The year 2025 has dramatically reshaped global and regional geopolitics through a series of crises: the India–Pakistan war, the Israel–Iran confrontation, and renewed instability on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. These events have exposed deep fractures in the international order, most notably the sharp deterioration in India–United States relations due to trade disputes, India’s ties with Russia, and differing assessments of the recent Indo-Pak conflict. This rift has created limited but significant diplomatic openings for Pakistan to re-engage Washington, while deepening partnerships with China and key regional players such as Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, the Israel–Iran war and persistent cross-border challenges with Afghanistan have complicated Pakistan’s security environment, forcing Islamabad to navigate intersecting great-power rivalries and regional fault lines with greater agility.
In this fluid landscape, emerging geopolitical alliances present both risks of entanglement and opportunities for strategic repositioning. The Catalyst Conversation, ‘Emerging Geopolitical Alliances and Implications for Pakistan,’ brought together practitioners to examine these shifting alignments, assess their impact on Pakistan’s security and foreign policy, and identify balanced, forward-looking strategies to safeguard national interests in an era of uncertainty and renewed possibilities.
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Zahra Niazi
‘States tend to overestimate themselves or the benefits and swiftness of war, and to underestimate their opponents’ capabilities, intentions, or the costs and duration of war.’ If anything, the 2026 war initiated by the United States and Israel against Iran shall be remembered in the annals of warfare among the most visible manifestations of this dynamic.
The war, immediately preceded by the January mass protests in Iran, did not represent a sudden rupture but rather the continuation of a 47-year-long confrontation and a more intense phase of the June 2025 war.
The US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, defined the war’s objectives as being laser-focused: to destroy Iran’s missile capabilities and its security infrastructure, while ensuring that it could never develop nuclear weapons. Beyond these stated objectives, among the priorities on the continuum also lay the objective of regime change, with both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu explicitly calling on the Iranian population to take over the government at the outset of the war.
