Pepe Escobar
Don't miss it: read it preferably before Trump's announcement tonight.
- The China-Pakistan statement on the war.
- What the Muslim Quad is really up to.
- What the death cult in West Asia really wants.
- All the cracks in the GCC's glitzy walls.
https://sovereignista.com/2026/04/01...an-gcc-riddle/
https://x.com/RealPepeEscobar/status...33310351618495
https://sovereignista.com/2026/04/01...an-gcc-riddle/
Pepe Escobar : The China-Pakistan-GCC riddle
amarynth
No one is betting that most GCC petro-monarchies in West Asia have seen which way the wind is blowin’.
Strategic Culture
China and Pakistan released a joint 5-points statement on the war on Iran that at face value might be considered as lame as it gets.
Immediate ceasefire & humanitarian access to all affected areas.
Early peace talks; respect for sovereignty of Iran & Gulf states; diplomacy over force.
Protection of civilians & non-military infrastructure under international law.
Security of shipping lanes, especially the Strait of Hormuz.
Strengthening role of the United Nations and a UN Charter-based peace framework.
For all of Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar’s unbounded enthusiasm, this sounds like a cliché collection with no bite. Dar heavily spun that both the US and Iran expressed their “confidence” in Pakistan’s mediation. That’s extremely debatable.
A feasible scenario: China was not convinced at all by anything discussed by a Quad – the Foreign Ministers of Pakistan, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia and Egypt – meeting in Islamabad. So Dar had to rush to Beijing to answer some tough questions.
Most of all, China could not possibly risk becoming the guarantor of a non-plan which will certainly be bombed by the Baboon of Barbaria in no time.
Of course there’s way more to it. But that will have to be discussed strictly between China and Iran. Dar had to run to Beijing because Tehran simply does not entirely trust Pakistan, not to mention the Turks and the Arabs. For anything meaningful to happen, Iran needs serious guarantees from China.
Previously, the Iranian government – with all its ministers – had responded to the 15-point US letter sent via Pakistan (in fact another intimation to surrender). They rejected all the US points and asserted the right to enrich uranium; continue developing its missile systems; request compensation for the unlawful war; and a lasting end of the war guaranteed by the UN.
Then there’s another intriguing scenario. The vague final statement might be interpreted as an opening for China to step in and mould the post-American Persian Gulf.
Pakistan’s Army Chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, the strongman of the current regime, has the Baboon of Barbaria on speed dial. This was Ishaq Dar’s second trip to China in 3 months. He was on the phone several times recently with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
So how did we get here?
What is this Muslim Quad really up to
To be blunt, Egypt geopolitically is a non-entity; and to make matters worse, did less than nothing about the horrendous Gaza genocide. Egypt and Pakistan can be seen in several aspects as vassals of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which are vassals of the combo US-death cult in West Asia (but that, in the case of Saudi, may be about to change).
There was vast spin that the meeting in Islamabad was coordinated by a “Sunni Axis”. Stratospheric nonsense. What really matters is that all of them back the death cult in West Asia; for instance, as in Turkiye continuing backdoor trade despite an “official” ban.
The interlocked relations of these four Muslim nations is complex. Pakistan and Iran share a tricky border: Sistan-Balochistan in Iran, Balochistan in Pakistan, this one crammed with CIA/MI6 infiltrated/weaponized actors such as the Balochistan Liberation Movement, BLM.
Islamabad has a defense pact with Riyadh, signed in September last year; yet that does not mean Pakistan would help Saudi against Iran, which is being illegally bombed by foreign actors. Everybody even in the Baloch deserts knows that if Iran falls, Pakistan is next.
Turkiye’s Fidan – who harbors presidential ambitions – is essentially an Atlanticist. Both Pakistan and Egypt are de facto run by two Zionist-linked generals. And then, to complicate matters, the Baboon of Barbaria, in public, called MbS an ass-kisser: nothing in the Arab world can possibly be more humiliating than that.
The Islamabad Quad met just as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait were “privately urging” the Baboon of Barbaria to go all out against Iran. That instantly changed after the “kiss my ass” gambit.
Now the GCC is already broken. Oman and Qatar declared themselves neutral – and won’t antagonize Iran. Riyadh, after Islamabad, came up with something quite bombastic. MbS has already started to exact his revenge: “We will no longer purchase American weapons.” Translation: one side of the larger than life petrodollar scam is already collapsing. The other side is collapsing in the Strait of Hormuz.
It was obvious even before Islamabad that Iran will not consider any US demands relayed via the Quad. Only via China.
Chinese diplomacy is always mastering sophisticated understatement. And caution. It was China that brokered the diplomatic agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Beijing: Wang Yi was there to give the imprimatur. But that, in fact, never really came together in practice.
Beijing simply cannot risk guaranteeing any peace initiative alone because they cannot trust the Trump administration nor the genocidal psycho killers in Tel Aviv.
The only reasonable path forward would be a sort of non-aggression pact fully guaranteed by the five permanent members of the Security Council; and even that could be bombed by the Baboon of Barbaria whenever his whims dictate.
Pitting Persians, Arabs, Turks, Kurds against each other
Islamabad’s ambition is boundless. They dream of facilitating a Hormuz framework – already being engineered by Tehran – with Beijing as de facto guarantor, thus at the same time solidifying Chinese influence across the Persian Gulf while Pakistan collects the strategic dividend of becoming a key geopolitical partner in West Asia.
But there’s a catch. Neither Iran nor China need Pakistan for an Hormuz framework. That’s already in effect: Iran’s parliament has already approved legislation to make the toll booth permanent – with a tiered system where Tehran collects fees in yuan and passage is allowed for everyone except US and Israeli-linked vessels.
Everyone in West Asia knows what the death cult wants: total Divide and Rule, pitting Persians, Turks, Arabs and Kurds against each other. Essentially, the blow up of West Asia – with the proverbial, incited Sunni-Shi’ite sectarian tensions widening to the point of involving Pakistan, all to the benefit of that ghastly concoction, Eretz Israel.
Assuming the war would end with a negotiated settlement – absolutely out of the question as it stands – Pakistan would profit immensely: the perpetually-stalled Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas pipeline, blocked by US sanctions, would finally come to light.
Then there’s the Gwadar angle – the Pakistani port in the Arabian Sea which is a counterpart of the Iranian port of Chabahar in the Sea of Oman, only 80 km away. Gwadar is 400 km away from the Strait of Hormuz. Gwadar is the southwest maritime terminal of the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship New Silk Roads/BRI project.
A Gwadar boom will allow Pakistan to develop refining, storage, and transit infrastructure connecting it with Iran’s energy flows. Translation; further integration between West Asia and South Asia. No wonder the Americans will do everything to prevent it – as much as they are bombing nodes of another key connectivity corridor, the Russia-Iran-India International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
Cracks on the GCC’s glitzy walls
The GCC is fracturing in real time. The UAE – an artificial construct, carved out by the Brits of lands belonging to the Sultanate of Oman – for all practical purposes has entered the American War on Iran. No culture. No History. Only a bling bling money laundering machine – which may be destined to extinction, or a return to Oman.
MbS, for his part, has already started to exact his revenge: and what he wants is definitely not what MbZ in Abu Dhabi wants. Iran, for its part, has already established, via ballistic missiles, the ability to devastate GCC petro-monarchies which insist on hosting US bombing raids.
And still, endless rabid vociferation and tweaking of narratives aside, there does not seem to exist any realistic possibility for the unhinged criminal psychopath incarnating the Presidency of the United States to find an honorable way out from his war.
He needs to pay back his selected billion-dollar Zionist donors; he needs a distraction from the Epstein files; yet at the same time there are signs he is “bored”; ready to ditch the GCC petro-monarchies; ready to declare Mission Accomplished; and ready to change the narrative again – as in attacking Cuba.
China and the Global South, in contrast, are fully aware that Iran’s Sovereign Resistance is now configured as the ultimate game-changer.
Geography is destiny, as much as History is geography in motion: Iran is the key crossroads and logistics maritime/landbridge connecting Russia, all of Asia, West Asia, Europe and Africa. China, Russia and the momentarily-in-deep-coma BRICS-plus cannot afford not to back Iran. Because the entire future of a possible global multipolarity hinges on a surviving, thriving, Sovereign, Resistance-reinforced Iran.
Yet, as it stands, no one is betting that most GCC petro-monarchies in West Asia have seen which way the wind is blowin’.
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