making progress, Iran had agreed to no enriched uranium stockpiling and full IAEA verification, peace was within reach. Talks were due to resume on 2 March.

The strikes began on 28 February.

That is not coincidence. That is a choice: war over settlement. Now look at the structure that follows. Iran has not won militarily. Its air force is degraded. Its infrastructure is hit. Its Supreme Leader is dead, replaced by his son; a harder man, not a softer one, which is itself a signal about how decapitation strategies tend to end. But Iran has achieved the one thing that matters strategically: leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. Analysts are already describing any exit that leaves Iran as the effective gatekeeper of the Strait as a colossal strategic failure for the United States. That is the centre of gravity. The US can bomb, seize assets, escalate. But it cannot reopen the Strait on its own terms if Iran is willing to absorb damage and impose cost. Geography is doing the work. Patience is doing the rest.

Now watch Washington move.

A $200 billion supplemental request is already in play. Oil prices are moving. Trump has begun the political separation, “I might have forced their hand”, while his own Secretary of State had already said Israel led the way. That asymmetry matters. Trump wants a deal he can sell to American families at the petrol pump. Israel wants Iran broken. Those are incompatible war aims, and they are visibly diverging: Trump rebuked Israel over the South Pars gasfield strike; Israel assassinated Ali Larijani, seen by some as a key potential negotiating figure, just as back-channel possibilities were opening.

The same negotiations torpedoed in February are now the only viable exit. Trump says Iran wants a deal. Iran denies it. Neither side is behaving like a defeated power. This is not surrender. This is endurance; and endurance, historically, beats air supremacy.

That is Suez. It does not require retreat under fire. It requires something subtler: the moment when the patron begins calculating its costs independently from the client, and reaches a different conclusion. When that happens, the war ends regardless of battlefield position. Britain and France didn’t lose in 1956 because they ran out of soldiers. They lost because Washington ran out of patience.

The American public will eventually ask whose war this was. That question is already forming. And it is precisely here, in the gap opened by Washington’s growing ambivalence and Israel’s strategic overreach, that the second story begins.

While the US and Israel have been consumed by a war that is proving harder to exit than to enter, one country has quietly stepped into the resulting vacuum. Not China. Not Russia. Not Turkey, though Ankara is watching closely.

Pakistan.

The country written off as a chronic failure, IMF supplicant, political circus, army behind the curtain, is sitting at the intersection of every active fault line simultaneously: Iran, Afghanistan, the Gulf, China, the United States. Geography always gave Pakistan this position. What has changed is the environment around it, which has been upended so completely that Islamabad’s chronic flexibility looks, for once, like an asset.

Pakistan is currently fighting its own war.

Operation Ghazab Lil Haq has struck Kabul, Kandahar, Khost, Jalalabad, and Paktika. Dozens of posts taken. Hundreds of Taliban fighters reportedly killed. Sustained air and ground operations across a sovereign border; and almost no international reaction. No UN emergency sessions. No sustained outrage cycle. No sanctions architecture. The reason is straightforward: nobody wants to defend the Taliban. That absence of sympathy functions as operational permission. Pakistan is, in effect, conducting unrestricted combined-arms warfare with minimal external constraint, building ISR capacity, strike tempo, and cross-border coordination in real conditions, against a real adversary.

This is not the Pakistan of Kargil.

But the military dimension is only part of it. Diplomatically, Pakistan has turned Trump 2.0 into a strategic opening; expanding cooperation into minerals, energy, and trade, securing the lowest tariffs in South Asia, signing a defence pact with Saudi Arabia. It is quietly exploring a Turkey-Saudi-Pakistan alignment. It maintains, uniquely, and valuably, working relationships with both Washington and Beijing simultaneously.

And now this: Pakistan has publicly offered to host negotiations to end the Iran war. The state associated with nuclear proliferation in 2004 is offering itself as the venue for ending the most consequential war in the world in 2026. That is not reputational drift. That is repositioning; made possible, directly, by the vacuum that Israel’s war has created. This is Pakistan’s second act, and it is happening because Israel’s war has reshuffled the board.

In the 1980s, Pakistan was a conduit: American arms in, Afghan fighters out, rents collected, bomb built. The bill came due later; a destabilised region, a heroin epidemic, a Kalashnikov culture, and decades of blowback. Pakistan has done this before: accumulated leverage during crisis and squandered it in peacetime. That remains the central question. Can it convert this moment into durable structural position, or will it, as so many times before, mistake tactical relevance for strategic depth?

Because right now, in the middle of a war that may yet become Israel’s Suez, Pakistan is back where it always believed it belonged; at the table where outcomes are decided. Three years ago, that would have been implausible. Today, it is simply the situation.