The last 72 hours have acquired unusual significance. Against the backdrop of US-Israel aggression targeting Iran, Pakistan’s efforts to end the war and help the two sides work towards an agreement have reached a critical stage.
Through constant telephonic interaction with Washington’s principals, alongside the Tehran visit, Pakistan’s COAS-CDF Field Marshal Asim Munir has led the process, while Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the foreign minister have worked the political and diplomatic channels to build trust and understanding. The prime minister is on a three-nation visit to Saudi Arabia and Turkiye to keep key friends in the region informed and engaged.
Taken together, these moves suggest that Pakistan is no longer merely responding to developments in West Asia. Both principals acknowledge, publicly and privately, Pakistan’s extraordinary role as an active participant in peacemaking, not merely a facilitator. This matters because the central issue today is not simply that multilateralism is under strain. That is already evident. The more consequential question is whether, in a world marked by war, selective legality, strategic distrust and overlapping regional crises, there remain states with both the incentive and the capacity to slow disorder, defend minimum rules and reopen diplomatic space. Middle powers cannot restore an older order in any full sense. They can, however, help repair parts of a damaged one. They can stabilise, convene, mediate and build coalitions at a moment when several major powers are themselves contributing to fragmentation rather than containing it.
What is unfolding globally is the erosion of the rules and assumptions that underwrote the post-1945 order. The UN Charter remains clear on the prohibition of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of states. Yet the international system increasingly displays selective legality, normalised exceptionalism and weakening institutional credibility whenever major strategic interests are involved. Sovereignty, however compromised, formally remains intact, but confidence in the principles embedded in the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia is steadily evaporating. Instability reigns. We have witnessed a US-Israel-triggered war turn rapidly into a wider international crisis, disrupting the global economy and altering the strategic calculations of states far beyond the immediate theatre of conflict.
It is precisely in this context that middle powers acquire renewed importance. They can initiate processes, reopen channels, restore some measure of restraint, widen diplomatic space and create platforms for coordination when stronger actors are locked into coercive logic. Middle powers do not necessarily bring vast material resources into conflict zones, but they can create the critical political space within which engagement becomes possible.
In recent weeks, Pakistan has clearly demonstrated that it belongs in this category of consequential middle powers. It possesses demographic weight, military credibility, nuclear deterrent status and geographic centrality linking South Asia with West Asia and China. It also has political relationships that extend across the Muslim world and into major-power settings. Pakistan’s relevance to West Asia is demonstrably strategic. Instability in West Asia affects Pakistan through energy vulnerability, shipping insecurity, financial exposure, regional military pressures and domestic political consequences. Pakistan’s diplomacy in recent weeks has therefore been substantive. It has involved sustained engagement with both regional and extra-regional actors. This also explains why Islamabad has increasingly sought not merely to respond to crisis, but to shape the environment within which crisis management occurs.
One important recent development in this regard has received too little attention. On April 14, senior officials from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Egypt met in Islamabad in what was effectively the first serious follow-up to the March 29 meeting of the four foreign ministers. That earlier contact had already begun to be described, informally, as an emerging West Asia Quad. The significance of the April 14 meeting lay in the fact that the effort was not being allowed to remain confined to immediate war diplomacy alone. The purpose appears broader: to explore whether a small group of influential regional states can gradually work towards a more cooperative political understanding on key regional questions. This is not, at least at this stage, a formal alliance or rigid structure. It is better understood as a flexible consultative mechanism.
Pakistan’s diplomatic flexibility is one of its strengths. In a region marked by fragmentation, intra-regional rivalries, and persistent external pressures this is an asset. It allows room for confidence-building, issue-based coordination and gradual institutional buy-in, as was evident in the April 14 meeting. There was, significantly, also interest in the possibility of widening the circle over time.
The importance of this lies in the strategic direction it signals. Pakistan appears to be moving, however modestly and incrementally, towards institution-building rather than relying only on crisis-response diplomacy. And in a fractured regional environment, even a flexible consultative mechanism among four key Muslim-majority states can serve as a stabilising force – not through rigid alignment, but through sustained consultation, political signalling and the gradual formation of common ground.
Pakistan’s diplomacy with China fits into this wider pattern. The Five-Point Initiative of China and Pakistan for Restoring Peace and Stability in the Gulf and Middle East Region, issued in Beijing on March 31, 2026, was the clearest formal expression of this effort. The initiative called for an immediate ceasefire and an end to hostilities; dialogue and negotiations grounded in sovereignty, territorial integrity, national independence and security; protection of civilians and civilian facilities, including peaceful nuclear facilities; joint efforts to preserve regional peace, including the security of shipping lanes and energy supplies; and adherence to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law.
Analytically, this was not merely a statement of sympathy. It was a middle-power framework for order repair. It linked de-escalation, legality, civilian protection, maritime security and diplomacy within one compact agenda. It also showed Pakistan acting as part of a wider, networked strategy, supported by China and reinforced by broader Muslim-country coordination. Pakistan’s role has acquired even greater visibility through its mediation between Washington and Tehran. Whatever the eventual outcome of those talks, this diplomatic fact itself remains significant. Pakistan was operating as mediator, venue provider and political channel at a time of acute regional fracture. That is classic middle-power behaviour.
That is why Pakistan’s recent, heightened engagement in West Asia carries value and purpose beyond the immediate crisis. Pakistan’s role as a middle power has been surfacing with greater clarity since May 2025. In its strategic, military and diplomatic response to Indian aggression, and now to US-Israel aggression against Iran, Pakistan has demonstrated how middle powers can influence outcomes in complex environments. By engaging the US while defending Iran’s threatened sovereignty, it has connected regional crises to wider strategic stakes and reminded a fractured system that force is not the only language available to states.
Pakistan has demonstrated that middle powers cannot eliminate coercion from international politics, nor can they fundamentally overturn the asymmetries of global power. But they can influence outcomes through proactive, trusted engagement in conflict zones. They can keep open the possibility of accommodation and reconciliatory politics even when formal international structures are weakened or paralysed.
That is the deeper significance of Pakistan’s present moment. The old order is weakened, and that very weakening is creating both the logic and the space for new forms of inter-state behaviour. Middle powers will shape that space, as Pakistan is now doing in West Asia. Pakistan has factored in the military realities on the ground, the catastrophic potential of an extended war and the urgent necessity of political restraint. In doing so, it has shown that even amid fracture, states with strategic credibility, diplomatic stamina and political trust can still help pull the system back from the brink. That is no small achievement. In a world increasingly driven by force, Pakistan’s West Asia moment is a reminder that diplomacy, when backed by seriousness and strategic weight, can still matter profoundly.
The writer is a foreign policy & international security expert.
X/Twitter: @nasimzehra Email: [email protected]
