By Mohammad Basir-Ul-Haq Sinha
There is a particular kind of humiliation that does not announce itself with sirens or explosions. It arrives quietly, in the form of an unanswered invitation, a cancelled flight, a statement from a foreign minister that does not even bother to mention your name. This is the humiliation that now finds Donald Trump, a man who built his political identity on the seductive fiction that he alone could bend hostile powers to his will. This week, in the diplomatic twilight of Islamabad, that fiction came undone. Let us be clear about what actually happened, because the fog of presidential bluster threatens to obscure a rather simple sequence of events. The White House had spent days signaling that a high level delegation, including Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, was bound for Pakistan.
The purpose was an audacious backchannel: to meet Iranian emissaries on neutral ground and resume negotiations over a nuclear program that has haunted the region for two decades. Then, in an abrupt midnight post on Truth Social, Trump announced the trip was off. His explanation carried the unmistakable syntax of a man trying to look as though he had chosen to leave a party he was never going to be invited to. “If they want to talk,” he wrote, “all they have to do is call.” It is the diplomacy of the jilted lover, and it fools no one. Because while the Americans were waiting for a phone that never rang, the Iranians were already conducting business.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was in Islamabad, but he was not there for any secret rendezvous. He met his Pakistani counterparts from dusk until dawn, discussing trade, border security, and regional stability. When asked about the possibility of an American meeting, his response was delivered with a precision that must have stung. There was, he said, “no possibility.” His visit was “strictly bilateral.” In other words, the United States was not even an afterthought. It was a ghost at a feast it had not been invited to. By the time Trump cancelled his delegation, Araghchi had already left for Tehran. The Americans would have arrived at an empty room. There is no other word for this but humiliation, though it is a humiliation dressed in the cheap suit of a face saving tweet.
The deeper tragedy, however, is not about presidential ego. It is about the slow, grinding cost of a foreign policy that confuses theatre with strategy. For weeks, the Strait of Hormuz has been a ticking clock. Iran, feeling the full weight of renewed American sanctions, has tightened its grip on the world’s most vital oil chokepoint. The consequences are no longer theoretical. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist not given to hyperbole, warned this week that another seven days of the current blockade will trigger a terminal energy crisis across South Asia and Africa. Three more weeks, and European aviation begins to collapse. Lufthansa is already cutting domestic flights not because of low demand, but because jet fuel is becoming a luxury commodity.
This is the material reality that Trump’s maximum pressure campaign has produced. It is not Iranian suffering that has resulted, at least not exclusively. It is the suffering of Pakistani labourers who cannot afford to fill their motorbikes. It is the suffering of Nigerian families who rely on imported fuel for generators. It is the suffering of Greek and Italian tourists stranded because their airlines cannot secure enough kerosene. Sanctions, it turns out, are not laser guided. They are cluster munitions that scatter their misery across the innocent and the guilty alike. And what of the military calculus? American naval forces in the Gulf are exhausted. There is a concept that strategists call the fatigue ceiling, the point at which even the most advanced warship becomes a liability because the humans inside it have been at general quarters for too long.
There is still talk of an Israeli strike, of a green light from the Resolute Desk, of some last act of martial theatre. However, that feels less like a policy option and more like a reflex, a ghost limb twitching on a body politic that no longer knows how to reach across the table. Because that is the real story here, hidden beneath the cancelled flights and the presidential bluster. The world is moving on. It has found new tables, new mediators, new geometries of power that do not run through Washington. For a century, American diplomats could assume that every important negotiation required their presence. That assumption is now dust. The call that Trump is waiting for is not coming. And the tragedy is that he may be the last person in the room to realize it.
(The writer is a Dhaka-based journalist and executive director of Citizens Power, the civic platform, writes incisively on people and power, political economy and the unfinished legacies of postcolonialism, can be reached at editorial@metro-morning.com)
