Vijay Prashad, Zulfiqar Ali: Pakistan’s 6 Corridors Are Keeping Iran Alive; Why Won’t America Sanction Pakistan?

by Transition Protocol(opens in new tab) [8-21-2026].

Trump's people tried to buy an Iranian general — and were refused. In this episode, Vijay Prashad joins Zulfiqar Ali to explain why the United States cannot win, cannot exit, and cannot even discipline Pakistan, the one country keeping Iran's economy alive. Pakistan has opened at least five land corridors into Iran — six, per our reporting — carrying Chinese and other Asian goods across the border, and Washington has not sanctioned a single one of the companies involved, including military-backed firms, while continuing to sell arms to the same military. The reason is simple: Islamabad is the last functioning channel the US has into Tehran.

We also take the war's stated cause apart. The IAEA logged 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to 60% before the strikes, but there is no confirmed weapons-design programme, no nuclear test, and — as Prashad states plainly — no international "weaponization clock" of any kind. Steve Witkoff's "11 bombs" figure was never an IAEA assessment. If the capacity was destroyed, why is the campaign still running? Because this was a regime-change war on the Iraq 2003 template, minus ground troops — and this time the government did not fall. Meanwhile Israel, which pushed for the war in the Situation Room, has left the table entirely and Washington is holding the file alone.

Then the part that reaches your wallet: the real prize was never Iran, it was the dollar. Gulf oil priced in renminbi would shrink the eurodollar market and constrain America's ability to run limitless deficits — which is why, as Prashad notes, Marco Rubio once admitted on television that de-dollarization would strip Washington of its instrument of punishment. Sanctions are already dead across Afghanistan and much of Central Asia, and the hawala system is being re-institutionalized in place of SWIFT. Vijay Prashad is a historian, journalist and director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, joining from Santiago. Zulfiqar Ali reports from sources in Pakistan and Tehran. Some claims in this episode are single-source and are labelled as such on screen — we attribute rather than assert. Transition Protocol: source-driven analysis of the shifting global order. Substack at the same name, twice weekly.