On Breakup Fantasies and Basic Geopolitical Decency

Following my conversation with Kabir; I mulled on the difference between criticising a state and fantasising about its dismemberment.

What should be the type of Critique?

Criticising a political party, a military institution, or a government’s failures is normal. It is necessary. Democracies depend on it. Even flawed democracies depend on it. Pakistan’s military can be criticised. India’s ruling party can be criticised. Iran’s clerical establishment can be criticised. No state is beyond scrutiny. But imagining the territorial breakup of a country, and doing so with visible satisfaction, is something else entirely.

Sacred States?

States are not debating societies. They are containers of memory, trauma, and blood. They are “almost” sacred spaces. For Pakistanis, 1971 is not an abstract lesson in federalism. It is a civilisational rupture. It was war, humiliation, loss of half the country, and a wound that still shapes the national psyche. For Indians, similar fantasies about Tamil Nadu, Punjab, or Kashmir breaking away would be equally triggering. Every nation has red lines embedded in its historical trauma.

Ex-USSR

When commentators casually speculate about Balochistan seceding, or Russian-speaking enclaves peeling off Moldova, or Armenia fragmenting further, they often treat territorial integrity as a chessboard variable. But for the people inside those borders, it is existential.

Geopolitically, fragmentation does not happen because Twitter wills it. States break when institutional weakness meets sustained external force. Ukraine is under invasion, not dissolving by civic boredom. Moldova and Georgia’s frozen conflicts are Russian projects. Armenia’s contraction followed military defeat. Sudan fractured along colonial fault lines and decades of civil war. Indonesia nearly broke in 1998, but the Javanese core held and re-consolidated.

Why States Collapse

The pattern is not that multiethnic states collapse. The pattern is weak institutions combined with sustained external pressure. States endure when they retain a functioning centre, fiscal capacity, coercive force, and often an external guarantor. They fracture when those fail simultaneously.

The Arab Spring Disaster

This is why the memory of the Arab Spring should sober any romanticism about state collapse. What began as domestic protest in several Arab states did not reliably yield stable reform. In multiple cases, the weakening of central authority created vacuums that were filled not by orderly democracy but by militia rule, proxy war, or prolonged instability. External intervention compounded internal fracture.

Why the Iranian Revolution Worked

The lesson is not that reform is undesirable. The lesson is that endogenous reform is structurally safer than exogenous rupture. Change imposed from outside often multiplies instability before it produces renewal; if renewal comes at all. That is why one can prefer gradual internal reform in Iran, for example, over externally engineered collapse. Sovereignty, however flawed, is still a stabilising framework.

A New State may not be a Fake State

There is also a double standard that creeps into this discourse. Some believe that because a country is “postcolonial” or “fragile,” its borders are negotiable in ways others’ are not. Yet no serious commentator cheerfully speculates about the dissolution of France, Germany, or Japan. Territorial integrity is treated as sacred in some cases and optional in others. That asymmetry breeds resentment.

Saffroniate need to let Pak breathe a little

A mature geopolitical culture distinguishes between critique and erasure. It recognises that sovereignty rests on political reality, not emotional approval. Pakistan does not cease to be legitimate because someone disputes its ideological foundations. India does not dissolve because someone critiques its democracy. Armenia is not fictional because it lost territory. Iran is not a laboratory for regime engineering.

Pakistan has a mature system of power distribution

States endure because they possess institutions, coercive capacity, fiscal systems, and external relationships. Pakistan has all four. Its party system is factionalised and regionalised — PPP in Sindh, PML in Punjab, PTI mobilising youth across provinces — but that diffusion is stabilising, not fatal. 1971 was an exceptional convergence of civil war, Indian intervention, and Cold War alignment. That configuration does not casually repeat.

Borders are real but can be unimagined

In a volatile global order — with Germany rearming, Japan recalibrating, Russia testing boundaries, and China underwriting corridors — the last thing serious analysis should indulge in is romanticism about dismemberment. Critique is legitimate. Breakup fantasies are unserious. Geopolitics requires sobriety. And sobriety begins with recognising that borders, however imperfect, are not toys.