“You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate,” as Chester L. Karrass said, emphasizing that outcomes are shaped by negotiation rather than what one feels entitled to. After talks between the US and Iran broke down during talks in Islamabad, US military forces on Monday decided to block all ships trying to enter or leave Iranian ports, escalating tensions and creating a new dangerous standoff. With enough warships, the blockade could deter many tankers from trying to transport oil to and from Iran. But American forces would also have to be prepared to board and seize enemy ships that try to break the blockade.
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Asian shares were trading higher, tracking oil, which fell on Tuesday as expectations rose for a possible second round of US-Iran talks. Benchmark U.S. crude fell 1.7% to $97.37 a barrel early Tuesday. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 0.9% to $98.49 a barrel.
In an interview with Mint, Ausaf Sayeed, former secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs and ex-ambassador of India to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, shared his views on the Iran-US war, noting that the conflict has created a complex and evolving geopolitical situation.
(Edited excerpts)
How would you define effective negotiation and what in your assessment were the main reasons for the collapse of the peace talks in Islamabad?
Effective negotiation is not just the act of reaching an agreement—it is a structured process through which opposing parties gradually reduce mutual distrust, exchange credible positions, and create conditions in which a lasting settlement becomes politically possible for both sides.
Measured against this standard, the US-Iran peace talks in Islamabad cannot be dismissed as a “total failure”—an interpretation that is historically inaccurate and analytically misleading. The language of the two delegations as they left Islamabad made their intent unmistakable: to keep the door open to negotiations rather than allowing the process to end. That’s the grammar of stalled negotiation, not closed—and the difference matters. This process has begun and is unlikely to end here.
Could India have been a better mediator? If so, how?
In theory, India has several attributes that could qualify it as a credible mediator in international conflicts. Its doctrine of strategic autonomy allows it to maintain pragmatic, interest-based relations with a wide range of actors – including major powers and regional adversaries – without being perceived as affiliated with any bloc or ideological camp.
In practice, however, the prevailing conditions precluded this possibility. A mediator’s main asset is the ability to exert influence on both sides simultaneously—in this case, Washington and Tehran. By 2025, the broader trajectory of Indo-US relations under the second Trump administration had reached a low point, limited by punitive tariffs linked to Indian purchases of Russian oil, US intervention in Pakistan, and transactional pressures, all of which limited India’s influence in Washington. India’s high-profile engagement with Tel Aviv immediately prior to the US-Israeli attacks on Iran ruled out its perceived neutrality in Iranian eyes.
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Meanwhile, India’s Tehran Canal has been operationally disrupted since sanctions-era oil imports were halted in 2019, and very limited progress on the Chabahar project offered little basis for restoring confidence. India thus lacked meaningful influence on both principles – the exact opposite of what effective mediation requires.
The deeper problem is historical. India’s mediation credentials are almost exclusively confined to the Nehruvian era and the nonalignment framework: the Korean War ceasefire, the Suez crisis and the Indochina conflict.
Since then, India has not replicated comparable standalone or leading multilateral mediation initiatives on the global stage.
Assuming US-Iran negotiations remain on hold and the current ceasefire expires, what are the most likely short- and long-term scenarios for regional security, nuclear proliferation risks, and potential escalation in the Middle East?
The consequences of the collapse of the Islamabad talks did not remain merely theoretical. Although negotiations broke down, the United States proceeded to impose a naval blockade targeting Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz.
The broader structural consequence is the accelerated erosion of American primacy in the region. The Gulf says that for the first time in history, absorbing Iranian strikes on its own soil is already diversifying its security dependence on China and intra-regional arrangements — a shift in orientation that the destabilizing blockade will only hasten.
From India’s perspective, how could the failure of these US-Iran talks affect India’s energy security, given our historical dependence on Iranian oil and our strategic infrastructure projects like the Chabahar port?
India is at the uneasy intersection of three converging pressures: rising global oil prices driven by ongoing conflict, a disrupted Iranian oil supply chain and Chabahar port an investment whose future is held hostage by Washington’s sanctions architecture. Higher oil prices, more expensive cooking gas and disruptions in remittances affecting millions of Indians working in the Persian Gulf translate directly into inflation, fiscal stress and political pressure at home. These are not abstract strategic interests – they carry concrete domestic consequences.
The situation in Chabahar is particularly precarious.
India signed a 10-year operating agreement in 2024 committing $370 million to the project, with $120 million already deployed — only to find that a waiver of US sanctions protecting that investment expired in April 2026. India is now seeking an extension while signaling a retreat: Union Budget 2026 skipped Chabahar financing for the very first time in over a decade, a telling indicator of how far US pressure has unsettled India’s strategic calculus. The port’s value as India’s only viable connectivity corridor to Afghanistan and Central Asia, bypassing Pakistan, far outweighs its commercial metrics – its loss would be a strategic setback of the first order. The same regional instability also clouds the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), leaving both of India’s main connectivity ambitions in doubt.
India’s energy response is to diversify towards Saudi, Emirati, Russian and American suppliers – a pragmatic but costly hedge. Russian oil, India’s largest import source after 2022, is now facing further pressure through US secondary sanctions that are stifling the very diversification strategy India has relied on. The honest assessment is that India has no cost-free alternative to Iran’s combination of proximity, favorable prices and payment flexibility – and each substitute comes with its own geopolitical costs.
In an emerging multipolar world, how should India adjust its foreign policy to balance relations with the United States, Iran and other key players after this diplomatic setback while protecting its strategic autonomy and interests in the Persian Gulf and the Indo-Pacific?
The central challenge for India’s foreign policy after the failure in Islamabad is to translate its well-established tradition of strategic autonomy into a principled, purposeful posture that advances India’s interests in a rapidly changing world. Strategic autonomy remains a sound basic principle—but a maturing multipolar order will increasingly reward nations that complement it with enduring institutional relationships and functional leverage across multiple arenas.
India’s most pressing foreign policy imperative is to negotiate a long-term, institutionalized exemption from Chabahar sanctions with Washington—not to overturn short-term exemptions that subordinate a grand strategic project to the rhythm of American domestic politics.
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This requires asserting India’s role as a leading Indo-Pacific partner in the sense that Washington understands it: Chabahar as a counterweight to Chinese influence in Central Asia and as a stabilizing presence in post-conflict Iran. At the same time, India must invest in the restoration of the Tehran Canal through tacit economic engagement and multilateral frameworks such as BRICS that provide a structured space for bilateral normalization.
The opportunity goes beyond Iran. The security vacuum created by the US-Iran conflict has opened up a new space in the Persian Gulf and prompted the GCC states to actively restructure their external partnerships. India—with its large labor diaspora, growing defense-industrial capacity, and non-threatening strategic profile—is well-positioned to deepen these bilateral ties on its own terms, rather than as an adjunct to Washington’s regional architecture. This does not require India to become anti-American; it requires India to be truly multi-directional. That difference—between multiple alignment and mere hedging—lies in institutional depth, and that’s exactly where India needs to invest now. For strategic autonomy to remain meaningful, it must rest on relationships capable of bearing weight, not merely on the absence of commitments.
What does the failure of the United States to secure a deal with Iran after intense direct talks reveal about American leverage and negotiating influence in today’s multipolar global order, and what lessons does it draw for powers like India?
The collapse of the Islamabad talks – intense, direct negotiations led by the US vice president – offers the most revealing stress test of US diplomatic power in a generation.
The underlying lesson is inconvenient but inescapable: military superiority, however overwhelming, cannot replace diplomatic strategy. Washington’s approach in Islamabad was not an aberration; was a logical expression of the coercive maximalism that had become increasingly reflexive in American foreign policy. Islamabad demonstrated with extraordinary clarity the limits of this reflex in a world no longer organized around a single dominant power.
For India, these lessons are not abstract – they are immediately applicable. The era of transactional deal-making and coercive bilateralism is generally yielding diminishing returns, even in India’s region and neighbourhood. Soft power, economic interdependence, and permanent institutional presence are proving to be more durable tools of influence than military leverage or pressure-based diplomacy.
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It follows that the willingness to build credible neutrality—to be seen as a trustworthy and principled actor by multiple parties simultaneously—is itself a form of strategic capital, finite and exhaustible, to be cultivated rather than assumed.
The host state of these talks acquired this capital simply by opening its doors; India, with its much larger structural assets, has allowed its peers to depreciate over years of selective adjustment. The multipolar order now taking shape will reward those who have built relationships deep enough to carry the weight when called upon. The question for India is no longer whether strategic autonomy is the right principle – it is whether the institutional architecture that gives it real meaning is being built with sufficient urgency. The answer is not a clear yes yet.
