Islamabad and the end of easy empire

History, when it chooses to humiliate power, does not bother with elegance — it stages spectacle. Islamabad — a capital long patronized, managed, and dismissed — now hosts the very powers that presumed they could redraw the region with missiles and press briefings. But let us be precise: this is not a meeting of equals. It is the convergence of aggressors and the state they failed to break. Washington and its Israeli ally waged war; Iran resisted — and refused collapse. What unfolds in Islamabad is not diplomacy by design, but necessity by failure: an American search for an exit from a war it could not win, and an Iranian willingness to talk only on terms that secure its position, […]