There’s an old line, sometimes attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to make it bigger. That might be the most generous interpretation of how the Trump administration is approaching its ongoing peace talks with Iran. 

Over the weekend, the news around the talks followed what has now become a familiar pattern. On Saturday, the two sides were reportedly close to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and lift the US blockade on Iran. Then on Sunday, President Donald Trump said he had told his negotiators “not to rush” into a deal. On Monday, the United States launched a new round of what it called “self-defense strikes” in southern Iran. The current message from the White House is that they’re giving talks another few days, and continue to believe believe a deal is likely, but haven’t taken a return to full-scale war off the table. 

Then in a rambling Truth Social post on Monday morning, Trump enlarged the problem by saying that it “should be mandatory” that as part of any peace deal, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey sign on to the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations with Israel. This is unlikely: Saudi-Israeli cooperation against Iran has been the worst kept secret in the Middle East for years, but the international outcry over the war in Gaza has made it politically untenable for these countries to publicly embrace Israel. It’s unclear just how seriously Trump will press for this, but the fact that at this phase in negotiations he’s bringing up new demands sure to irritate his own allies, suggests he’s not exactly desperate to wrap these talks up.

The fact that a deal still hasn’t been signed — despite the fact that the underlying dynamics of the conflict haven’t changed much since Iran and the United States signed the current ceasefire agreement  in early April — as well as the fact that Trump seems to be expanding rather than narrowing his demands suggests two things that turn the recent weeks of negotiation reports on their head: First, Trump does not believe that he is losing this war. Second, he is still hoping to reach a mega-deal to reset the politics of the entire region. 

Trump doesn’t think he’s losing

Before the war began, Trump told a concerned Tucker Carlson that despite predictions warning that attacking Iran could destroy his presidency, he was confident everything would be okay “because it always is.” The war certainly hasn’t gone as easily as expected, but it’s very possible Trump still believes he has the upper hand and that everything will work out.

In his defense, the most dire predictions of economic turmoil made when the Strait of Hormuz was closed have not come to pass. Oil prices have been hovering around $100 a barrel and Americans are feeling the impact at the pump, but it’s worth recalling that many energy experts were predicting $200 per barrel oil by now if the strait were not opened. (There are a few explanations for this, but the main ones seem to be that the US and other non-Gulf producers have been able to export more oil than many anticipated, while China has slashed its imports, relying on its substantial reserves. For all the reports of Chinese assistance to Iran’s war effort, in this respect, Beijing may be doing more to help the United States.) 

The crunch may still hit: There are global concerns about jet fuel supplies ahead of summer travel season, and the impact of the global fertilizer shortage on this planting season won’t be felt for months. But for now, the US economy is not in full-blown crisis mode, and Trump may feel he’s proved the “panicans” wrong. 

The war is broadly unpopular and a large majority of Americans say it has raised their cost of living, but according to a recent poll by the Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs, 73 percent of Republicans still approve of Trump’s handling of the situation. Fears of an America First revolt by Trump’s MAGA base also seem to have been overblown.

As long as US troops aren’t being killed — and none have been since the ceasefire began — and the economic turmoil stays manageable, Trump may continue to believe that time is on his side. On the other hand, Iran’s current leaders, who believe they can absorb more pain than the Americans and are even less sensitive to public opinion, probably believe that too. This is a recipe for stalemate. 

War to end all wars

In some respects, Trump has narrowed his goals for the war in Iran. Rather than pushing for caps on Iran’s ballistic missile program or its support for regional proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah as he did in talks prior to the war, Trump now says the “one thing” he thinks about is preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

But it would be difficult enough at this point just to get a deal over Iran’s nuclear program that satisfies what appears to be Trump’s main condition: that it be tougher than the deal Barack Obama negotiated in 2015. Though the Iranians have reportedly agreed in principle to dilute or dispose of their stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the White House is continuing to insist that the stockpile itself be turned over to the United States. “No dust, no deal,” one official told Fox News, referring to Trump’s description of the stockpile as “nuclear dust.” That became a harder circle to square last week when Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a directive saying the uranium should remain on Iranian soil. 

The deal under discussion, according to most reports, simply starts a process of nuclear negotiations over a 60-day period — which would at least lower the temperature, though it leaves the main sticking point unresolved and it’s not hard to imagine the situation deteriorating again during that period. 

However, his comments linking the Abraham Accords to the resolution of the Iran war suggest that Trump, who is reportedly “bored” by Iran at this point, is thinking bigger. Trump has always expressed confidence that he alone can bring peace to the Middle East as a region, not just solve individual conflicts. Recall that when he announced his plan for ending the war in Gaza last September, he described it as a great day in the “history of civilization” that could bring “eternal peace to the Middle East.” In reality, it didn’t even bring eternal peace to Gaza, but he may be hoping to finish the job now. 

For the moment, we may be in a dynamic where the costs to Trump aren’t high enough that he feels compelled to end the war quickly, but they’re just high enough that he feels he needs a big win to justify them — whether that’s a deal that demonstrably exceeds Obama or achieves his alleged dream of “eternal peace.” 

The Americans were closing in, the situation was getting more dangerous by the minute — and President Xi Jinping was waiting for my recommendation.

The standoff began in May, when the US announced a package of anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles to Taiwan that would significantly upgrade the island’s ability to repel a Chinese invasion. We ordered massive military exercises in the region as a show of force. The US soon responded by sending the USS Abraham Lincoln to lead its own exercises with a joint contingent of Australian and Japanese forces.

If we showed weakness, Taiwan might be lost to China forever. If we were too aggressive, it could lead to World War III. But with so many ships and aircraft menacing the region, all with unclear intentions, the situation was getting too complex for commanders to process, and the risk of a deadly miscalculation was rising. Already, there had been a tense near-miss when a Chinese maritime militia fired on an American helicopter — thankfully, without casualties.

Perhaps it was time to let the machines take over. 

The commander of the Chinese naval strike force in the region requested permission to turn on our recently deployed AI hub, which could coordinate the defense systems of all ships in the region and was capable of differentiating between friend and foe, firing in response to threats, and finding the optimal course of action based on China’s rules of engagement and available resources. In other words, if the Americans attacked, it could decide the appropriate response faster than any human. 

As the vice chairs of the Central Military Commission, my colleagues and I were tasked with making a recommendation to the president. The system could buy us precious seconds to rescue ships from imminent attack, but it was also untested in combat situations and had reached only 95 percent accuracy in tests. 

After a tense discussion, we ultimately decided to employ the new system, but keep it in a “human-in-the-loop” setting that would require us to give a final order before firing. We were taking a cautious approach. 

Not cautious enough, as it turned out. 

A few days later, the AI-enabled system malfunctioned, opening fire on a US vessel and killing a number of US soldiers. Soon, American politicians and media were calling for payback. US ships began conducting joint patrols with the Taiwanese navy. Our intelligence sources indicated President Donald Trump was close to declaring an official alliance with Taiwan and basing US troops on the island. 

We were on the brink of all-out war. 

Fake war, real problem

As you’ve probably surmised, this is a fictional scenario. I am not actually a high-ranking Chinese general, and Trump risking war with China over Taiwan is not exactly what transpired in the real May 2026.

 The story comes from the script of a wargame conducted by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution that I participated in last fall. The “vice chairs” in the simulation were a bipartisan group of staffers and China policy wonks sitting in a comfortable Washington, DC, conference room over coffee and bagels. (As a condition of participating in the game, I agreed not to name or directly quote any of the participants.)

But the concern that the game illustrates, of an AI-enabled defensive system causing a military crisis to spin out of control, is a very real one. Experts are increasingly worried that AI-enabled systems could cause military conflicts to escalate faster than any human can control or anticipate — or that a miscalculation could lead to AI taking military actions that humans never intended, with deadly consequences. And the risks are especially acute when it comes to nuclear-armed countries like the US and China. 

To date, AI-enabled systems have been used mainly by militaries like America’s and Israel’s in conflicts where they already had overwhelming advantages over their opponents, or by countries like Ukraine to level the playing field against a much larger foe. But what would it look like in a war between two “near peer” superpowers like the US and China? 

This is no longer just a theoretical question. Under an initiative that began in the Biden administration, the US is working to develop fleets of small, cheap AI-enabled drones that could create a cost-effective “hellscape” to counter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The decisions my team made in our simulated conflict could be on the table in a real conflict sooner rather than later.

We may not be able to turn back from this new frontier. But if government and military leaders can figure out its rules and update their thinking in time, they might be able to head off the global war that they’ve spent generations trying to prevent.

The rise of battlefield AI 

Jacquelyn Schneider, director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, has been conducting games related to the topic of artificial intelligence and crisis escalation for several years now, with participants roleplaying nations on both sides of hypothetical conflicts. When she began running the war games, the capabilities in the “May 2026” scenario still felt futuristic. Lately, the game has “felt a little bit less like science fiction,” she told me.

The Pentagon has been actively working to accelerate the use of AI to detect threats, identify targets, and support commanders’ decision-making for years now. Its early initiatives during the first Trump administration were born in part out of officers’ frustration with data analysis failures that led to the deaths of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military collected vast amounts of information from sensors, satellites, and human sources, but was often too slow to find threats to troops on the front lines. The dream was a system that could detect potential dangers earlier and give users options for how to destroy them far faster than human analysts, dramatically shortening what military planners call the “kill chain.”

Now we’re seeing AI programs handle real-world combat situations on a daily basis. Maven Smart System, the Palantir-supplied system that integrates data from satellites, drones, and numerous other sensors, has been used by the US to pass along dozens of potential Russian targets per day to Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainians themselves have developed a system nicknamed “Uber for artillery” to coordinate fire across the frontline. During the war in Gaza, the Israeli military system employed an AI-enabled system known as “Lavender” to identify Hamas targets, though some reports suggest it may have had an error rate of around 10 percent.

The US military has used AI in its recent operations in Venezuela and Iran, which generated significant scrutiny after a targeting mistake killed at least 175 people at a school in Minab, most of them children. It’s not clear yet whether the AI systems Claude and Maven Smart System played a role in that specific strike, but both were widely used in the bombing campaign, according to US officials.

Nonetheless, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is aggressively pushing to deploy AI more widely across US military systems. Earlier this year, the Pentagon threatened to block Anthropic, Claude’s owner, from being used across government — reportedly over the company’s demand that its software never be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic wanted to keep a human in the loop on life-or-death decisions, while Pentagon officials reportedly wanted the option to bypass the company and use the program however they wished.

Which brings us back to the US and China. While AI-enabled errors may have led to tragic civilian deaths in Gaza and Iran, those errors in a US-China conflict could have truly global consequences. 

The bombing of the Minab school, for example, has been compared in some coverage to the accidental US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. That incident, which occurred at a time when US-Chinese relations were comparatively friendly and China’s military was much smaller, sparked a diplomatic crisis. Today, something similar might spark a war — and, in an increasingly automated battlefield, one that could turn from a conventional conflict into a nuclear exchange faster than human military leaders can keep up.

AI and the escalation ladder

This isn’t the first time a new military technology has forced a rethink of how limited wars can turn into much bigger ones. The advent of nuclear weapons made the management of conflict escalation a pressing issue for Cold War defense strategists.

The most famous of these was the RAND Corporation’s Herman Kahn, who devised a 44-run “escalation ladder” in 1965 to model conflict in a nuclear era. The ladder began at a nonviolent cold war, and ascended through conventional war with “limited” nuclear exchange kicking in around rung 15, ascending all the way up to a mindless and apocalyptic nuclear “spasm” at rung 44. 

Kahn’s writings are unnerving in their cold rationality. (He was one of the inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s character, Dr. Strangelove.) But a concern throughout the nuclear era has always been that a crisis could escalate due to human miscalculation or technical error rather than rational calculation. 

Just a few years earlier, in 1962, this had very nearly happened during the US-Soviet confrontation over Cuba. In what is generally acknowledged as the closest the Cold War ever got to going nuclear, the US, alarmed by the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba, ordered a blockade of the island, warning that any attempt by the Soviets to ship additional military hardware to the island would be met with force. 

In one of the most unnerving near-misses of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the captain of the Soviet submarine B-59, after being hit by US depth charges and finding himself unable to contact Moscow or other ships in the area, nearly fired a nuclear-armed torpedo. 

Both sides in the standoff came away convinced that they needed to find ways to signal their moves up and down the escalation ladder more clearly in order to prevent an accidental war. The next year, Washington and Moscow installed a “hotline” for instant phone communication between the US president and the Soviet premier. 

But what if the next several steps up the escalation ladder happened without their input at all? In a 2019 paper, Michael Horowitz, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, imagined how the Cuban Missile Crisis might have played out in the age of AI. After ordering the US Navy to blockade Cuba, President John F. Kennedy could have had a system like the one in the Hoover simulation pre-programmed to fire on any Soviet ship that attempted to run the blockade. 

It’s possible this could be effective signaling. A popular metaphor in the Cold War era involved one player in a game of “chicken” throwing their steering wheel out the window to resolve any doubt about where they were headed. 

If Kennedy could have convinced the Soviets that his killer robots would fire on any ship that approached Cuba without even waiting for his orders, it might have deterred Russian leaders who might otherwise doubt America’s willingness to fight a nuclear war. On the other hand, the US would be putting an extraordinary amount of trust in an automated system not to make mistakes or — as in the B-59 episode — to interpret an ambiguous incident the same way a human commander who doesn’t want to see his own family incinerated in a nuclear blast might. 

“Few things are more important to militaries in crisis situations than informational awareness and control over decisions,” Horowitz wrote. 

A nuclear “flash crash” 

One major concern is that if key decisions are delegated to AI systems, which may themselves be responding to decisions taken by the enemy’s AI systems, a conflict could simply escalate too fast for human decision makers to keep up.

In his book, Army of None, Paul Scharre, the former Pentagon official who’s now at the Center for a New American Security, cites the example of the 2010 “flash crash,” in which the Dow Jones lost nearly 9 percent of its value within minutes, only to recover it less than hour later — an incident blamed on the cascading interactions of algorithmic trading programs responding to each other’s moves without human intervention. The fear is that the next superpower war could be a “flash war.”

Rebecca Hersman — former director of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency who’s now at the Center for the Governance of AI (GovAI), an independent think tank — has warned that modern technologies, including AI, have the potential to scramble the linear escalation ladder envisioned by Kahn into a more unpredictable dynamic she refers to as “wormhole escalation.”

She sees several ways this could happen, and they don’t necessarily require humans to cede complete control to an AI defense system. The data the enemy’s AI systems are using to assess threats could be spoofed or contaminated, pushing leaders into a quick decision with bad intelligence. Or AI-generated disinformation or deepfakes could influence the decisions of military or political leaders deciding whether to escalate or de-escalate a conflict: This risk was dramatically demonstrated during the brief 2025 armed conflict between India and Pakistan, when social media on both sides were flooded with misinformation, making it difficult to get an accurate picture of the battlefield and driving both sides toward more aggressive stances. (This was also likely the first armed conflict between two nuclear-armed rivals in which both sides used AI-augmented weapons and AI-generated misinformation against their adversaries.)

The risks are compounded by other trends, including the commingling of nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities on the battlefield. Russia, for instance, has made abundant use of its nuclear-capable “Oreshnik” missiles (armed, thankfully, with conventional payloads) in deadly strikes against Ukrainian cities. China also has dual-capable missiles that would make it difficult for analysts to tell nuclear from non-nuclear launches during a conflict.  

Where does AI come in? Stephen Herzog, professor at Middlebury Institute of International Studies’ James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, imagined a combat scenario in which the US is attempting to destroy a Chinese target with a conventionally armed intercontinental ballistic missile fired from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. If the launch failed, an AI battle management system might decide that a submarine right off the Chinese coast should destroy the target instead. But this could cut the amount of time the Chinese had to decide whether they were under nuclear attack from minutes to seconds. 

“That’s incredibly effective operationally, but it is terrifying from an escalation perspective, because we’ve now lost time for interpretation, we’ve lost time for signaling, and we’ve lost time for potential restraint,” Herzog said. 

Then there’s the question of whether AI itself is inherently escalatory. Leaders decide to start and end conflicts by weighing the risks and benefits, but also by using human intuition to guess their counterparts’ thinking, imagine their intentions and fears, and consider whether there’s room for common ground. Two algorithms sizing each other up might approach these questions in a fundamentally different way.

“An AI optimized around predefined goals may overlook opportunities for de-escalation, not because it technically malfunctions, but because it was never designed with the ambiguity to build trust or manage a crisis,” said James Johnson, a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen and author of the book AI and the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and Risk in the Digital Age.

A study from King’s College London published in February found that in simulated war games, chatbots including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are extremely likely to use nuclear signalling and tactical nuclear weapons use, and tend to treat “nuclear weapons as legitimate strategic options, not moral thresholds.” Hoover’s Schneider has found similar results when she has popular chatbots play her wargames. However, other researchers have found that models can be properly prompted to provide less escalatory options.

AI technology, unlike nuclear weapons, is also still in its relative infancy. While the Cold War powers could rely on mutually assured destruction — a credible fear that both sides would be annihilated in any nuclear conflict — to discourage brinkmanship, some experts fear that a breakthrough in AI on one side could lead the other to conclude it had to act quickly or lose its ability to defend itself.

“One of the biggest effects of AI may be that, if, say, the US is just so much better at integrating AI than China that the US may rapidly win a conflict over Taiwan, that puts pressure on the Chinese to use nuclear weapons right away,” said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Other tech innovations could also tilt decision-makers toward escalation. AI-enabled targeted and intelligence monitoring could make “decapitation” strikes like the one that recently killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei easier to carry out — precisely the sort of scenario one could imagine prompting a leader like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or Russia’s Vladimir Putin to consider reaching for the nuclear codes. 

The people problem

It’s probably too late to put the military AI genie back in the bottle, given the arms race between countries to develop cutting-edge systems first. The best way to handle the risks going forward might be, ironically enough, to train the humans responsible for using these systems to be more skeptical about their value.

As in nearly every domain, the people who fight wars for a living are clearly getting more comfortable with AI. The top US general commanding US forces in South Korea recently raised eyebrows after telling reporters he regularly consults ChatGPT to help with command decisions.

Nonetheless, most humans are still very reluctant to give up full control to the machines when it comes to life and death decisions. In the US-China war game I played, all of the groups chose to keep the AI system in “human-in-the-loop” mode, despite the assurances we were given about the system’s reliability, and that decision held no matter how dangerously the crisis escalated. 

“At a minimum, meaningful human control means that when I delegate an authority to a system, it will not exceed the authority that it has been given,” said Hersman, of GovAI.

Many experts are less worried about AI escalating conflicts on its own, though, than they are with AI making humans more likely to escalate conflicts. A frequently expressed concern about the military use of AI is “automation bias,” the human tendency to give undue deference to computer-generated advice and conclusions. 

“What seems to be most dangerous with AI is not necessarily uncertainty, but instead, perhaps overconfidence and misplaced certainty, and AI can really provide that,” said Schneider, the Stanford researcher who conducted the wargame. “The tools themselves are built to engender confidence.” 

Schneider noted that Anthropic’s Claude, the system the Pentagon is hoping to remove with its systems, is the one that’s “more likely to tell you where uncertainty lies, as opposed to other models, which might take a more kind of strictly rational, ‘LeMay’ kind of approach” — a reference to the notoriously hawkish Cold War Air Force commander Curtis LeMay who once summed up warfare as “when you’ve killed enough [people] they stop fighting.”

It’s possible this bias towards AI-prompted escalation can be addressed with the right training. A recent study by Horowitz, the former Pentagon official and UPenn professor, found, encouragingly, that West Point cadets exhibit automation bias at less than half the rate of civilians. The results suggest “we’re not condemned to a future of accidents due to overconfidence,” Horowitz said, as officers learn to take their suggestions with a grain of salt. 

Horowitz believes that the design of AI interfaces, which present users not only with information but with the sources of that information, will go a long way toward determining what impact AI has on the battlefield. Though he’s relatively confident in how those systems are designed in the US, he notes, “I don’t know what China’s equivalent of Maven Smart System looks like.”

Ultimately, AI may do less to change the way people fight wars than to amplify it. While much of the coverage of the strike on the Minab school and Israel’s use of Lavender focused on the role of AI, ultimately it was most likely outdated targeting data in the first case and extremely permissive rules of engagement in the second that led to civilian casualties. 

Hegseth’s push for expanded AI use comes as he also looks to loosen the rules of engagement and reduce the role of lawyers in military oversight, which have raised concerns that the US is becoming more tolerant of collateral damage and less willing to hold people accountable for potential war crimes.

“If you’ve programmed your AI well, trained it well, and ensured that only high-quality data goes into it, I could well believe that the results will be better than just the use of humans,” said Carnegie’s Acton. “Now, do I trust the current US or Israeli governments to use it responsibly? Probably not, is the answer.”

If the US finds itself in a major international conflict in the coming years, there may be a temptation to blame AI for speeding up the battlefield or engendering overconfidence in commanders. But ultimately, it will be humans who choose to put themselves in that situation.

This story was produced in partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners.

As the world waits to see if President Donald Trump will give his final approval to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and, perhaps, finally bring the 2026 US-Iran conflict to a close, it’s already clear that one of the more surprising developments of the conflict has been the prominent role of Pakistan as a mediator. 

It was Pakistan’s military leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, who served as the key go-between in the talks that led to the initial two-week US-Iran ceasefire in early April, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif who announced that it had gone into effect. Several days later, Islamabad hosted the highest level talks between the US and Iranian governments since 1979, including US Vice President JD Vance. On April 21, Trump announced the ceasefire had been extended, saying it was at Pakistan’s request. Munir has made two personal visits to Iran as part of his mediation efforts, the most recent on May 21.

Whereas the “P5+1” countries of the UN Security Council — the US, China, the UK, France, and Russia, plus Germany — helped bring about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and Oman hosted the US-Iran talks in the lead-up to the war, Pakistan has been the intermediary and negotiating venue of choice since the conflict began. The world’s only predominantly Muslim nuclear power is a rare country with credibility on both sides of this war. 

Pakistan’s prominent diplomatic role in the conflict is the latest sign of the unexpectedly close relations between the country’s government and the second Trump administration. “Thank you to Pakistan and its great prime minister and field marshal, two fantastic people!” Trump wrote in a characteristic Truth Social post in April. He has lavished particular praise on Munir, whom he has called an “exceptional man” and “my favorite field marshal.”

Pakistan’s new role as an indispensable US partner is partly due to some skilled Trumpian diplomacy by its government and partly due to just how much this administration’s global priorities have changed from the days when China and jihadist terrorism were the top of the agenda. 

How Pakistan went from pariah to partner in Washington

All of this would have been difficult to imagine during Trump’s first term, when Pakistan was often treated as a pariah. 

On New Year’s Day in 2018, Trump suspended most security assistance to Pakistan, tweeting, “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools.” 

Trump would go on to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Pakistan, which had been a close US counterterrorism partner even amid widespread allegations that it had provided safe harbor to the Taliban militants fighting US forces in Afghanistan and maintained relations with other anti-US militants. Pakistan responded by halting intelligence-sharing with the US amid widespread anti-American protests.   

At the same time, Trump cultivated a close relationship with Pakistan’s arch-rival India and its prime minister, Narendra Modi. Modi’s brand of majoritarian populist politics made him a natural Trump ally, and India’s position as a superpower counterweight to China made it a natural security partner for the US. The pro-Indian tilt in US foreign policy continued into the Biden administration, and there was every expectation it would carry through when Trump returned in 2025. 

Flattery and crypto: How Munir won over Trump

Pakistan’s turnaround with the new Trump administration began in early March 2025, when the country arrested an ISIS-K operative who was allegedly a key planner of the Kabul airport suicide bombing that killed 13 US troops during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and extradited him to the United States, earning public gratitude from Trump.  

Then came the brief May 2025 war between India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s government publicly praised Trump for his “pivotal leadership” in the diplomacy that ended the conflict and nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize. The flattery worked: Trump brought up Pakistan’s nomination during a phone call with Modi and was reportedly irritated that the Indian leader did not follow suit and, by contrast, seemed to go out of his way to downplay America’s role. 

Pakistan has also seemed particularly well-attuned to the personalist style of diplomacy in the Trump era, where the line between business and politics can be extremely blurry. Pakistan’s finance minister has signed a deal with World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company co-founded by Trump’s sons and the sons of his diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff. 

Last year, Sharif also signed several memoranda on deals to deliver critical minerals and rare earth elements from Pakistan to the US. Pakistani officials have taken to referring to counterterrorism, critical minerals, and crypto as the “3 Cs” underlying their relationship with the Trump administration. 

The current relationship has also doubtless been helped by the ascendance of Munir, a man who Trump might describe as a military strongman out of “central casting.” Pakistan would certainly not be playing the same role today if Imran Khan, the former cricket star turned anti-American populist prime minister — who took power halfway through Trump’s first term — were still in office. Khan was removed in a vote of no confidence in 2022, which Khan blamed on the military establishment, and has been detained on corruption charges since 2023. With his removal, the military moved quickly to consolidate power. 

Pakistan’s military has always played a significant and complex role in Pakistan politics, exercising a significant amount of power behind the scenes; the country has suffered several military coups. Since Munir, formerly chief of the country’s powerful military intelligence agency, was appointed army chief by Sharif in 2022, the nation has veered closer to an outright military dictatorship: A constitutional amendment passed in 2025 gave Munir full control over all branches of the military including the nuclear forces, for the duration of a term that could last until 2030, and immunity from prosecution.  

Trump has helped cement Munir’s status by hosting the field marshal for a working lunch at the White House — the first time a Pakistani military leader rather than its elected prime minister has been hosted for such an event. 

How Pakistan is navigating America’s new priorities

If things are different now for the US and Pakistan, it’s partly just because the world is different. The US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 removed one of the major sources of tension in the US-Pakistan relationship: the Pakistani government’s alleged double game with the Taliban. In fact, Pakistan and the now Taliban-controlled Afghanistan have been fighting a brutal border conflict for months.

It also helps that the Trump administration is generally less focused on Islamist terrorism this time around. It has pivoted away from “great power competition” with China, decreasing the importance of India’s role. US-India relations are generally frostier over a variety of issues ranging from India’s agricultural protectionism, to immigration in the US, to India’s economic relationship with Russia. 

“The second Trump administration, in its foreign policy, is aggressively transactional; it’s not changed by strategic considerations, even compared to how it was during its first term,” said Michael Kugelman, senior fellow for South Asia at the Atlantic Council. “So in that regard, [the Trump administration] would not have any concerns about embracing Pakistan, even though Islamabad has a very close alliance with Beijing.”

Pakistan has been accumulating an unlikely set of friends and partners in recent years. Even amid its rapprochement with the US, Pakistan has deepened its military and economic relationship with China. (Xi Jinping hailed his country’s “unbreakable” friendship with Pakistan during a visit by Sharif last month.)

In 2025, Pakistan signed a nuclear defense pact with Saudi Arabia. This is particularly notable given Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons: Some analysts saw this as effectively extending Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella to its allies in the Persian Gulf, though others disputed this interpretation.

Pakistan’s relations with Saudi Arabia’s rival, Iran, are complex, to put it mildly. It was only in 2024 that the two countries were lobbing missiles at each other’s territory, but they quickly deescalated the tensions; they have since cooperated in combating separatist militants and smugglers along their shared border. Munir, in particular, is believed to be deeply familiar with Iran’s military establishment from his days as Pakistan’s spy chief. 

“They have proven remarkably adept and agile in ensuring that they’re able to keep all of these balls in the air,” said Elizabeth Threlkeld, director of the South Asia program at the Stimson Center, referring to Pakistan’s global web of alliances. “But they are also vulnerable to a number of different shocks from different sources, given their positioning right now.”

Pakistan’s involvement in US-Iran diplomacy is not just an effort to gain favor with Trump. Islamabad genuinely needs the war to be over as quickly as possible. Pakistan is one of the countries most exposed to the economic impact of the war: It normally imports almost two-thirds of its natural gas and 30 to 40 percent of its total imports via the Strait of Hormuz. Food and fuel prices are surging in the country. Add to that the strong domestic opposition to the US-led war among Pakistan’s population, particularly its large Shiite minority. Pakistan’s defense pact with Saudi Arabia also raises the risk of it being drawn into a conflict in the Gulf. 

If the war has highlighted Pakistan’s diplomatic savvy, it has also at times exposed its limits. For all its efforts, Pakistan’s mediation has been unable to turn April’s ceasefire into a permanent end to the conflict that reopens the Strait. At times, Pakistan has appeared to be misrepresenting the sides’ actual positions in hopes of pushing a deal through. Trump’s recent demand that a number of Muslim countries including Pakistan join the Abraham Accords as part of a final Iran deal did not go over well in Pakistan, which has refused to recognize Israel since its founding. 

The longer the war goes on, the more Pakistan’s involvement will look less like a diplomatic masterstroke and more like a credibility-taxing quagmire. As India’s experience has illustrated, foreign governments are often lavished with praise by Trump only so long as they’re useful. If Pakistan can’t deliver the ceasefire deal Trump is looking for, or if his priorities simply shift again, it may once again find itself on the receiving end of Trump’s attacks. 

Gas prices are high right now — an average of roughly a dollar more than they were last year for Americans. But considering that we’re not more than 100 days into the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which the International Energy Agency called the “most severe oil supply shock in history,” it seems like they should be higher. When the Hormuz crisis began, many analysts were predicting the price of oil would rise to $200 a barrel, which might mean gas in the $6.50 to $7 per gallon range. Instead, oil is currently trading at less than $90 a barrel. 

That’s partly thanks to some promising recent diplomatic developments, but it’s never risen higher than around $114, far below the heights it reached after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The 1970s-style gas lines that many anticipated have not materialized. 

So what’s going on? There are a few explanations. One is that more oil is still leaving the Middle East than many thought possible, via alternative pipelines and via covert means through Hormuz itself. Another is that oil-producing countries that don’t depend on Hormuz, most importantly the US, are ramping up production. Many countries are also still tapping their strategic reserves. But possibly the largest and definitely the most unexpected factor is that the world’s most insatiable consumer of oil has just stopped buying it. 

China turns off the tap

China is normally the world’s top crude oil importer, and it sources much of that oil from Iran and other countries in the Middle East. China’s imports have fallen from around 11.6 million barrels a day to around 7.8 million, the lowest levels since 2017. To put it simply, there are millions of more barrels per day for other countries to import than anyone thought was possible. Good news for every other economy in the world — but what about for China itself? 

“If I knew nothing else about what was going on and I was just looking at my data, I would assume there had been a demand collapse on par with the Covid-zero lockdowns,” said Rory Johnston, a Toronto-based oil market researcher, referring to the draconian policies the Chinese government imposed during the pandemic that effectively ground its domestic economy to a halt. “But that’s strange, because I haven’t seen any news about China relocking down its economy.”

China’s economy hasn’t cratered. Quite the contrary: All available data on industrial output, automobile traffic, pollution, and other economic indicators suggests that the country  is humming along as normal. In recent years, the Chinese state has made massive investments in green energy and electric vehicles. Those investments have likely helped cushion the blow, but they’re still not enough to account for the numbers we’re seeing.  

Instead, we seem to be seeing the results of a longer-term strategy. Back in 2023, many analysts were perplexed by the fact that China was dramatically ramping up its imports of crude oil and its refineries were pumping out dramatically higher amounts of gasoline and diesel, despite the fact that the country’s economy was slowing down. There appeared to be little demand for all that fuel at the time. We may be seeing the fruits of that stockpiling now. 

China’s government also hasn’t explained their rationale for cutting imports during the current conflict, nor has it publicly acknowledged that it is. The closest we’ve gotten to an official acknowledgement of what’s happening may have been from US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who said that China is releasing oil from its strategic petroleum reserve. 

The odd thing about that, notes Johnston, is that the strategic reserve tanks in China that are visible to commercial satellites appear to be just as full if not more full than they were before the war. So where’s all their fuel coming from? 

The most likely possibility is that China has large underground reserves that are not visible to the outside. The Chinese government has also mandated state-owned commercial companies to maintain their own strategic petroleum stocks. Whatever the case, China simply has a lot more oil on hand than we thought. 

How long can China keep this up? Johnston says that’s difficult to say given that estimates of China’s stocks range from half a billion barrels to one and a half billion. But in theory, it could be months. 

Why is Beijing doing this? 

In theory, it’s possible that when President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in May, they reached some sort of agreement for China to reduce its imports. After all, Trump is benefiting politically from the choice. 

But it seems unlikely that Xi would agree to a policy to underwrite a war against one of its allies, and as unlikely that Trump wouldn’t tell anyone he had extracted that big a concession. More likely, China sees the benefit in preventing an all-out crisis in the countries that are its most important export markets. 

Intentionally or not, though, China’s policies may be prolonging the war. Trump is clearly eager to reach a deal to reopen Hormuz, but not desperate enough to agree to major concessions or Iran’s nuclear program or sanctions relief. His urgency might be different if oil were at $150 a barrel rather than $90, putting even more pressure on American consumers during a pivotal election year. For all the attention paid to how Chinese missiles and satellites might be helping Iran’s war effort, that assistance might be outweighed by how its energy policies are helping the US. 

Beyond this conflict, China’s policy may have wider strategic implications for China’s growing ability to weaponize its role in the global economy — a field of competition the US long dominated. As Eurasia Group oil analyst Gregory Brew wrote on X, “The world doesn’t have a swing producer any more” — referring to how Saudi Arabia’s oil production capacity once allowed it to almost single-handedly swing global energy markets — ”but it may have a swing consumer.” 

In other words, China is intentionally keeping oil prices lower than they would be otherwise. It could in theory pull the rug out and jack up the world’s prices as well. 

In part, China is simply also a country that’s traditionally inclined to stockpile stuff, whether it’s oil, strategic metals, or even pork. When it began its oil-buying spree a few years ago, there was some speculation it might be preparing for a major global crisis, namely an invasion of Taiwan.

There’s always been an assumption that the massive disruption to global trade a war over Taiwan would cause constitutes a sort of mutually assured economic destruction that might help dissuade Beijing from acting. But what we’re seeing is that China may actually be more insulated from that kind of disruption — and even more capable of causing it — than we thought. 

Comoros, an island nation of less than 1 million people, more than 3,000 miles away from Iran, might not seem to have much at stake, politically, from the current conflict in the Middle East. President Donald Trump has never publicly mentioned it. It is neither an ally nor a target of the Iranian regime. But as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, no country is totally insulated from the fallout of the war launched by the United States and Israel, and that includes Comoros. 

Last month, the country’s government attempted to raise gasoline prices by 35 percent, blaming the price shock caused by the Iran war. The public response included protests, roadblocks in the capital, and clashes with security forces during which one person was killed. The government suspended the fuel price increase in response.

It’s not the only place where Hormuz shockwaves have caused social unrest. Four people were killed in Kenya in May in protests sparked by rising fuel prices. Bus drivers in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, have gone on strike over a 46 percent increase in diesel prices, grinding the city to a halt. 

Notably, none of these were primarily protests against the war itself, or against Iran’s blockage of the strait. The citizens of these countries were protesting against their own governments. This is not only an example of just how far-reaching the unintended consequences can be when the US government launches a war. There’s also the possibility that by attacking Iran, the US could be creating new security crises that it will face in the years ahead. 

The coming food shock

Worse may be yet to come: For one thing, even as many countries are struggling with the impact of high energy costs, oil prices haven’t yet surged to the levels many experts were anticipating if the strait remained closed. If the strait continues to stay closed, that may change as countries deplete their reserves. For another, if the strait crisis has the impact on food supplies that many are anticipating, the effect on political instability could be even more pronounced. 

Nearly a third of the trade in global fertilizer normally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. In addition to the strait’s closure raising the price of fertilizer itself, rising fuel prices affect food prices in a number of other secondary ways, including transportation and irrigation costs. “Energy is kind of the master cost in the economy that determines virtually every downstream cost,” said Cullen Hendrix, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

The full impact may not be felt for months, and may already be baked into the economy of the near future, given that the spike in prices happened during planting season for farmers in the Northern Hemisphere. 

“I’m very concerned for later this year and the first quarter of 2027, because at that point we will know what the fall harvest looked like in the Northern Hemisphere,” Hendrix added. “That could spell a really significant crisis coming in 2027.” 

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that the closure of the strait is “not a temporary shipping disruption but the beginning of a systemic agrifood shock that could trigger a severe global food price crisis within six to 12 months.” The World Food Program anticipates that if oil prices stay around $100 per barrel through the end of the month, an additional 45 million people could fall into acute food insecurity.  

In the United States and other developed countries, that could mean higher food prices for families already struggling to make ends meet and trouble at the ballot box for incumbent politicians. In other parts of the world, the impact could be much more dramatic — and potentially more deadly. 

Whenever there’s a commodity price shock, unrest will follow, said Caitlin Welsh, director of the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Security and International Studies. “You’d be hard pressed to find instances where discontent and protest doesn’t take place.”

Why food prices drive political instability

Years of research has shown that when global food prices increase, low-income countries are far more likely to experience a number of types of political instability, such as anti-government demonstrations and riots, as well as violent conflict in the form of both civil wars and interstate wars.

Price rises alone are unlikely to translate into unrest. But they can when they come on top of existing economic and political crises. 

“It is more of a trigger,” said Rabah Arezki, an economist and senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “Food price increases in richer countries don’t have the same effect as in a country where unemployment is high, and where grievances are also high.” Kenya, for instance, has been experiencing protests against corruption and economic mismanagement for years, including a deadly round of clashes in 2024. A sharp increase in the daily cost of living can bring already discontented people out onto the streets. 

“When food and energy become unaffordable, they expose the fractures of society,” said Rami Zurayk, a professor of agriculture and food sciences at the American University of Beirut. 

The relationship between food prices and political instability is one that’s been discussed from the 1789 French Revolution to Egypt’s 1977 “Bread Intifada.” But in recent years, the two best-known examples came in 2008 and 2011. In 2008, the price of commodities like wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans more than doubled due to a number of environmental and economic factors, which led to food riots and protests in more than a dozen countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Even better known is the 2011 Arab Spring, first sparked by the public self-immolation of a Tunisian food vendor. Global food prices had risen more than 40 percent in the months leading up to the Arab Spring. The Middle Eastern and North African countries where mass protests broke out that year were heavily dependent on imported food. 

It’s reductive and unfair to those who participated in the uprisings to simply say that food prices caused the Arab Spring. The protests were focused on these populations’ longstanding grievances against corrupt autocratic regimes. But it’s fair to say that the heightened costs were one of the triggers that turned 2011 into a year of mass uprisings. 

A perfect storm for food insecurity

Experts say it’s particularly bad timing for a global spike in food crises. The World Food Program’s budget was slashed by around 40 percent this year, largely due to cuts in aid from the United States, which previously provided more than half its budget. A recent paper published in Science noted “significant and sustained increase in conflict” in the months following the Trump administration’s USAID cuts in the countries that were previously most dependent on that aid. 

On top of that, forecasters say that this summer’s El Niño climate event could be especially severe, causing droughts in some regions and excess rain in others, further stressing food supplies. 

Food crises have become more frequent and severe in recent years, after decades of decline, driven in large part by an increase in the number of international conflicts.  

The crisis could be driving conflicts for years

“This is a peculiar crisis in that it started from a war that was a war of choice,” Arezki said. “Unlike the other crises, this is one that could be resolved.”

In theory, the crisis could end once Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz, though the ripple effects of the closure will be felt in energy and food markets for months. It’s unclear when that will happen: Iran views the costs it is imposing on the international economy as its main source of leverage against its adversaries. In fact, however, as an oil- and gas-producing country with abundant domestic food supplies, the United States is relatively insulated from the impact of the Hormuz closure. The same goes for Israel, which has little reliance on Gulf oil. The pain is being felt far more acutely in poor countries that have had nothing to do with the war. 

Iranians themselves are also struggling, under heavy sanctions and blockade, with skyrocketing food prices. Another mass public uprising seems unlikely during the war, but it’s worth recalling that an increase in fuel prices was the proximate cause of the widespread protest movement that broke out in the country in 2019. 

As for the US, given that Trump has said that he’s not particularly concerned about Americans’ cost of living when it comes to his decision-making in Iran, it’s hard to imagine that the struggles of countries in Africa or Asia are high on his agenda. If food insecurity in the developing world were a major priority for this administration, it would not have spent much of its first year cutting funding from the programs meant to address it.

But it’s worth considering that the upheavals of the Arab Spring set the conditions that led to the US military intervention in Libya in 2011 and the operation to combat ISIS in Syria and Iraq three years later. The United States is currently conducting a growing but little discussed air campaign to combat the group al-Shabaab in Somalia, where a years-long hunger crisis has been not only a humanitarian disaster, but has also been a significant driver of conflict. Millions also face food insecurity in conflict-wracked Northern Nigeria, where the US has been stepping up operations targeting Islamist militants accused of violence against Christians. 

In other words, unstable regions around the world tend to attract American military involvement. So Americans could end up paying for the economic impact of this war in ways far beyond the shock at the gas pump or the grocery checkout aisle. 

At its outset, the war known as Operation Epic Fury in the United States and Operation Roaring Lion in Israel marked a historic first: the first time the two countries’ militaries went to war fighting side by side. By all accounts, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the key voices — if not the most important voice — influencing President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the military operation, which has now lasted more than 100 days. And yet, it’s been clear from the start that there were differences in the two countries’ priorities when it came to the war. Those differences have never been more evident than they were this past weekend. 

On Sunday night, Iran launched its first direct attack against Israel since the tentative ceasefire in the conflict in early April, firing a barrage of missiles at several targets including an air base; Tehran said it was retaliation for Israel’s prior offensive in southern Lebanon. Trump said on Sunday that he had urged Netanyahu not to retaliate in order to allow ceasefire talks to continue. He also told the Financial Times in an interview on Sunday that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice,” but to accept a US-negotiated ceasefire, adding, “I call the shots,” he said. “I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots.”

Nonetheless, Netanyahu appeared to take a shot of his own on Monday, with Israel launching strikes against a petrochemical plant in southern Iran — its first strikes inside the country since the ceasefire. US officials say the US military did not participate in the attacks. 

The two sides have now taken steps to deescalate. Iran’s military says it has concluded its operations against Israel for now, while Netanyahu instructed his military to halt preparations for another attack after Trump posted on Truth Social that both countries “immediately stop ‘shooting.’”

Publicly, it looked like Netanyahu had defied Trump, although subsequently, sources told the Wall Street Journal that Netanyahu had made clear to Trump in a conversation on Sunday that he had to retaliate, and Trump had simply urged him to keep it limited. Either way, it’s a signal that when it comes to this war, the two leaders’ incentives are moving in opposite directions. The airstrikes come just a week after a tense phone in which Trump called Netanyahu “fucking crazy” and accused him of ingratitude over what Trump felt was Israel’s disproportionate military actions in Lebanon. On Sunday, according to Trump, he warned Netanyahu that if he escalated the war further, he might soon be left to fight Iran alone. 

The divisions here are not new. Israel’s end goal, from the start of the operation, has been regime change in Tehran, whereas the United States was more concerned about maintaining regional stability. As was the case in Gaza, Israeli officials felt the ceasefire with Iran was imposed on them by the United States and that their objectives had not yet been met.

Compounding the issue, both leaders are trailing heading into pivotal elections. Netanyahu faces the very real possibility of losing power in national elections in late October. Trump’s Republicans may lose one or both houses of Congress in midterm elections in November. 

While Trump likely still believes he can salvage a victory out of Epic Fury and has shown he won’t cut a deal with Iran at any price, it would clearly be in his best interest, and in the interest of his party, for him to end an unpopular war that has driven up the cost of living for American voters as quickly as possible. 

In Israel, meanwhile, the war is extremely popular, and resuming it may redound to the benefit of Netanyahu, reeling in the polls over his ongoing corruption trial as well as criticism over the security failures that led to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. After months in and out of bomb shelters, it would certainly be harder to make the case to Israeli voters that it was all worth it if the war ends with Iran’s regime still in place, rebuilding its missile forces, its proxy networks, and perhaps even its nuclear program. Israel’s military is also pushing ever more aggressively into Lebanon in response to rocket attacks from Iran’s ally Hezbollah, despite US-led efforts to reach a ceasefire there. 

“There was no way that Netanyahu — when he’s so close to an election when he’s underwater, and when people are already angry about what’s going on in northern Israel [where Hezbollah is firing missiles] — could simply not respond to direct Iranian ballistic missiles on Israeli territory,” said Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at the US-based Israel Policy Forum. 

Both leaders are also at pains to demonstrate that they are not letting the other one “call the shots.” Netanyahu has been under increasing criticism from his electoral opponents for turning Israel into a client state of the United States and being unable to stand up to Trump; the criticism will only get louder if Israel is pressured into agreeing to a US-brokered ceasefire viewed as favorable to Iran. Trump, meanwhile, is taking heat from opponents as well as members of his own coalition for taking marching orders from Israel. Netanyahu has incentive to show he can defy Trump. Trump continues to emphasize that he’s the dominant partner in the relationship. 

The biggest point of stress in the partnership in the coming weeks may be Lebanon. Israel views Hezbollah as an imminent threat and wants to separate the issue from the negotiations with Iran, preserving its ability to strike in Lebanon as it sees fit. The Iranians, as they did on Sunday, are eager to link the two battlefields, demanding that any ceasefire also cover Lebanon. That means that the Trump administration — for whom the issue of Hezbollah is far less existential — is increasingly viewing Israel’s actions in Lebanon as an obstacle to ending the wider war. Trump has already pushed Israel to curtail some of its operations and avoid strikes on the Lebanese capital, Beirut. 

It will certainly complicate efforts to bring this war to a close if the United States has to negotiate a ceasefire not only with its adversary, Iran, but with its ally, Israel, as well. But ultimately, there’s probably a floor to just how bad relations between Trump and Netanyahu can get. For all that he’s far more willing than other US presidents to publicly say things that seem calibrated to humiliate the Israeli leader, Trump is also far more willing to accede to Israel’s actual policies — in Iran, Lebanon, or the Palestinian territories. For his part, Netanyahu can only go so far when it comes to publicly breaking with Trump.

The real test for whether something has fundamentally changed in the US-Israeli relationship is likely to come when one or both of these leaders are out of office.