A country must sometimes name the power it has accumulated. Pakistan has fought wars, survived coercion and terrorism, mastered nuclear danger, tested alliances, sustained difficult friendships and negotiated amid upheaval. Yet its foreign policy remains described through vocabulary supplied by other capitals: ally, frontline state, major non-Nato ally, pivotal state. These are assignments, not a self-definition.
Pakistan now stands in the open with experience, capacity and relationships forming a strategic repertoire of its own. It has seen conflict, practised deterrence, enabled diplomacy and learned from action and restraint. This is Pakistan’s ‘purposeful power’.
Purposeful power is not swagger or a claim to primacy. It is the capacity to deter, negotiate, convene, build and choose: peace pursued from strength, engagement anchored in principle, and cooperation giving participants a stake in stability. It also marks a historical shift. Pakistan joined Seato in 1954 and the Baghdad Pact, later Cento, in 1955. Those structures served purposes formulated elsewhere and failed Pakistan in its wars with India. Pakistan left Seato in 1973; Cento disappeared in 1979.
Pakistan is currently engaged in shaping regional arrangements around Pakistan’s own judgement, capabilities and interests, guided by a strategic doctrine based on the following five principles drawn from its experience and forward-looking vision. One is civilisational wisdom: strength, restraint and reconciliation. Present-day Pakistan absorbed the Indus, Gandharan, Persianate, Islamic and Sufi worlds. That inheritance matters because coexistence was not tolerance bestowed by the powerful; it was demanding statecraft among communities inhabiting common spaces.
The Treaty of Hudaybiya offers a profound lesson. The Muslim community could defend itself, yet accepted tactical flexibility to avoid bloodshed and preserve a larger peace. Strength made negotiation credible; restraint converted an unequal moment into strategic achievement. Reconciliation was not surrender but rather disciplined confidence about the future. This has contemporary urgency. A plural Asia requires sovereign states to defend their interests while accepting that lasting order cannot be built through exclusion or humiliation. Pakistan’s civilisational vocabulary can contribute, provided it becomes serious policy, institutional competence and consistent conduct.
Two, credible deterrence must serve peace. Pakistan was born into strategic asymmetry: a larger neighbour, unresolved disputes and repeated war. Its nuclear capability established a limit against existential aggression. Counterterrorism campaigns built operational knowledge; its armed forces gained experience across conventional, sub-conventional, air, maritime, cyber and intelligence domains, at immense cost.
The May 2025 conflict with India demonstrated both capacity and danger. Pakistan’s military response established that aggression would carry costs. Yet the greater strategic achievement was combining defence with calibrated restraint, accepting a ceasefire and keeping the possibility of dialogue open. Deterrence succeeded not simply because weapons were used, but because their political purpose remained the prevention of uncontrolled war between nuclear-armed states.
Destructive capacity is no longer the monopoly of great powers. Missiles, drones, cyberattacks and autonomous systems allow smaller actors to inflict disproportionate damage. Interdependence transmits local shocks through energy markets, shipping and digital networks. Security requires credible capability, clear red lines, communication and an exit from escalation. Pakistan knows this from experience. Its doctrine should be firm: aggression will be resisted, but military power must serve political settlement.
Three, dialogue must rest upon law, justice and human dignity. Dialogue becomes disreputable when it asks the injured to forget injury or treats aggression and resistance as equivalents. Peace cannot be constructed upon silence. Sovereignty, international law and peoples’ legitimate rights, including self-determination, must be protected. Pakistan’s advocacy for Kashmir, Palestine and decolonisation belongs to this diplomatic tradition.
But accountability must lead towards settlement, not inherited vengeance. Pakistan’s record offers examples. In 1971, it enabled the secret diplomacy that opened relations between the United States and China, showing the value of discretion and trust. Pakistani personnel have served in UN peacekeeping since the Congo in 1960, including in Bosnia, where protection and humanitarian relief required courage under multilateral authority. Pakistan also participated in diplomacy surrounding the 1988 Geneva Accords on Afghanistan. Yemen offered another lesson. In 2015, parliament resisted pressure to join the Saudi-led war while affirming Pakistan would defend Saudi territorial integrity. That decision protected a vital relationship without entering a ruinous conflict and preserved engagement with Iran.
Four, Pakistan as a strategic power: purposefully shaping principled coexistence. Pakistan possesses the standing and strategic judgement to act as an autonomous diplomatic power. It has ties with China, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye; relations with the US and Europe; bonds across the Muslim world; and interests in Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. Few states combine nuclear deterrence, a professional military, technological potential and access across competing centres of power.
That combination creates agency and responsibility. Pakistan can initiate dialogue, convene adversaries, define convergent interests and negotiate principled accommodations. It can speak to Riyadh without becoming anti-Iran, engage Tehran without weakening Saudi security, and build a great strategic relationship with a rising China while remaining constructively, sometimes transactionally, engaged with the US. It maintained close relations with Syria during Bashar al-Assad’s rule yet is now constructively engaged with President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s transitional government. It also sustains state and military relations with Lebanon across that country’s internal divisions. These are marks of diplomatic range: relationships maintained without surrendering independent judgement.
The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement signed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye in August 2026 should be understood within this evolution. Its statement that an attack upon one will be treated as an attack upon all invites comparison with Nato's Article 5. But Article 5 itself does not order identical, automatic military action: each ally takes such action as it deems necessary, including armed force.
Nor is the Makkah arrangement merely Nato in Muslim dress. It has no Nato-style integrated command or standing force. Its emerging machinery instead includes a political and defence committee, a Riyadh secretariat, interoperability, exercises, counterterrorism coordination and defence-industrial cooperation. The absence of instant war-making is not proof of emptiness. Deterrence is intended first to prevent attack. The critical questions are whether the partners develop credible consultation, clarify obligations, preserve sovereign decision-making and use their combined weight to produce diplomatic exits.
This is an organically negotiated undertaking among three regional powers. From May to Makkah, Pakistan has moved from demonstrating national deterrence to helping design collective security. Its ambition should be preparedness without bloc confrontation, alongside reciprocity and negotiated common spaces. Pakistan need not place itself between other powers. It can purposefully shape the terms upon which powers coexist.
Five, creative interdependence is the architecture of lasting security. No country’s security perimeter ends at its border. Pakistan’s safety depends upon maritime access, energy flows, food and water availability, supply chains, critical minerals, digital networks and climate security. A defence doctrine that protects territory but ignores economic vulnerability is incomplete. Equally, commerce without deterrence leaves national prosperity exposed to chaos and coercion.
Creative interdependence joins these realities. Pakistan, a sovereign power whose interests extend across South Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, the Indian Ocean and beyond, seeks to build partnerships by making conflict costlier and principled peace more compelling. That means governing corridors rather than merely making them available; producing defence technology rather than purchasing it; setting standards for artificial intelligence and cyber security; developing ports, railways and energy systems around priorities; and investing in comprehensive relationships that sustain cooperation when governments disagree.
The Makkah arrangement can become one component of that practice if it protects sovereignty without manufacturing enemies. Its value will lie not only in what the three states might do during an attack, but in what they build before one: intelligence coordination, industrial capacity, crisis communication, negotiated restraint and economic resilience.
Pakistan’s demonstrated and conveyed wisdom to a fractured world is simply: strength without aggression; dialogue without surrender of principle; justice without vengeance; and cooperation without domination. It’s not a zero-sum game. It is to enlarge the political space in which nations and peoples can compete, engage, trade, innovate and prosper creatively and confidently, without destructive conflict. While Pakistan ought to resolve internal challenges, it’s diligently undertaking purposeful work as a strategic power.
The writer is a foreign policy & international security expert. She tweets/posts @nasimzehra and can be reached at: [email protected]
