All great wars are existential. They are reshaping the way people live, think, compete and consume. The 20th century understood this after the two world wars and their horrors. The safeguards collectively built to prevent conflicts and their tragic consequences have since broken down into a postmodern strategic cauldron of new wars that we witness with horror. Their strategic, political and human costs are both calculated and contested in real time.
Machine learning, automation, precision mass options, cybernetic, space and information systems have all entered the mix of postmodern arsenals to wreak a new arc of potentially irreversible havoc, compounded by existing hardware on the map of a world on fire. Aircraft carriers and elite stealth bombers strike alongside low-cost unmanned craft in the air and on the water. Supply chains, energy lifelines, water, food and public truths now compete for blood and treasure in every measure of limited and potential losses.
The 21st century is almost as violent as the terrible century that preceded it. In addition to the 61 active conflicts that define human experience worldwide, the war in West Asia has shifted global action to the most strategic geopolitical theater. Hormuz’s chokepoint economy asserts its central role at the heart of global oil disruption, while future investments built around stability in the GCC are challenged by a hardline Iran and its escalating war with Israel and its patrons, primarily the United States. GCC states rely on the blocked strait to import food and export oil, while oil-importing economies around the world continue to brace for the impact of war prices, transport surcharges, and even rationing of petroleum products.
For now, Tehran has locked in its management of the strait and, by its stated position, will not give up its options, even if the war escalates in a way that imposes formidable costs. At the same time, a rapid spiral of strategic volatility is setting new benchmarks for regional and global peril in more ways than one. Although it will eventually be rebuilt, the bombing of US bases in neighboring Gulf countries has opened the door to a new fragility of geopolitical trust based on hydrocarbons, Western protection and siled predictability. For the main combatants, notions of sovereignty and staying power will likely determine outcomes rather than clear victories. Unthinkable tactical deployments also fill the new landscape as warfare options in the realm of a dangerous new normal.
Yet major impacts and emergency responses take up most of the public’s oxygen in this war. Peace has lost its luster in times of historical rupture. The rules that protected the weak have taken a sabbatical. It is not just the traditionally vulnerable cohorts of the poor, displaced women and lost children, who constitute the collateral damage of this conflict. This time it is the air, soil and water that we regularly hope will be replenished or available as global commons and which are at serious risk of contamination, irradiation and shortage.
In Tehran, the black rain is a grim marker of the looming crisis that will follow this greatest disruption of oil supply lines in history. Experts say this means carcinogenic compounds, ultrafine particles and PAHs have already found their way into acid rain, which is just the tip of the dark iceberg. This will not only affect Iran. The environmental crisis could have catastrophic consequences for ocean shores, marine life and even drinking water in a region that relies on seawater via desalination plants. The toxins will seep into the soil, causing untold damage to the quality of groundwater and the foods grown there.
Warnings are everywhere. The Conflict and Environment Observatory warns that a high incidence of missile and aerial activity, as well as attacks on energy infrastructure, are creating cross-border public health impacts that will continue well after the war ends. The scale and enormity of contemporary wars are so staggering that they defy estimation of their long-term damage. The risks also don’t measure up to the dangers of a staggering burn rate of carbon emissions. Since emissions from war are not included in the Paris Agreement, the calculations on global warming are already far from reality in a world that is speeding past its climate tipping points. Just to provide context, GHG emissions linked to the war in Ukraine during its first two years reached the totality of France’s annual emissions.
All these calculations are important for Pakistan, which suffers direct consequences with cooking temperatures reaching 53 degrees Celsius in summer. Although “scorched earth” has been a tactical ploy used from the earliest iron arrowheads in human conflicts, noncombatants in today’s accelerated war will suffer in ways they have not suffered in conventional wars. Today, despite quantum technological advances, instead of conserving water, soil and air, new weapons and AI almost guarantee that their lethality is increased to the point of elegant agnosticism of lack of consequences. In this amoral multiverse, the environment becomes a vast theater of occasional collateral damage. In development terms, this means more hunger, more scarcity, more inequality, more sick people without a safety net. Certainly not the prosperous future presented at conferences with big LED screens and beautiful white flowers.
For Pakistan, which shares a coastline with Iran and is close to the Gulf countries, the dangers are real, but will continue to be considered third-tier threats until the coastline turns oily or the air in Karachi takes on a dark, gray hue. In either case, there is little Islamabad can do immediately except treat resilience as a multidimensional challenge, with climate performance criteria for all strategic ministries. In the short term, in the hierarchy of disruptions caused by this war, Pakistan’s threshold of anxiety will be common to many countries facing future reckonings at the gas pump and gas stoves. It won’t just be a transportation crisis. Or LNG deficits. Diesel shortages in food-growing countries like Pakistan can have a huge impact on the next planting season.
While the government works to protect the public from further suffering, a prolonged war of attrition in the Gulf – even with reduced levels of violence – will be problematic. All the executive’s room for maneuver will be devoted to maintaining a regime of exchange stability, covering essential imports and managing oil stocks. So far, Pakistan has cushioned extreme impacts, but exposure to exogenous shocks will be difficult to contain if the war lasts 60 days.
In this whirlwind of global strategic crises, Pakistan’s challenges are complex. Even without war, the line between America’s choices and an indestructible relationship with China has not been easy. Today, its diplomacy is tested daily between neighborhood constraints with Iran, vital defense pacts and economic ties with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, exposure to remittances in the GCC, large domestic Shia cohorts, kinetic pressures from an intransigent Taliban regime in Afghanistan, India’s predatory interference in Balochistan and KP, and lingering notions of legitimacy.
On the Pakistani street, no matter how pragmatic the government may be in making difficult choices for the greater public good, no foreign policy can be expected to be devoid of moral choice. The reported use of white phosphorus in Lebanon, the genocidal land grab and the trauma of Palestinians are not acceptable to anyone. Neither are attacks on a country’s sovereignty or the bombing of desalination plants.
This is why Pakistan was the first Muslim country to condemn such acts, including the tragic assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. Despite its vulnerability in multilateral forums controlled by the Bretton Woods financial establishment, Islamabad has not joined the ISF as a fighter but has also rightly condemned the recent attacks on GCC countries.
In a world where the fragile unity of the Muslim world has collapsed faster than a missile pod after an interception, Pakistan has been the longest in the front line defending the flag. A deep national commitment to the suffering of Muslims in occupied Kashmir and Palestine has pushed Islamabad to take consistent and clear stands against forced settlements in the two illegal gulags. However, the limits of Pakistani diplomacy must remain linked to the first overarching objective of any foreign policy, which is to protect its populations and not feed on justified anger or send troops at the risk of their lives. Our capabilities have been decisively demonstrated in the wars that have affected our airspace. Let’s keep this blue sky as long as possible.
The writer is a former Ambassador to the United States and Chairman of the Standing Committee on Climate in the Senate of Pakistan.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policies of PK Press Club.tv.
