Late Tuesday, with less than 90 minutes before the United States’ self-imposed deadline to escalate strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi confirmed the agreement hours later. This pause appears narrow and fragile, yet significant. Image Credits: Getty Images The temporary truce is the result of weeks of painstaking, behind-the-scenes diplomacy, orchestrated by a country that rarely claims the center st

For three decades after the Cold War, conflict resolution rested on a fragile but functional assumption: that a single superpower , or a small concert of allied states, could set the terms for ceasefires, peacekeeping mandates, and post-conflict reconstruction. That era has ended, and its demise is visible in paralyzed security bodies, the proliferation of proxy wars, and the normalization of economic warfare as a tool of statecraft, a challenge that Islamabad Accords aim to

For decades, the Middle East's most consequential conflicts have not been fought between armies in uniform on clearly demarcated borders. Instead, they have been waged indirectly, through armed groups, economic blockades, cyber campaigns, and political assassinations carried out by non-state proxies. These proxy wars have shaped the region's borders, toppled governments, and determined the fate of millions. Yet as the costs of indirect warfare have mounted, a parallel diploma

A financial crash in one country triggers a banking crisis on another continent. A respiratory virus in a single city becomes a global pandemic within weeks. A regional war disrupts grain shipments, and food prices rise in countries thousands of miles away. The 21st century has revealed a hard truth: no crisis stays local for long. Yet the international institutions built to manage these interdependencies, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Trade