Three capitals in three weeks. Pakistan has never been wanted by this many people at once, and the arithmetic has not really changed: more demand, same return. A mutual defence pact in Mecca, a plea in Tehran for a settlement that turned out to be easier to sign than to hold, a committee in Istanbul to make the first of them permanent.
Ask what Pakistan has been paid for its role over the last six months, and no one has a clear answer.
The country is carrying an unusually crowded diplomatic portfolio. Washington and Tehran have reason to see Islamabad as a channel; Saudi Arabia and Turkey have drawn its military establishment, and the security guarantees that come with it, deeper into their emerging regional architecture; Beijing has reason to value Pakistan not only as a strategic partner on India’s western flank, but as a country with access to Iran and the Gulf. Each relationship gives Pakistan a different kind of utility and creates something Pakistan has rarely been able to command: simultaneous relevance with competing power centres.
But Pakistan has rarely lacked strategic importance, it has been useful to someone’s war, someone’s border, or someone’s containment strategy for most of its existence. What it has never done is convert that usefulness into standing, and while necessity gets a country called when something burns, it does not necessarily get it admitted once the fire is out. Take Pakistan’s case: frontline security partner in the Afghan war and recipient of billions in U.S. military and economic assistance, yet within eighteen months of the Soviet withdrawal sanctioned heavily for its nuclear programme that Washington had spent a decade declining to notice. The lesson is not that Pakistan is used, it gets paid, but the payment expires, and when the problem changes, so does Pakistan’s place in the room.
Start where Munir started: in June, Pakistan brought Washington and Tehran an agreement bearing its capital’s name, signed by both President Trump and President Pezeshkian, with Prime Minister Sharif signing as the mediator. This was followed by serious apparatus including the creation of working groups on the nuclear file and on monitoring and dispute resolution, oversight committees, a de-confliction cell in the Strait of Hormuz, a sixty-day roadmap to final terms, and technical talks at Bürgenstock mediated by Pakistan and Qatar.
Then in July, the agreement collapsed. Again, there was no penalty that Pakistan could impose, no benefit it could suspend or no obligation running in its direction from the U.S. or Iran. What it did was have Munir in Tehran twice in August to try to mediate something Pakistan had built and received recognition for in the past four months.
The lesson is not necessarily Pakistan being excluded, but that its inclusion was not durable enough to become leverage. A mediator convenes, a guarantor holds something the parties need even after an agreement breaks. Compare May 2025, where the U.S. stepped into the Pakistan-India crisis with leverage that did not come from being a mediator. It held financing timelines, trade terms, the flow of equipment, and in turn mediation followed as a consequence of leverage it already possessed, not the source of it. Any great power’s influence exists independently of any seat it holds. Pakistan has the channel with Washington and Tehran, but not an asset either side has to preserve the channel for and its position will last precisely as long as the goodwill of the parties granting it.
In July 1971, Henry Kissinger flew to Beijing from Pakistan’s airfield, a channel Pakistan opened that produced the Shanghai Communiqué, normalisation and the architecture for American communication with Beijing. What it received was gratitude, but five months later, as Pakistan was engulfed in the 1971 war that led to the secession of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, that gratitude did not translate into intervention. So while Pakistan had helped create one of the most consequential diplomatic realignments of the Cold War, it had extracted no continuing position from it that could be used when its own interests were at stake.
That is an irony worth sitting with. And while Pakistan opens doors, gets the meeting, signs the communiqué, and takes the recognition, what it rarely asks is what should remain in place after the party that needed the access no longer does.
China is the relationship Pakistan has managed best, and it is instructive precisely because Beijing is not indifferent to Pakistan’s geopolitical relevance. China values Pakistan as a partner on India’s western flank, as an outlet towards the Arabian Sea, and increasingly as a country with access to Iran and the Gulf. The difference is that Beijing has not treated that utility as something to cash out during a crisis. It has spent a decade building around it.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is not episodic: it does not appear when something is burning and vanish when the fire is out. A decade of it has left 9,500 megawatts of generation capacity, a highway network Pakistan could not have financed alone, a deep-water port and the beginnings of an industrial framework. When Sharif and Munir visited Beijing in late May, Xi Jinping publicly praised Pakistan’s constructive role in the Middle East, and the visit produced some $7 billion in investment memoranda. That does not mean Pakistan has extracted equivalent leverage from CPEC; it just means Beijing has treated Pakistan’s strategic value as something to accumulate around rather than something to consume in a single crisis.
Beijing’s reasons for valuing Pakistan are as strategic as any other nation’s, just as Washington and Tehran have reasons to use it as a channel. But China built something that keeps producing whether or not the channel was needed in a particular year. So the question has not only been whether Pakistan was valued for its relevance, but whether it has built something for that value to accumulate.
The machinery of Pakistan’s statecraft is geared towards extracting immediate concessions from strategic relevance, rather than turning that relevance into durable bargaining power. China gives Islamabad a useful point of comparison for what it is doing now and what it keeps leaving on the table and becomes a useful demonstration of what accumulation looks like, and of how different the outcome can be when a relationship outlasts the crisis that first made it valuable.
That makes the Mecca pact the next test. Saudi Arabia brings money and Turkey brings military capacity, but both can continue to contribute without Pakistan becoming structurally necessary to the arrangement. Pakistan’s contribution is a nuclear guarantee, one that cannot be reduced, withheld or credibly threatened. The value Pakistan gets from the pact therefore has to be written into the machinery being built with Saudi Arabia and Turkey, because if this is where this architecture becomes permanent, that is where Pakistan should be negotiating its position in it.
The same logic applies to Pakistan’s largest economic relationship, and the deadline is closer than Islamabad appears to recognize it. Pakistan is the single largest beneficiary of the European Union’s GSP+ scheme, with roughly €7.5 billion in eligible exports in 2024, at a utilisation rate above 95 percent and an estimated €732 million in tariff exemptions, and an EU market taking 28 percent of everything Pakistan sells abroad. Yet the relationship remains fundamentally unilateral, in which the EU sets the rules, evaluates Pakistan against its conventions on its own schedule and decides whether this preferential access continues. Under the new regime, Pakistan has until the end of 2028 before it must reapply under stricter conditions.
Islamabad approaches this deadline as a compliance exercise: pass the laws, implement the conventions, submit the reports. But compliance only preserves the privilege; it does not improve Pakistan’s position within the relationship. A quarter of the country’s export economy sits on an arrangement in which Pakistan has no vote, no standing, and a deadline it did not set. The opportunity is to use the moment when the world is asking Pakistan to prove that it deserves access to ask what the world is prepared to institutionalise in return.
Islamabad’s current relevance is unusually broad, but it must remember that relevance is not a stockpile. It has seen historically how its relevance rises during crises and falls when they end. A hinge is not a country everyone likes. It is a country no one can work around. Pakistan’s problem has never been that no one needed it, but that everyone needed it temporarily; its importance will return when the next crisis is on the map, just as every previous one has. But what happens between the crises is what Islamabad needs to have control over. For seventy-nine years Islamabad has been very good at getting called; the opportunity now is to make itself harder to remove once it arrives.
