After the Islamabad MoU: Pravin Sawhney on Who Won the Iran War and What Comes Next

A memorandum signed after a war

When the United States and Iran put their names to what has come to be called the Islamabad MoU, much of the commentary treated it as one more chapter in a long sequence of stop-start diplomacy. In a conversation with the host Bushra Khanum Fahad, the defence analyst Pravin Sawhney, editor of Force magazine, argued for a different reading: that this is a document written by the side that came out of the fighting with more options, and that it should be read as a record of who could afford to keep going.

Sawhney's starting point is the structure of the agreement. The memorandum is between Washington and Tehran; Israel is not a party to it. But, as he reads it, the text puts responsibility on the United States to restrain Israel, because it calls for a ceasefire on every front. That matters because Israeli strikes on Lebanon have continued even as talks proceed. In his account, those strikes are a test of President Donald Trump's control over an ally, not a breach by Iran.

The memorandum sets a 60-day window for converting it into a final deal, extendable by mutual consent. Sawhney does not expect the deadline to hold. He does expect the direction of travel to survive it. "Time is on Iran's side," he said, and he argued that every additional day of delay costs Washington credibility among what he called the Global South.

Why Washington has few military options

The core of Sawhney's argument is that a peacetime memorandum would have been a bargain between roughly equal winners, whereas this one followed a war in which, he says, Trump found no military route left. "If he had any other option," Sawhney said, he would not have signed. He also described strong domestic pressure on the American president over what was conceded, since few in the American security establishment, in his telling, are prepared to accept that the United States can lose a war.

He walked through the options one by one. The air campaign lasted 39 days and, in his assessment, achieved little, partly because Iran's military facilities are underground. A ground war would need something on the order of 300,000 troops, he said, against roughly 60,000 American soldiers now spread across ten West Asian countries. Assembling that force would take months, as it did before the 1991 Gulf War, and would need Congressional approval. Iran's terrain of mountains and forests is also, he noted, far less forgiving than Iraq's open ground. The Gulf summer, with temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius, is a further constraint.

That leaves a naval blockade, which Sawhney sees as risky in its own right. Iran's drones and missiles, he said, can strike at long range with accuracy, and a single large American ship lost would be a blow to Washington's standing far out of proportion to the military value of the vessel.

Iran's leverage, and what it says it wants

Sawhney described Iranian leverage in geographic terms. Iran, he said, effectively controls the Strait of Hormuz and, through allies, exposure in the Red Sea. He argued that undersea internet cables passing through those waters are vulnerable, with consequences reaching well beyond the Gulf, and that Iranian drones and missiles can reach targets up to 4,000 kilometres away. Some of these are large assertions and they come from one analyst's assessment, not from an independent audit.

The more interesting point is psychological. Iran's fight, he said, is "a war of survival," and Iranian commanders know why they are fighting in a way that American soldiers, he suggested, do not. Many Americans, he added, now describe this as Israel's fight, not theirs.

Yet Sawhney cautioned against reading Iranian strength as a bid for domination. He pointed to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's repeated calls for a regional framework, and to language in the memorandum that he reads as requiring external forces, meaning American troops, to leave the region. A regional arrangement, he argued, only works if all parties believe they are equals in it. Nobody can build mutual trust while claiming to be the strongest.

Bases, the petrodollar and the limits of empire

The most consequential of Sawhney's claims concerns the American military footprint. By his count the United States has about 60,000 troops in ten countries in West Asia, across 19 bases, five of them in Gulf Cooperation Council states: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE. He says the memorandum obliges Washington to withdraw them, and that Trump, by signing, took on the responsibility for delivering that. He described the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait as still weighing their options. He was careful to add that a regional order means the region decides its own security arrangements; it does not, he said, dictate whom Gulf states trade with, and the memorandum is silent on their commerce with Israel.

From there, Sawhney drew a line to the dollar. If the bases go, he argued, the petrodollar arrangement will gradually erode, and with it the strength of the American economy and its ability to sustain around 750 bases worldwide. He described American power as resting on two pillars, military strength and the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency, and argued that the first has been dented on the battlefield and that the second is being questioned. As evidence he pointed to Japan selling American Treasury bonds and to countries accumulating gold. These are contestable readings, and Sawhney offered them as his own judgment on where the trend is heading, not as settled fact.

Pakistan, from facilitator to mediator

A large part of the conversation concerned Pakistan, whose role in the talks Sawhney called a significant diplomatic gain. He traced it in stages. After the four-day conflict with India, he said, Washington concluded that Pakistan had handled the fighting better, and Islamabad and Riyadh signed a formal defence agreement at the end of 2025. Pakistan then became a facilitator, hosting the first talks on 11 April, and later a mediator, carrying each side's concerns to the other. The fact that the document is known as the Islamabad MoU is, for Sawhney, the sign of how far this has gone. He counts Pakistan alongside Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey among the regional powers that now matter.

He attributed this partly to geography and nuclear status, but mainly to the fluency of Pakistan's military leadership in foreign policy. He recalled General Jehangir Karamat telling American officials in 1998 that Pakistan's national security was not negotiable, and described Field Marshal Asim Munir as continuing that tradition. Pakistani officials, he added, are also unembarrassed about flattering Washington when it serves them: they credited Trump with the India-Pakistan ceasefire and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, while New Delhi declined to.

What it means for India

Sawhney was blunt about India's position. He said he has argued for about four years that Indian foreign policy is built on an outdated picture of a unipolar world, when three great powers now matter and two of them, Russia and China, are next door while the United States is 12,000 kilometres away. India's foreign policy, he said, is fixed by ideology as much as by interest: the same ideological gap that keeps relations with Pakistan from normalising, in his view, also draws the government toward Israel.

He was sceptical of backchannel diplomacy with Pakistan, calling Track 2 and Track 3 discussions meaningless. The first real step, he said, would be restoring both countries' High Commissions to full strength. He was equally pessimistic about relations with China: flights and trade may resume, but he expects little investment without mutual trust, because India has chosen to see China as a rival. He also noted that China's Belt and Road links now reach every South Asian state except India and Bhutan, which he took as a sign that China is now part of South Asia, not an outsider to it.

The cost, he told the host, falls on ordinary Indians, and he expects the policy to persist as long as the present government does. The conversation ended without a prediction that anything would change, only a claim that the world already has.