At Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral, President Trump said Graham “never saw a war that he didn’t like.” It was a fitting epitaph for a man who, before his death, had already dismissed Pakistan’s peacemaking efforts between the United States and Iran as “problematic.” Now that the ceasefire has crumbled, critics are circling the same question: Did Pakistan fail? But that is the wrong question. The right one is far more uncomfortable. Why do we expect a mediator to guarantee a peace that the warring parties themselves are not ready to keep?

To appreciate how unfair that expectation is, consider how rarely peace has been guaranteed even by the most powerful actors on the world stage. After the devastation of World War I, the League of Nations was created to mediate tensions, but it lacked both “carrots and sticks,” meaning incentives and punishments, to actually enforce peace. Later, during the Cold War, a superpower like the United States could use genuine carrots and sticks. A classic example is the Camp David Accords of 1979, where Washington offered massive financial incentives to Egypt and Israel, payments that continue to this day. As Asfandyar Mir of the Stimson Centre has noted, the attributes that made a country geopolitically influential in that era were settled: major-power status, economic weight, liberal normative credentials, and the authority to convene other major states. Even with all those advantages, no mediator has ever been able to permanently lock in a peace that the parties themselves could not sustain.

The next time a phone rings in Islamabad with the world holding its breath, it will do so because Pakistan kept the line open when others had no access.

The next time a phone rings in Islamabad with the world holding its breath, it will do so because Pakistan kept the line open when others had no access.

Even in the American unipolar moment after the Soviet Union collapsed, Washington remained the lead mediator, including in South Asian conflicts........

© Daily Times