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WHILE the US may want regime change in Iran, and Israel the collapse of the established order, internal strife and chaos, it appears that Tehran has stayed safe from US-led military strikes, for the time being at least, because any such action seems less imminent now than it did earlier this week.
Speculation abounds about what made US President Donald Trump change his mind — from entreaties by Gulf friends, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman, to a seemingly bizarre New York Times report that claimed that the apartheid state’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also asked the US leader not to launch military strikes for the time being.
However, in Trump’s own words “nobody” made him change his mind and it was the staying of 800 hangings of protesters that Iran had supposedly planned that was the main reason he had called off the strikes and also because the protesters’ “killing has stopped”.
Whatever led to the pause, temporary or permanent, it is a welcome development for the region, which seemed to be sliding towards strife, with worries in the Gulf about Iran’s possible retaliatory missile strikes against American military bases and, who knows, even economic infrastructure such as oil and gas facilities.
Pakistan can heave a sigh of relief that no further destabilisation has happened on the country’s western borders.
Perhaps, the most serious challenges would have come Pakistan’s way in either a regime change or collapse-chaos scenario. In the case of regime change, it would not have been surprising to see an administration in Tehran sympathetic to Israel. That would have meant a hostile entity like Israeli intelligence enjoying far greater access to Iran than, for example, Indian intelligence has at present.
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are like a sty in Israel’s eye. And, therefore, you can well imagine the consequences of the latter’s intelligence sitting on our nearly 1,000-kilometre border with Iran, adding to our existing security concerns due to the situation on the Indian and Afghan borders. Coastal security would be another concern.
In the other scenario, where a central authority collapse would lead to chaos and fragmentation, it would be reasonable to assume that Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province would be one of the regions affected by any such development, which, in turn, would lead to even more issues across our common, often porous, border.
With the same ethnicity straddling the border, you can well imagine the boost the insurgency in our Balochistan could get from the collapse of the central authority in Iran. Israel has enhanced its security through internal strife in Syria. It is the Mossad playbook for all states around it who are not in its pocket.
So, Pakistan can heave a sigh of relief that no further destabilisation has happened on the country’s western borders and up the coast, in the short run at least. But Trump’s decision to impose another 25 per cent tariff on anyone doing business with Iran will deepen the crisis in the sanctions-clamped nation.
It was the economic crisis, with the rapidly falling value of the Iranian currency and inflation, that triggered the recent round of street protests. There can be no doubt that the Israeli intelligence service Mossad was involved in arming and instigating some of the protesters as the former CIA chief and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo openly tweeted, but the protests erupted due to the economic mess where even purchasing bread is becoming a problem.
This fact was acknowledged by Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who said the government needed to address the legitimate concerns of the protesters who had a right to take to the streets. Now a new budget is expected to be presented before parliament to replace the earlier proposal rejected by it. But then, the protests turned violent and the security services were ordered to crack down.
Some Tehran-based sources say the protests were peaceful till some elements from among the protesters fired at the security forces and also attacked infrastructure. These sources claimed that, of the 2,000 people killed, some 700 were law-enforcement officers. But these claims were impossible to verify independently.
Trump’s tariffs on top of sanctions could create further problems for the Iranian leadership as even the thus far recalcitrant India is having second thoughts about doing business with Iran and has pulled out of the Chabahar port project, which it saw as vital to expanding its trade ties all the way to Central Asia.
With the exception of China and Russia, additional US tariffs would be sufficient to discourage the smaller economies from trading with Iran, which would worsen the resource crunch in that country. The oppressive Iranian regime has some serious thinking to do over the coming weeks.
The immediate threat of US-Israeli military action may have receded somewhat but the economic crisis is going to worsen. Iran may consider easing restrictions on how women should be attired and create more space for peaceful expression of dissent as a means of reducing tensions within its society.
Side by side, it should consider what price tag it wants to attach to its nuclear programme. With its successful and lethal missile programme, it has already gained a degree of effective defence. Only Iran can tell if stopping its enrichment programme in exchange for lifting of sanctions and economic relief is worthwhile.
If its missile stockpile, particularly of the hypersonic variant, is what prompted many of its Gulf neighbours and, by some accounts, even Israel, to ask the US not to provoke it by attacking, Iran’s defence shield seems to be working. Only the decision-makers in Tehran will know if that is enough or whether their pursuit of nuclear weapons is non-negotiable.
Their past experience of doing a deal with the Obama administration in 2015 to cap enrichment that Trump later annulled is not encouraging. Even then, it’s not clear what other options a country facing economic ruin and internal strife can exercise.
The writer is former editor of Dawn.
Published in Dawn, January 18th, 2026
