In the gilded conference rooms of Islamabad, where Field Marshal Asim Munir has recently played host to American envoys and Iranian diplomats, one can almost hear the echoes of an older diplomatic theater – Oslo, Camp David, even Geneva in 1985. The cast is unknown, but the script is the same between the two. opponents who still cannot bring themselves to speak directly.
The proposition that the Washington commentariat is being asked to swallow whole is that Pakistan – that perpetually fragile and perpetually nuclear state on the Indus – is about to deliver what five decades of American citizenship could not.
Color me disobedient. Not because Pakistan has done nothing—it has done a lot, more than its opponents in New Delhi should admit—but because the very things that make Islamabad useful as a postman also limit what it can deliver as a peacemaker.
Consider first what Pakistan brings to the table, as the realist tradition requires that we start with capabilities rather than aspirations.
Pakistan shares a 900-kilometer border with Iran and has spent decades cultivating the difficult, transactional relationship that geography imposes on neighbors it would rather not be. It maintains fairly warm ties with Tehran, whose patience prevents Balochistan from becoming completely unmanageable.
It maintains close ties with Riyadh, whose checkbook keeps Pakistan’s lights on.
More importantly, in the era of Donald Trump’s second presidency, Pakistan has cultivated something more valuable than institutional partnerships: a personal rapport between Munir and the US president, who has reportedly taken to calling the field marshal his “favourite warrior”. In a White House where personality trumps process — so to speak — that matters.
It is also true, and worth conceding to Islamabad’s defenders, that Pakistan has already done something tangible. The April 8 ceasefire that halted the joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran following the attacks that killed Ayatollah Khamenei was not negotiated on its own.
Pakistani officials took the fifteen-point American proposal to Tehran in March. They hosted talks in Islamabad in April. They are now, as of this week, taking Iranian counter-proposals back to Washington as Trump publicly warns that talks are on the “borderline” between a deal and renewed attacks.
This is nothing. It is, in fact, much more than the European Union, the United Nations or the Gulf states have achieved.
But here we must distinguish—as Hans Morgenthau insisted we always must—between the mediator who facilitates and the mediator who provides.
Oslo didn’t succeed because the Norwegians were smart; it succeeded, as long as it did, because Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, each for his own structural reasons, had concluded that the existing arrangement had become more costly than compromise.
Egypt and Israel made peace at Camp David because Anwar Sadat had decided, after October 1973, that he could not afford another war, and Menachem Begin had decided that Sinai was negotiable in exchange for permanence elsewhere. Jimmy Carter and his team mattered, but they were the catalysts, not the cause.
What, then, are the structural conditions upon which Pakistan’s mediation must rest? Here the picture darkens significantly.
The American proposal — an end to Iran’s nuclear program, limits on its missile arsenal, the reopening of Hormuz, restrictions on its regional proxies, conditional sanctions relief — is essentially a demand for Iran’s strategic surrender, dressed up in the language of negotiations.
The Islamic Republic, even bloodied and leaderless, has been here before; it’s the same package Washington has put on the table since the Bush administration, with cosmetic tweaks. That Pakistan is the courier does not change what is in the envelope.
Meanwhile, Iran has used the ceasefire to do what wounded states always do when given a break: According to US military estimates, it has restored access to thirty of its thirty-three missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz and rebuilt its missile stockpile to roughly seventy percent of prewar levels.
Tehran’s hardliners – and after Khamenei’s assassination, moderates are an endangered species – are not preparing to capitulate. They are preparing for the next round. Pakistan cannot mediate this.
Nor should we forget the plight of Islamabad, which the city’s brokers rarely advertise to their American interlocutors.
Pakistan is simultaneously fighting a war on its Afghan border, managing an energy crisis exacerbated by the Hormuz rift and dealing with a public that doesn’t particularly want its government to do Washington’s bidding against a Muslim neighbor. The Munir government’s room for maneuver is narrower than the Atlantic Council’s panel discussions suggest.
The honest assessment, I think, is this:
Pakistan is performing the role of indispensable postman with skill and, by the standards of South Asian diplomacy, remarkable discretion. She deserves credit for keeping the channels open at a time when the alternative is American B-2s returning to Iranian skies.
But the structural distance between Washington’s maximalist demands and Tehran’s diminished but still defiant red lines is not one that any broker, however talented, can dispense with. Munir is no Henry Kissinger, and even Kissinger—let’s remember—needed Mao and Zhou Enlai to want the opening before he could engineer it.
If the Iran War ends in 2026, it will end because Trump, facing midterm elections and a domestic electorate angry about gasoline prices, decides he wants a “deal” he can sell as a victory, and because Tehran’s new leadership concludes that survival is worth more than percentages of enrichment.
Pakistan will be the country, maybe the handshake picture. It will not be the reason.
This is no small thing. But it’s not what the headlines promise, in their excitement.
This aITEM was originally published in Leon Hadar’s Global Zeitgeist and is reprinted with kind permission. Become a subscriber here.
