@MinmajMarwat Pakistan started Shuttle diplomacy. But the thing is that only the two boys(COAS &PM,) are actively engaged although diplomats mater the most in shuttle diplomacy.
We should avoid any rush to judgement about the Islamabad talks which have barely got going. Diplomacy is a process, not an event. Anyone who thinks the process will yield something quickly is mistaken. No need to see it in terms of either breakthrough or breakdown.
Barry Buzan spent his career asking why we keep thinking about security the wrong way.
The standard assumption is that great powers decide and smaller states react. Buzan dismantled this. In his Regional Security Complex Theory, security is fundamentally regional, countries in the same neighbourhood are locked into shared fears and interdependencies whether they choose to be or not. The Middle East is not a stage handed to America to direct. It is a complex with its own logic, its own wounds, and its own momentum. Washington intervenes. It does not control.
This is the first thing to understand about the Iran war. It did not begin in Washington. It erupted from within a region that has been accumulating pressure for decades, through sectarian rivalry, competing survival calculations, and the slow suffocation of a state that felt permanently encircled. The region pulled the trigger. Great powers just handed it the gun.
But Buzan goes deeper. Security is not just military. Its most volatile dimension today is societal, the struggle to protect collective identity, religious belonging, and cultural survival. Iran is not only fighting for territory or nuclear rights. It is fighting against erasure. The fear running beneath this war is civilizational: that to lose militarily is to be dismantled as a people, delegitimized as a culture, and made to disappear as a coherent force in history.
That fear did not emerge from nowhere. It was constructed. And this is Buzan’s most unsettling insight - securitization. Security is not an objective condition. It is a speech act. When leaders declare something an existential threat, they are not describing reality. They are building it and in doing so, unlocking emergency powers that suspend every normal constraint. Decades of Western and Israeli rhetoric about Iran, terrorist state, rogue regime, axis of evil, did not just describe a threat. It manufactured one. And Iran’s own leadership securitized its population in return, until both sides were trapped inside a reality neither fully chose.
That is the Buzan picture of this war. A region with its own explosive logic. A civilization fighting for its identity. And two sets of leaders who securitized their way into a conflict that now has no clean exit.
Fear was the architecture. War is what happens when no one remembers who built it.