In the summer of 1971, a Pakistani military plane carried Henry Kissinger on a secret flight to Beijing. The trip helped unlock one of the Cold War’s most consequential diplomatic openings and briefly made Pakistan indispensable to global strategy. Islamabad asked for little in return beyond what it has long sought: relevance, and the material and political benefits that come with it.
Half a century later, Pakistan is attempting something similar: It is positioning itself as a backchannel between Washington and Tehran, balancing ties with a United States it formally partners with, a China whose strategic and financial patronage has anchored Pakistan’s military establishment since the 1960s, and an Iran it has historically viewed with caution. To some observers, this looks like deft diplomacy, while to others, it appears contradictory. Pakistan’s mediation instead is better understood as something more consistent and structural, a recurring strategy in which political and military elites convert geopolitical relevance into domestic survival.
Elite Dynamics
Since 1947, foreign policy in Pakistan has often functioned less as an expression of national consensus and more as a substitute for it. International positioning has allowed a narrow civil-military coalition to generate resources, prestige, and insulation from domestic pressure. Periods of internal instability have frequently coincided with moments of heightened external importance. The current mediation effort in the Iran war fits this pattern.
For Field Marshal Asim Munir and Pakistan’s military leadership, renewed relevance offers a way to reinforce its central role in state affairs at a time of domestic strain. Political polarization has intensified, with the establishment’s confrontation with PTI and the imprisonment of Imran Khan fracturing the civilian political landscape. Economic stress has mounted through successive IMF programs, a depreciating rupee, and inflation that has eroded living standards across income groups. Challenges from opposition movements have tested the military’s ability to manage dissent through its traditional tools of coercion and co-optation. Acting as a critical intermediary allows the military to reassert its indispensability both at home and abroad.
For the foreign policy establishment, high-visibility diplomacy brings more tangible returns. Engagement with major powers can translate into leverage in financial negotiations, including discussions with international lenders and partners. Even the perception of strategic importance can shape how external actors approach debt relief, aid flows, and economic cooperation. For the broader political class, participation in high level diplomacy provides a narrative of competence that can offset domestic shortcomings. International engagement becomes a way to demonstrate relevance and effectiveness, even as economic and governance challenges persist.
The common thread is not national strategy in the traditional sense, but self preservation. External engagement provides access to resources and political cover that are harder to generate through domestic performance alone. The pattern is not abstract: For example, when Pakistan mediated an opening between the US and China in 1971, Yahya Khan’s government used the resulting political cover to insulate the military from international accountability over East Pakistan. More recently, the 2008 and 2019 IMF bailouts arrived during heightened cooperation between Washington and Islamabad on regional security, but while civilian services were cut, the military’s budget remained protected and even augmented. For Pakistan and its civil-military institutions, the dividends of external relevance are used to defer, rather than invest in, structural reform.
“Pakistan’s mediation instead is better understood as something more consistent and structural, a recurring strategy in which political and military elites convert geopolitical relevance into domestic survival.”
Mediation as Resource Mobilization
This dynamic also helps explain why mediation efforts emerge at particular moments. Pakistan’s political system has long relied on external inflows, including security assistance, infrastructure financing, remittances, and multilateral support. These flows are often tied, directly or indirectly, to geopolitical positioning.
The contrast with Pakistan’s more precarious moments sharpens the argument. Between 2018 and 2022—as Washington deprioritized South Asia in favor of the Indo-Pacific, especially following its withdrawal from Afghanistan, and China slowed infrastructure financing—Pakistan navigated successive IMF programs with diminished geopolitical leverage. What changed in 2025 was not Pakistan’s strategic ambitions; rather, the external environment created space for an offer that had been made before. Indeed, as early as 2019, Imran Khan explicitly attempted to position himself as the mediator between Washington and Tehran. The effort then yielded no results, not because of Pakistan’s unwillingness to play that role, but because neither party was ready. Mediation is thus not opportunistic improvisation, but a standing strategy that activates when external conditions allow.
Recent diplomatic activity illustrates this pattern. High level contacts with Washington, outreach to Tehran, and engagement with Beijing all serve to reinforce Pakistan’s image as a necessary interlocutor. Each interaction carries symbolic and practical value. Symbolically, it signals that Pakistan remains relevant in a shifting geopolitical landscape. Practically, it strengthens the case for continued external support.
What appears as peacemaking abroad can also generate political capital at home. Diplomatic visibility can be presented as evidence of effective leadership, even when domestic indicators tell a more difficult story. Indeed, with Pakistan’s inflation climbing back toward double digits as the Iran war drives up energy and transport costs, consumer confidence plummeting to near historic lows, and poverty affecting more than a fifth of the population, foreign policy in this case can also be performed for domestic audiences.
A Pattern with a Precedent
The historical parallel with Pakistan’s greatest historical mediation effort in 1971 is instructive, but it should be understood carefully. Pakistan’s role in facilitating U.S.-China rapprochement brought significant short-term prestige and strategic importance, a USD $100 million US aid loan, a waiver on the existing arms embargo, and sustained American political cover as the East Pakistan crisis unfolded. It also coincided with a period in which the country’s military leadership faced limited external scrutiny over its actions in East Pakistan. The benefits of international relevance did not resolve underlying political crises for the civilian-military establishment. If anything, they helped postpone the consequences for the government of the erstwhile West Pakistan.
Today’s mediation efforts may produce similar short-term gains: Increased international visibility, renewed engagement with major powers, and potential economic relief are all plausible outcomes. But as long as structural economic weaknesses, political fragmentation, and imbalances in civil-military relations remain unresolved, these benefits are unlikely to address the deeper issues that make such strategies necessary in the first place.
“Overestimating Pakistan’s neutrality or underestimating its domestic constraints can lead to misplaced expectations.”
What This Means for Washington
There is also a broader implication for how external actors interpret Pakistan’s role. For policymakers in Washington and elsewhere, it is tempting to view Islamabad as a neutral broker capable of facilitating dialogue between adversaries. But mediation is shaped by the incentives of those who undertake it, and in Pakistan’s case, those incentives may not always align with rapid conflict resolution. Sustained relevance, after all, can be as valuable as successful resolution. If geopolitical importance is tied to the persistence of crises, then there may be less incentive to bring those crises to a definitive close. This does not mean that Pakistan seeks instability for its own sake—especially given its extant vulnerabilities to a conflict with Iran, in which domestic politics, sectarian tensions, internal security, and economic pressures are already implicated—but it does suggest that its engagement is conditioned, in some part, by a need to remain indispensable.
Understanding this logic is critical. Overestimating Pakistan’s neutrality or underestimating its domestic constraints can lead to misplaced expectations. Engagement can still be useful, but it should be approached with a clear sense of the underlying dynamics. Pakistan can open doors between adversaries; it has done so before, and it may do so again. But the reasons it occupies this role are rooted less in diplomatic exceptionalism than in the internal structure of its political system. If external relevance substitutes for domestic legitimacy, mediation will remain a strategy of survival domestically as much as a pathway to peace abroad.
Should U.S.-Iran talks collapse, the historical record offers a sobering guide. In 1971, the political cover generated by Pakistan’s role in the U.S.-China opening did not survive the collapse of the domestic bargain it was meant to protect. Today, a failed mediation would not unravel the gains Pakistan has already made. The Pakistani military leadership has already demonstrated its international relevance, and IMF engagement continues regardless of the outcome. The more likely consequences are a return to the precarious baseline: diminished leverage, renewed pressure from lenders, and a political establishment that must again generate legitimacy through domestic performance it has struggled to deliver.
Whether the current moment leads to meaningful de-escalation between Washington and Tehran will depend largely on decisions made in those capitals. That is ultimately why the Islamabad channel matters beyond this particular crisis. It is a reminder that for Pakistani elites, the goal has never been to solve crises that make them indispensable, but to be present when the next one arrives.
Views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
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