Rolling the Last Dice

By: Tahir Jamal Baig
In February 1995, the City of London awoke to a scandal that would become a textbook case in arrogance. Barings Bank — the venerable merchant bank that had financed the Napoleonic Wars and survived countless market storms — was felled by one man: Nicholas William Leeson, a 28 year old derivatives trader operating out of Singapore. Leeson was not a criminal mastermind. He was, in the truest sense, a gambler. His fatal wager was not just on futures contracts, but on the belief that he could bend reality to his will, double down on losses, and ride out the storm until fortune smiled again.
This time, Fortune did not smile. Nick Leeson began to lose heavily on Nikkei 225 futures. Rather than accept defeat, he doubled down — again and again — over three catastrophic days. By the time the dust settled, Leeson had lost more than the bank’s entire capital. Britain’s oldest merchant bank, older even the Bank of England, was sold for £1.
Every gambler walks into the casino believing they will leave richer than they arrived. The machine will yield, fortune will smile, and they will be the exception to the rule. Yet the entire business rests on a single, unbreakable truth: “the house always wins.”
The Leeson episode has been told as a cautionary tale for finance, but it’s logic extends far beyond the trading floor. The psychology of the highstakes gambler is unnervingly familiar to anyone who watches political life. Autocrats, like gamblers, survive on risk. They take positions, bluff opponents, stake reputations on improbable outcomes. And when their bets begin to sour, they are tempted — almost hardwired — to double down, convinced that just one more roll of the dice will vindicate them. In both arenas, the danger lies not in the initial gamble, but in the refusal to walk away.
Nations, too, often persuade themselves they can beat the odds. They convince themselves that fortune bends to their will, that they alone can outwit the system, that the final roll of the dice will deliver salvation.
History, however, is merciless to such illusions. The house — whether it be the immutable laws of mathematics, the ruthless logics of politics, or the cold & unforgiving lessons of statecraft — always wins in the end.
It is the same delusion that drove leaders into some of the 20th century’s most humiliating misadventures. In 1956, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden convinced himself he could out-smart both the United States and the Soviet Union by seizing back control of the Suez Canal. The result was a national humiliation that marked the formal end of Britain’s pretensions as a global superpower. Like Leeson, the Prime Minister Eden of Britain saw the early warning signs in the form of American disapproval, mounting diplomatic isolation — yet doubled down until the losses were unrecoverable.
Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal was similarly a gambler’s spiral. Faced with the risk of political exposure, Nixon’s team opted for a coverup. When the strategy began to crumble, they pressed harder, drawing ever more people into the conspiracy. It was the political equivalent of martingale strategy: keep doubling the stake to win back losses. In politics, as in gambling, it merely accelerated the collapse.
Donald Trump’s presidency was, in many ways, an extended exercise in transactional risktaking — the political equivalent of running a casino while sitting at the table yourself. His approach to foreign policy was pure dealmaker psychology: frame every negotiation as a zerosum game, keep the counterpart guessing, extract concessions before the other side realizes the odds.
Some deals yielded quick wins; others left bruised relationships and unresolved disputes. But like Leeson, Trump’s instinct was to keep the chips in play, rarely cashing out. The political base thrilled at the spectacle — the image of a leader “fighting for better terms” — but the diplomatic ledger revealed a pattern: concessions wrung at the cost of trust. In the casino of global politics, house rules dictate that damaged trust is the most expensive loss of all.
Pakistan’s establishment — the informal but decisive coalition of military brass, intelligence networks, and bureaucratic elites — has long fancied itself “the house” in the country’s political casino. It bankrolls certain players, curtails others, and believes it can always swap out a losing hand for a fresh one. The rise of Imran Khan seemed, at first, a promising wager: a charismatic populist with a celebrity aura, fluent in both the idioms of national pride and Western respectability.
Like Leeson’s early trading wins, Khan’s early political momentum was intoxicating. He delivered a populist surge that rattled traditional parties. The establishment read the moment as vindication — proof it could engineer a stable, pliable government under a new brand. But populists, once in power, are rarely pliable. Khan built his own political capital rapidly, often at the expense of those who had sponsored him. The establishment, instead of cashing in early or hedging the bet, let the gamble run — tolerating his confrontations with the media, judiciary, and foreign partners until the stakes became unmanageable.
When relations soured, the establishment tried to close the position abruptly, pushing Khan out through parliamentary maneuvers. But as any gambler knows, the exit is the riskiest moment. Khan, now cast as the wronged outsider, turned his political movement into an insurgency against the very power bloc that had once backed him. In political markets, as in financial ones, unwinding a highrisk position can trigger the very collapse one hoped to avoid.
“Failed state” is a term often tossed about with reckless ease. Generally, it describes a state unable to enforce law, deliver basic services, or command legitimacy. However, failure in technical terms, is measured through certain indicators: governance, security, economic stability, political legitimacy, and social cohesion.
Pakistan is far from total collapse — its state machinery still functions, its armed forces remain coherent, its bureaucracy still collects taxes and runs ports. Yet the phrase “failed state” persists in political discourse because it speaks to chronic dysfunction: an economy perpetually on the brink, governance that lurches from crisis to crisis, an establishment prone to highrisk political engineering, and a judiciary that oscillates between activism and acquiescence.
In political economy a failed state emerges, when a country burns political capital faster than it can replenish it, betting on shortterm fixes while structural weaknesses deepen. It is governance as a gambler’s creed: survive today’s table, ignore tomorrow’s debt.
Pakistan today stands in that gambler’s fog of delusion. Its ruling elite its elite raising the stakes after every loss, doubling down on failed strategies, convinced that the one last bold move will erase decades of misjudgment. But states, like banks, have a finite shelf life and Pakistan’s appears dangerously close to expiry. What follows is not merely the critique of a regime or a party, but an unflinching account of how a nation gambles away its very future.
The collapse, when it comes, is sudden but never inexplicable. By the time Barings’ losses surfaced, they were irreversible. By the time Nixon faced the “smoking gun” tape, his presidency was doomed. By the time Eden’s troops landed in Port Saeed, diplomatic defeat was inevitable. And by the time Pakistan’s establishment tried to cut loose its populist protégé, the narrative had already turned against them.