Pakistan Won the War in Iran

On April 7, as the deadline approached for U.S. President Donald Trump’s ultimatum to the Iranian government to open the Strait of Hormuz or face the destruction of “a whole civilization,” a Pakistani general placed a phone call that helped avert disaster. Field Marshal Asim Munir—the chief of Pakistan’s army, the country’s most powerful institution—pressed Trump and Iran’s surviving leadership to stop the war. Within hours, Washington and Tehran announced a cease-fire. Trump and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi publicly thanked Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Days later, U.S. Vice President JD Vance sat across from Iranian negotiators in Islamabad for more than 20 hours, the highest-level direct contact between the two countries since the 1979 revolution.

The future of the resulting cease-fire, and the formal truce and plans for a broader settlement that followed, is now deeply uncertain. But Pakistan’s mediation was nevertheless a remarkable development. For most of the postwar era, the attributes that made countries geopolitically influential were settled: they included major-power status, economic weight, liberal normative credentials, and convening authority over other major states. At no point during its history did Pakistan meet these criteria. It was a nuclear-armed country on the fringes of the Western order, associated more often with regional instability than with conflict resolution, with a limited economy and few liberal democratic bona fides. And yet, during the most dangerous Middle East crisis in a generation, Pakistan did what China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and other geopolitical heavyweights could not.

Islamabad’s efforts are emblematic of a broader shift in global politics. A disordered international system shaped by multipolar competition is starting to reward different kinds of states that lack traditional geopolitical credentials. With the United Nations and other multilateral bodies proving unable to mitigate modern conflicts, nontraditional powers, including Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, and others, are beginning to fill the gaps by engaging in order-stabilizing statecraft. The ability of these states to foster trust across geopolitical blocs and open channels of communication between adversaries who cannot or choose not to engage has allowed them to mediate hostage and prisoner releases, negotiate the opening of commercial corridors, and open meaningful political dialogue, all in service of managing conflicts before they spiral out of control. In the coming decade, this type of statecraft will make them invaluable geopolitical assets.

Not all of these states will pass the litmus tests the United States typically uses to sort partners, such as democratic credentials, liberal governance, or political distance from China. Washington may believe that it should rely only on established allies and partners who share its values and strategic objectives in its competition with Beijing. But if the United States wants to keep itself out of costly conflicts around the world, it may have no choice but to forge closer ties with the new stabilizing powers.

MEDIATING THE MOMENT

In his second term, Trump has largely dispensed with the conventions of traditional American diplomacy: its emphasis on alliances, multilateral institutions, and the promotion of liberal values abroad. But even before his return to the White House, the limits of the traditional diplomatic toolkit had become evident. The instruments the United States and its allies have used to influence partners and compel adversaries—alliance structures, military aid, economic sanctions, summits, appeals to international law—have proved insufficient to end the wars of this era. Neither the most comprehensive Western sanctions regime ever assembled against a major economy nor billions of dollars in military assistance have forced an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, now in its fifth year. Israel and Hamas repeatedly defied multiple rounds of U.S. pressure and UN Security Council diplomacy, prolonging the war in Gaza for nearly three years. Western naval coalitions were unable to stop the Houthis from launching missiles at ships passing through the Red Sea, disrupting trade in one of the world’s most important commercial arteries.

The war in Iran was the latest example of the failure of major powers to stop conflicts. European powers, despite suffering dire economic effects from Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, contributed little to the war’s termination beyond perfunctory statements of concern. China, having brokered the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023 and having long touted its military and economic inroads into the Middle East, nevertheless stayed on the sidelines. Even India, with its self-proclaimed multialigned foreign policy, declined a role. Into this void stepped Pakistan.

A few increasingly valuable attributes made Islamabad an effective mediator between Tehran and Washington, with whom it is neither a treaty ally nor an adversary. For one, it was able to hold meaningful relationships across divides that traditional powers cannot. Pakistan maintains a strategic relationship with China while also consistently seeking one with the United States, even when Washington has refused out of deference to India. It is tightly aligned with Saudi Arabia but also tied to Iran by geographical proximity and religious affiliation. That cross-cutting position made Pakistan useful to Washington and Tehran when each needed a party the other could accept as an intermediary.

Islamabad also had leverage in the form of credible coercive power. A mutual defense pact between Islamabad and Riyadh meant that when Iran began firing missiles at targets across the Gulf, Pakistan could have intervened in defense of Saudi Arabia if the conflict had escalated. Pakistani participation, in turn, could have catalyzed other Muslim-majority states, most of which were either hedging or showing restraint in their responses to Iranian attacks, to fully enter the war. That prospect, much more than the American and Israeli strikes, would have threatened the existence of the Iranian regime and Iran’s regional position, since Tehran would have been isolated in the Muslim world.

Leverage and flexible relationships, however, would have meant little without leaders willing to accept the political risks of using them. Leaders stake their credibility on successful mediation, and they may incur domestic political costs and damage to their foreign relationships if their attempts fail. Most leaders of traditional powers, bound by the bureaucratic structures of the foreign ministries beneath them, are too risk-averse to attempt this kind of principal-led geopolitical brokerage. But Pakistan’s leadership fit the bill. Munir was willing to expend political capital on an uncertain diplomatic opening, believing that Trump could still be amenable to negotiating an end to hostilities in the region.

For most of the past two decades, Pakistan was in no position to take on such a role. The country’s part in the U.S. war on terror was a source of persistent friction between Islamabad and Washington. The relationship deteriorated further when the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. By the time Munir took command of the army in 2022—which made him Pakistan’s de facto leader—many analysts believed Pakistan was in terminal drift. Its relationship with the United States had not recovered, its domestic politics were still in turmoil, its economy neared default, and it faced a metastasizing insurgency backed by Afghanistan’s new Taliban regime.

But Munir managed to steer a different course, particularly in international affairs. He rebuilt the relationship with Washington. The May 2025 war with India proved a turning point in this effort. Pakistan stood its ground and counterpunched against its much bigger adversary, helping Munir win Trump’s appreciation and, with it, a warmer, more personal rapport than any Pakistani leader has had with a U.S. president in a generation. He signed the mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia and strengthened diplomatic channels with Iran, further elevating Islamabad’s regional standing and expanding its access.

BETTER BRANCH OUT

Pakistan is not the only nontraditional power now practicing order-stabilizing statecraft. Qatar, which hosts both Hamas’s political bureau and the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, mediated a cease-fire and the release of hostages and prisoners between Hamas and Israel. In the same conflict, Egypt leveraged its control of the Rafah crossing—the main conduit for aid into and refugees out of Gaza—to press both sides toward a deal. Turkey used its ties to Washington and Hamas and its standing in the Muslim world to shape the terms of the Gaza truce and, before that, exploited its rare ability to talk to both Moscow and Kyiv to host the negotiations among Russia, Ukraine, the UN, and others that yielded the Black Sea grain deal and averted a global food crisis. De-escalation of the Houthis’ attacks on ships passing through the Red Sea came through discreet diplomacy by Saudi Arabia and Oman.

The United States cannot afford to ignore this trend. U.S. foreign policy has long been organized around the courtship of allies and partners: NATO members, Asian treaty partners, a small circle of regional pillars. That alliance-centric architecture, anchored in shared values, served the United States well during the Cold War and the unipolar decades that followed, when a more settled international order kept conflicts local. The United States worked with countries outside its core circle of allies and partners in this period, but it tended to treat such relationships as outliers—transactional, provisional, and secondary to its alliances. Even today, Washington may be tempted to file away Pakistan’s role in brokering the cease-fire with Iran as a useful but minor episode, especially if the truce fully collapses.

But as both the Biden and Trump administrations have learned at great cost, modern conflicts cannot be walled off. Alliance-centric strategies, which promise that pooling the military and economic weight of many states will deter threats and, if necessary, defeat adversaries, have proved incapable of preventing or ending wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran. In a disordered world, that rigid approach is a liability. Creating pockets of stability requires flexibility of the kind practiced by Pakistan and its peers.

To foster relationships with these mediators, the United States must show the same willingness to cross divides that the mediators themselves have displayed. Until 2024, a near consensus in Washington held that because the United States needed strong ties with India to balance China, it would have to shut out Pakistan. Trump defied that logic and took a personal interest in the relationship with Islamabad. When the crisis came, that departure proved valuable.

It might also prove instructive. If the last decade is any guide, future presidents will also benefit from flexibility as they deal with new and long-running conflicts. European security remains unsettled and the Red Sea a vulnerable chokepoint. Even in the best possible case, the situation in Iran and the Gulf will continue to be volatile. A broad portfolio of relationships with mediator states that do not fit the familiar rubric of friends and foes will help the United States navigate these challenges. Washington should still have allies and partners in the traditional sense. But maintaining order will also depend on states well outside that circle.

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