Geopolitics – Brown Pundits

The Forty-Day War: Pakistan Saved the World?

X.T.M · April 5, 2026 · 100 comments

[A note before we begin: We held back out of respect for Iran Zamin and the weight of what was unfolding. Pakistan has now acted where others would not, and the moment deserves acknowledgement.

This should have been India’s role. No other power sits closer to both Tehran and Washington. No other civilisational bridge existed with the credibility to hold both sides. That fatal trip, PM Modi’s visit to Tel Aviv, poisoned those waters permanently. It did not merely signal a foreign policy choice. It signalled comfort with regime change in a neighbouring civilisation. The opportunity cost is historic and will not be recovered.

What Pakistan has achieved is without precedent in its modern history. The Muslim Prussian Republic, forged in argument, held together by will, perpetually doubted, walked into the gap the subcontinent’s greater power vacated and stopped a war. The world owes a debt to Quaid-e-Azam and Allama Iqbal’s creation that it will not rush to acknowledge. That is how it goes. But we are noting it here, now, while the moment is live.]

History named the last one. It was called the Twelve-Day War. Clean. Surgical. A rehearsal. This one will be called the Forty-Day War. It began on 28 February 2026 with a decapitation strike that shattered Iran’s command structure in a single night and a brutal attack on a girl’s school. It paused on 8 April, when a Pakistani Prime Minister’s tweet achieved what five weeks of bombardment, ultimatums, and a pope’s intervention could not.

Pakistan forced the pause the world could not secure.

This is not sentiment. It is structural. Islamabad was the only room both sides could enter. Pakistan maintained working diplomatic channels with Tehran throughout the war. It shared enough institutional credibility with Gulf capitals to be trusted as a mediator. It was sufficiently operationally relevant to Washington; Field Marshal Munir’s name appeared, unremarkably, in Trump’s own ceasefire announcement, to be taken seriously rather than patronised. No other state sat at that intersection. Egypt tried. Turkey tried. Neither had all three legs of the stool.

Over forty days, escalation outran control. Oil surged past $110 a barrel and briefly touched $117. Insurance markets seized. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz reduced to a trickle. American signalling moved from coercive to apocalyptic, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” Iranian signalling hardened even as its leadership structure absorbed shock. Each side retained the capacity to raise costs further. Neither had a clean exit.

Pakistan supplied one.

The mechanics of the pause reveal everything. Tehran accepted a two-week window in which maritime traffic would resume under its coordination. Read that precisely. Coordination, not surrender. The Strait remains, in Iranian framing, an instrument of state power. That is not the language of defeat; though states rarely speak the language of defeat in real time, regardless of battlefield reality. What matters is what the text actually says. Iran controls the reopening. Iran does not yield it.

Washington will declare victory. The machinery is already running. Continue reading The Forty-Day War: Pakistan Saved the World?

Dhurandhar 2: When the Villain Disappears, So Does the Film

X.T.M · March 29, 2026 · 7 comments

We wrote in December that Dhurandhar perfected Bollywood’s new formula: the fetishisation of Pakistan as the subcontinent’s most glamorous disaster. Dangerous, broken, desirable, and always in reach. Three months later, the world has changed more than the franchise has. Iran has seized the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan is psychologically vacating South Asia. And Dhurandhar 2 arrives as a cinematic relic of a paradigm already dissolving.

It is not good.

The first film worked because the villain was the gravitational centre. Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait, Baloch, charismatic, smouldering, made Ranveer Singh’s Hamza credible by giving him something worth the deception. A spy story lives or dies by its antagonist. Remove the antagonist, and you don’t get a hero. You get a man punching air for four hours. That is Dhurandhar 2. Angrier, louder, emptier; and at 3 hours 55 minutes, a film that confuses scale with depth.

The structural collapse is ideological as much as narrative. Dhurandhar 1 had grey. Hamza was a man genuinely lost between two worlds; the film understood that proximity to Pakistan produces desire, not only contempt. That complexity, that slippage between intimacy and danger, was what made it aesthetically serious. Dhurandhar 2 closes that gap entirely. The Pakistani Muslim is now simply a target, and the film is at pains to multiply them faster than they can be eliminated. This is the Hydra error; the same mistake Mossad has made in Gaza. Cut off the head and ten more appear, until the only logical conclusion the audience is being nudged toward is collective punishment. You cannot make a film that glorifies this logic and then claim it is merely entertainment.

The Hindutva-Zionism convergence is now visible at the level of cinematic grammar. Both traditions have arrived at the same endpoint: the innocents cannot be separated from the combatants, therefore the innocents must go too. It is a short distance from that premise to a football scene with a severed head, which Dhurandhar 2 includes without irony. This is not complexity. This is an audience being educated to hate, and that is far more dangerous than any amount of bad plotting.

Bollywood has always used Pakistan as its erotic shadow; familiar enough to feel intimate, foreign enough to feel forbidden. That formula depended on the Pakistani figure retaining some glamour, some interiority, some capacity to make the Indian hero sweat. Dhurandhar 2 strips all of that away. What remains is a shooting gallery. The irony is that by dehumanising its villains, the film also destroys its hero. Hamza becomes less interesting the more Pakistan becomes merely a backdrop for his competence.

The music, which in the first film gave us a Persian Gulf aesthetic that became genuinely anthemic, is a significant step down. The background score intrudes rather than elevates. And Ranveer Singh, who is a serious actor, is given a character arc built almost entirely around rage; which is a waste of an instrument that can do much more.

There is a deeper geopolitical irony the filmmakers did not intend. Dhurandhar 2 is a film about Indian dominance of the AfPak axis at precisely the moment that axis is reorienting toward Iran. Pakistan is stepping into its role as a Muslim power, mediating with Tehran, psychologically decoupling from the subcontinent. The Baloch and Pashtuns are the eastern Iranians; Punjab’s future is as a lowland frontier of a broader Persianate world, not as the last redoubt of a subcontinent fixation. Dhurandhar 2 is the cinematic expression of an India that has not yet noticed.

What Dhurandhar 1 understood, and Dhurandhar 2 has forgotten, is that the most dangerous person in any room is the one you cannot stop watching. Rehman Dakait was that person. His absence is not a plot problem. It is the film’s entire problem.

The sequels that matter are the ones that deepen what came before. Dhurandhar 2 only amplifies it, and amplification without depth is just noise.

⚠️ SPOILERS BELOW – Read only if you have seen the film Continue reading Dhurandhar 2: When the Villain Disappears, So Does the Film

Were You Colonised or Not? The UN Slavery Vote That Split the World

X.T.M · March 29, 2026 · 12 comments

West vs the Rest

Today’s UNGA vote, 123 for, 3 against, 52 abstentions, is a clean ledger of where the world stands. The resolution declares the transatlantic slave trade “the gravest crime against humanity.” Three countries voted against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. The UK and all 27 EU members abstained.

The 52 abstentions are the more revealing column. The EU’s stated objection was legal: calling this the “gravest” crime implies a hierarchy among atrocity crimes, which has no basis in international law. That’s a defensible position. It’s also a convenient one for countries that ran the trade.

The US was blunter; its representative objected to the “cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point to reallocate modern resources.” At least that’s honest about what reparations actually means in practice.

The UN is essentially asking whether countries whether they were colonised or not?

The 123 is the story. This isn’t Russia and China championing the Global South; it’s Africa, the Caribbean, and most of Asia doing it themselves. This marks the first floor vote at the UN specifically on transatlantic slavery as a crime, and a call for reparations.

The resolution is non-binding, so nothing material changes today. But the vote is a data point: on a question of historical accountability, the West is either against or abstaining, and everyone else is not.

That’s the fault line. West vs the Rest; and the Rest has the numbers. Gaza, Russia, Iran: all proxies for the same fracture. Russia ran an empire, but its Soviet collapse was so total it no longer reads as imperial. China likewise. So both get to stand on the other side of the line.

And underneath the EU’s legal objection, the “hierarchy of crimes” argument, is something unspoken: the Holocaust has long held the position of singular atrocity in Western moral architecture. This resolution is, implicitly, a challenge to that. The Rest is saying: your crime towards us was graver, or at least as grave. Europe couldn’t vote yes without conceding the point.

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

X.T.M · March 29, 2026 · 51 comments

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

The Hormuz Ultimatum: Wealth Doesn’t Win Wars

X.T.M · March 20, 2026 · 33 comments

Wealth Doesn’t Win Wars

A contact in New York mentioned, almost in passing, that the shelves at their local (premium) supermarket were beginning to empty. Not bare, but noticeably thin, the way they go before a blizzard. People panic-buying quietly, without announcement. At LaGuardia, long queues that the local press has barely covered. The official newsflow says nothing. But the supermarket shelves don’t lie.

This is how the consequences of a war 6,000 miles away arrive in the richest city in the world; not with sirens, but with gaps on the grocery shelves and unexplained airport delays that nobody in authority seems in a hurry to explain. The information lag is itself a story. There is roughly a week between what is happening and what is being reported. Don’t believe one’s lying eyes.

BB’s thesis is that military power is ultimately a function of GDP. It is a reasonable working assumption. It is also, we would argue, dangerously wrong in the specific conditions we are now watching play out in real time.

The United States and Israel are the two wealthiest, most technologically sophisticated military powers to have ever jointly prosecuted a war. Their adversary is a sanctioned, inflation-wracked theocracy that has been massacring its own citizens and losing proxy after proxy for two years. And yet here we are, Day 23 of Operation Epic Fury, with Trump issuing a 48-hour ultimatum to obliterate Iran’s power plants unless the Strait of Hormuz is fully reopened, Iran responding that any such strike will be met with attacks on U.S. and Israeli energy and infrastructure assets, Brent crude at $112 a barrel and Goldman Sachs projecting elevated prices through 2027, and the administration having exhausted every economic lever it possesses. The richer side is losing the economic war. The question is whether they know it yet.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Sociology of Surrender

The pattern is not new. We have watched it twice in living memory, in the same geography, and both times the lesson was the same. Continue reading The Hormuz Ultimatum: Wealth Doesn’t Win Wars

The Strait That Broke the World

X.T.M · March 15, 2026 · 22 comments

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel struck Iran.

They hit fuel depots, missile sites, command infrastructure. Within seventy-two hours, the Strait of Hormuz, twenty-one nautical miles at its narrowest, carrying twenty percent of the world’s oil, closed. It has not reopened. Everything that follows from that sentence is not speculation. It is arithmetic.

The Price

Oil was at sixty-five dollars a barrel when the bombs fell. Within days it touched one hundred and twenty. Analysts at Kpler said publicly that if Hormuz stayed shut through March, one hundred and fifty was not a ceiling. Barclays agreed. The IEA called the disruption the largest in the history of the global oil market, twice the scale of the 1956 Suez Crisis. People heard those numbers and thought: petrol prices. School run. Heating bills. They were thinking too small.

The Cascade

Oil is not just fuel. It is the circulatory fluid of the entire industrial world. When it doubles overnight, everything that moves, everything that is made, everything that is insured, financed, or shipped reprices simultaneously.

Marine insurance becomes unwritable. Trade credit freezes. Every CFO at every company in every sector looks at their cost assumptions, built at seventy dollar oil, and cancels the next quarter’s capex in the same morning meeting. That coordinated freeze is not a symptom of recession. It is the recession, arriving before a single GDP figure confirms it.

The banks come next. Energy loans, airline debt, shipping company bonds, all underwritten at sixty to eighty dollar oil. At one hundred and twenty sustained, covenant breaches begin quietly. Not crashes. Tightening. The marginal credit that keeps service businesses alive stops flowing.

Then the Gulf sovereign wealth funds. ADIA. PIF. QIA. Mubadala. Two to three trillion dollars in global assets, equities, real estate, private equity, deployed as patient capital into Western markets for fifteen years. They are nominally richer at one hundred and twenty dollar oil. But their export infrastructure is disrupted, their domestic spending obligations spike immediately, and their liquidity needs arrive precisely when their asset values are falling.

The moment even one major fund moves from net buyer to net seller, it removes the price support it has been providing silently for years. Other funds follow. The risk premium they have been suppressing across global asset classes reasserts overnight.

This is not the 2008 financial crisis. That was a fire in the financial system’s wiring. This is the fuel supply to the engine failing. Different category. Larger consequences.

The Trap Continue reading The Strait That Broke the World

They Blinded the Attackers in 72 Hours. No One Is Saying It.

X.T.M · March 9, 2026 · 55 comments

hat tip: Richard Medhurst — full satellite analysis here

The Thing In Front of Your Nose

The uncomfortable truth about this war is not what Iran destroyed. It is what the destruction revealed was always already hollow.

Alaric - World History Encyclopedia — Alaric the Conqueror of Rome

Empires do not collapse when they are defeated. They collapse when the gap between their self-image and their actual condition becomes impossible to maintain. The Roman legions did not disappear because the Visigoths were militarily superior in any comprehensive sense. They disappeared because the infrastructure of belief that sustained them; the idea that Rome was invincible, that the civilisational order it represented was permanent, had been quietly rotting for generations before the walls were breached. What Alaric provided in 410 AD was not a military verdict. It was a legibility event. He made visible what had already become true.

I’ll note here: I fully support removing Khamenei, Nasrallah, Hamas; the architects of civilian suffering. Not at the cost of the innocent. That distinction matters and I won’t pretend otherwise.

Medhurst has spent the last several days making the invisible visible; overlaying satellite photography on base after base across the Gulf, turning classified embarrassment into public record.

What Actually Happened

Iran strikes AN/FPS-132 early warning radar in Qatar | TURDEF — The billion dollar radar, one of 6 in the world

Continue reading They Blinded the Attackers in 72 Hours. No One Is Saying It.

India Won the World Cup. Now the Hard Part.

X.T.M · March 9, 2026 · 15 comments

Another version of this article has now appeared at BRAHM.

India won the T20WC yesterday becoming the first team to

Win it thrice | Win it at home | Win it back to back |

Won 3 ICC trophies back to back to back. I always knew this day was coming.

The Golden Age is not arriving. It has arrived.

Badshah’s structural point is right as far as it goes. A country of 1.4 billion people that loves one sport above all others was never going to stay second once the money came. The BCCI’s TV deal money, the IPL pipeline, the depth of the talent pool no. Bangladesh, Pakistan, the West Indies may genuinely no longer able to compete at the same level. Nothing can deny India, that is Bharat, waking up to her Destiny as a Global hegemon (InshAllah this prefaces greatness in others spheres of National Excellence).

But I want to push back gently on the linear framing. More wealth, more wealth, more wealth; therefore dominance. The model minority version of sport & geopolitics. It’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete.

War is what is in your belly

My Urdu teacher told me something interesting: war isn’t just about your technology. It’s what you have inside your heart. Sports exists, in part, as simulated war. And what makes sport compelling, what makes it actually compelling, not just statistically interesting, is that once the conflict starts, you genuinely don’t know what will happen.

Who is David? Who is Goliath?

Continue reading India Won the World Cup. Now the Hard Part.

India’s Guest. America’s Kill.

X.T.M · March 5, 2026 · 52 comments

On the 4th of March 2026, a US submarine torpedoed the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean, 40 nautical miles off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka. At least 87 sailors were killed. Over a hundred remain missing. Pete Hegseth called it “quiet death” from the Pentagon podium; bragging it was the first torpedo kill since World War II.

MILAN at Vyzag

The IRIS Dena had just left Visakhapatnam. It had been India’s guest. Formally invited to MILAN 2026, the International Fleet Review hosted by the Indian Navy, attended by 86 ships from 74 nations. The Eastern Naval Command had tweeted a welcome photograph two weeks earlier: “reflecting long-standing cultural links between the two nations.”

Two weeks later, that ship is on the ocean floor. And from New Delhi, silence. Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi said it plainly: Frigate Dena, a guest of India’s Navy, was struck in international waters without warning. That line will not be forgotten in Tehran. It should not be forgotten in New Delhi either; because it is the most precise summary available of what Modi’s diplomatic positioning has actually cost India.

When guests are murdered

Say what you want about Pakistan’s post-colonial elite; and there is plenty to say. But since Pahalgam they have been reading the room better than New Delhi has. Not because Islamabad became richer or more competent. Neither of those things happened. What happened is simpler: when the bombs fell on Iran, Pakistan said nothing loud, and that silence was itself a signal. Across the Muslim world that signal was heard. Loyalty travels farther than power. Whether that loyalty is strategic or genuine is a separate question. The effect is the same.

Pakistan Post-Pahalgam Continue reading India’s Guest. America’s Kill.

On Whose Side Is God?

X.T.M · March 3, 2026 · 65 comments

The Wrong Question About Barbarians

Omar’s excellent piece raises the question of barbarians. I want to raise a harder one: whose side is God on? I ask this not as theology but as military analysis. Because the planners of Operation Epic Fury appear to have assumed the answer is obvious; and that assumption may be the central miscalculation of this war.

Isfahan: A Rich History and Unique Tourist Attractions - Persis Collection — *Barbanians*

The Pahlavist Map of Iran

The Pahlavists who helped guide this operation are, broadly speaking, secular liberals. Their Iran is Tehran’s northern suburbs, Los Angeles, Paris. Their model of the enemy is a man like themselves: attached to life, afraid of death, protecting assets and family and position.

Rational actors in the economic sense. You remove the leader, you remove the fear, the system collapses. This is a coherent theory of change. It just happens to be wrong about the specific civilization it was applied to.

Iran faces a pivotal moment. Can a tired regime contain a fresh wave of ... — Pretender to the Peacock Throne

The Gift of Martyrdom

Shia Islam is not organised around the fear of death. It is organised around the embrace of honourable death as the supreme spiritual achievement. Karbala is not a trauma to be processed; it is a template to be repeated. Husayn did not miscalculate when he rode into the plain knowing Yazid’s army outnumbered him. He made a theological choice.

The willingness to die without surrendering is not a bug in the Shia operating system. It is the entire point of the operating system. When you assassinate a Supreme Leader who has spent forty years framing his rule in exactly these terms, you do not break the system. You hand it the most powerful gift available: a martyr. Khamenei is now Husayn. The Americans gave him that.

Ashura Mourning Procession in Karbala, Iraq by students. - Islamic ... — *Yá Husayn*

On Sky Gods and the Human Spirit Continue reading On Whose Side Is God?