Pakistan, April 14 -- No deal came out of Islamabad, and by the time the delegations were airborne, US President Donald Trump had already shifted the argument from the conference room to the sea, ordering a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz after the first direct, high-level US-Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution ended without agreement on the one question that swallowed everything else: Iran's nuclear programme.

That is the visible outcome. No second-guessing that. Of course, there's another that needs a harder, closer reading of the fine print. Pakistan did not produce a settlement in 21 hours. Yes, but it did produce something rarer in this neighbourhood, where diplomacy is usually treated as a public relations costume. It turned...