There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from watching a superpower bluster. From where we stand in Pakistan, a nation that has lived under the long, unpredictable shadow of American foreign policy for decades, the current confrontation between Washington and Tehran carries a familiar and deeply instructive weight. We have seen this script before. We know how it is written, and more importantly, we are beginning to understand how it ends. Donald Trump’s renewed aggression towards Iran, and the spectre of crisis looming over the Strait of Hormuz, is not simply a bilateral conflict between two adversarial states. It is a stress test of American imperial power itself and the results, for those willing to read them honestly, reveal a machinery that is formidable in its reach but increasingly brittle in its outcomes.
The Strait of Hormuz is among the most consequential waterways on earth. Roughly a fifth of the world’s oil passes through its narrow corridor daily. Iran, which shares the strait’s northern coastline, has long understood that geography is its greatest strategic asset. When Washington tightens sanctions, rattles its carrier groups, or threatens military action, Tehran’s most potent counter is not a missile, it is the credible threat of closure. A blocked Hormuz does not merely inconvenience America. It sends shockwaves through Asian markets, European energy supplies, and Gulf Arab economies simultaneously. Trump’s administration has treated this reality with theatrical dismissiveness. Maximum pressure campaigns, sweeping sanctions, and military posturing have been deployed as though Iran were a minor actor that could simply be squeezed into submission. Iran is not a state that collapses under external pressure without consequence. It is a civilizational nation-state with deep institutional roots, a sophisticated proxy network stretching from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq, and a population that whatever its grievances against its own government, has historically closed ranks under the threat of foreign aggression. America has repeatedly underestimated this.
The Hormuz crisis does not unfold in a unipolar world.
We in Pakistan do not view these events as distant spectators. We are neighbours to this volatility in every meaningful sense. Our western border meets a region directly shaped by the Iran-America rivalry. Our economy is tethered to Gulf oil. Our diaspora workers, millions of them, labour across the Arabian Peninsula in conditions that become precarious every time the temperature rises in the Strait. A spike in oil prices does not register as a news headline in Lahore or Karachi; it registers at the petrol pump, in electricity bills, in the cost of flour. Beyond the economic immediacy, there is a geopolitical literacy that Pakistanis have developed over generations of living adjacent to American power. We remember the 1980s, when Washington armed the Mujahideen against the Soviets and then walked away, leaving us to manage the wreckage. We remember the post 9/11 decade, when we were told we were partners and treated as instruments. We remember drone strikes, unilateral decisions, and the consistent experience of being consulted last and blamed first. This history does not make us reflexively anti-American. It makes us clear-eyed. What our eyes see now is a superpower increasingly unable to convert military dominance into political outcomes.
Imperial power, at its height, does not acknowledge its own limits. That acknowledgement is precisely what defines the beginning of decline, not military defeat, but the growing gap between threat and result. America’s engagement with Iran illustrates this gap with painful clarity. For over four decades, Washington has attempted to isolate, sanction, coerce, and destabilise the Islamic Republic. The result? Iran today has a more advanced nuclear programme than at any previous point in its history. It has deeper regional influence than it did before the Iraq War, a war America fought partly to reshape the Middle East in its own image, only to inadvertently hand Tehran a buffer of allied militias across the Arab world. If anything, pressure has hardened Iranian resolve and accelerated its pivot toward Russia and China, both of whom are delighted to welcome a defiant, resource-rich partner into their orbit. Trump’s approach operates on the assumption that there is a breaking point, that Iran will eventually capitulate rather than endure. This assumption, though, misreads the nature of the Iranian state and Persian political culture. Nations that define themselves through resistance do not respond to pressure by surrendering. They respond by innovating around it.
There is a larger frame that must not be missed. The Hormuz crisis does not unfold in a unipolar world. It unfolds in a world where China is Iran’s largest oil customer and has signed a 25-year strategic cooperation agreement with Tehran. It unfolds in a world where Gulf Arab states, nominally aligned with Washington are hedging their bets with alarming speed, normalising relations with China, reopening ties with Iran, and diversifying their security arrangements. Saudi Arabia and Iran restored diplomatic relations in 2023, brokered not by Washington but by Beijing. That single fact speaks volumes. The neighbourhood America has long managed through force and patronage is rearranging itself without asking for American permission. From a Pakistani vantage point, this multipolarity is not threatening, it is the condition under which countries like ours can finally exhale. A world with more than one great power centre offers smaller states more room to manoeuvre and more leverage. We are not naive about what Chinese or Russian power means. The monopoly of a single hegemon, we have learned from experience, comes with its own heavy costs. Trump’s Iran policy, aggressive, transactional, and ultimately strategically hollow reveals what serious analysts have noted for years; that American power remains unmatched in its capacity for destruction, but is deeply limited in its capacity for construction. It can bomb. It can sanction. It can isolate. What it struggles to do, in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, across the arc of its post-Cold War interventions, is build the political outcomes it seeks. The Strait of Hormuz crisis is not a crisis of Iranian defiance alone. It is a mirror held up to American strategy, and the reflection is uncomfortable. A power that cannot close the gap between its threats and its results, that watches its preferred regional order quietly dissolve while rivals broker peace agreements in its backyard, is a power encountering the outer walls of its own reach. From Lahore, we have watched great powers move through the subcontinent’s history. What centuries teach is that no empire announces its own limits. Those limits announce themselves. Right now, in the narrow blue waters of the Strait of Hormuz, the announcement is growing louder.
The writer is a Lahore-based observer of South Asian and international affairs. She holds an MSc degree in Economics & Finance from LSE.