It is time to acknowledge reality. Decades of “maximum pressure” and military strikes have failed to eliminate Iranian resilience or erase its technological advances. More fundamentally, they have demonstrated that zero-sum approaches to international politics inevitably produce negative-sum outcomes. Security and sustainable development are fundamentally indivisible, collective realities. Insecurity and anti-security dynamics cannot be neatly contained; they inevitably cross borders, as recent regional developments have so starkly demonstrated. No country can build a secure, prosperous oasis on the shifting sands of a neighbor’s engineered instability. To escape this perpetual cycle of crisis, we need a paradigm shift—one that replaces the exhausted grammar of coercion with an indigenous architecture of collective security.
Iran’s former Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, asserted on Sunday that the recent negotiations in Islamabad failed to reach a breakthrough because the United States attempted to dictate its own conditions rather than engage in a balanced dialogue.