President Donald Trump’s fascination with Pakistan’s military leader Asim Munir has puzzled many: The President is on record both in press conferences and on social media, calling him “a good man” and his “favorite field marshal” (the equivalent of a U.S. five-star general). Trump should have met the most famous Field Marshal Pakistan ever had, General Ayub Khan, who served as Pakistan’s president from 1958 to 1969.

Khan was so powerful and charismatic that even as a military dictator, he had European and American leaders enthralled. His aura was so great that Jackie Kennedy accepted his invitation to visit Pakistan in 1962. She traveled to Pakistan with her sister Lee Radziwill, and glamorous pictures of her on a camel in Karachi and in a motorcade in Islamabad almost seem like stills from a Hollywood movie.

In the late 1950s, Khan aligned Pakistan with the United States in a series of bilateral defense agreements, and America promised to settle the Kashmir issue between Pakistan and India. In 1960, a U2 spy plane took off from Peshawar and was shot down over Soviet territory, leading Khrushchev to threaten to drop a nuclear bomb on Peshawar, which thankfully did not come to pass. This dramatic affair cemented the relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan; in a 1964 Foreign Affairs article, Khan called his country “America’s most allied ally in Asia.”

But the United States did not settle the Kashmir issue, and regional tensions finally erupted in the 1965 India-Pakistan war. Khan, shaken by America’s lack of support, visited China, whose Communist rule under Mao Zedong had already been recognized by Pakistan in 1950. The growing relationship between the two so-called “Iron Brothers” led Pakistan to facilitate one of the greatest foreign policy successes in the world: the U.S.-China back-channel talks in 1971. Initiated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with Pakistan’s next military ruler-cum-President, General Yahya Khan (a close friend of then-President Richard Nixon) relaying messages between China and the United States, this diplomatic success gave Pakistan the confidence that it could — and should — play a pivotal role in the region.

Fifty-odd years later, Pakistan’s recent role in the Iran-U.S. peace talks is a major point on this long and twisting road. When the Feb. 28 war involving Israel, Iran and the U.S. began, and the world was seized by paroxysms of economic disruption and regional violence, Pakistan stepped forward in April as a broker for peace between Iran and the U.S. in negotiations that lasted 21 hours in Islamabad. The ceasefire produced by these talks miraculously held despite ongoing fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, U.S. attacks on Iranian radar sites and retaliatory Iranian strikes. Two months later, on June 18, the two countries signed an interim agreement to end the war, with Pakistan signing as mediator.

Three days later, a second round of talks in Switzerland showcased Pakistan’s Munir and Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif embracing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and negotiators Jared Kushner and Stephen Witkoff like long-lost friends. The next morning, the parties announced “major progress” on a 60-day roadmap to peace. The events plainly demonstrate how Pakistan has asserted itself as a middle power in a newly emerging multilateral world.

A Certain Set Of Skills

Pakistan didn’t fall into this position by accident. It was by design, a strategy that began with Khan and continued to develop through Pakistan’s involvement in the 1970s-1980s U.S.-Soviet war in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s support made the difference between victory and defeat for the mujahideen and by extension the United States; this ultimately led to the end of the Cold War and the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1988. Pakistan’s continued relationship with Afghanistan during the following decades was considered controversial and disloyal, but after the tumultuous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and a subsequent period of cross-border militancy, that relationship helped to bring the Taliban to the table for the 2025 peace talks in Doha. 

Today, Pakistan is an unlikely contender for such an important role. It faces many challenges, including its geographical location that places two hostile countries, Afghanistan and India, on either side of its borders. Pakistan has fought four full-scale wars with India — and additional conflicts like last year’s Indian misadventure, Operation Sindoor. Meanwhile, Pakistan faces a deadly insurgent-led conflict on its Afghanistan border. It has been a challenge for Pakistan to survive both these situations, let alone harbor aspirations for a leadership role in the region.

“Pakistan’s internal weaknesses, its flawed political system, its flagging attempts to provide its citizens with prosperity, education or health care, have often made it the target of the world’s scorn.”

Pakistan’s internal weaknesses, its flawed political system, its flagging attempts to provide its citizens with prosperity, education or health care, have often made it the target of the world’s scorn. And it has been treading diplomatic water since the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011, prompting ongoing accusations that Pakistan backs terror and plays a double game with its Western benefactors.

Add to this a very dangerous situation in Balochistan, where militants want to break away from both Iran and Pakistan, which has hurtled the province into one of the most deadly and complicated military-versus-non-state-actors proxy wars of its short history.

But like Liam Neeson in the popular movie “Taken,” all of this has imbued Pakistan with a — let’s say — certain set of skills. These include Pakistan’s wise use of nuclear deterrence; its leveraging of its Shia population; how it positions itself among the Gulf States; a strong friendship with China; and, finally, indisputable military strength. 

1. The Nuclear Deterrent

Pakistan possesses a nuclear weapon that it wields as a deterrent against India. Foreign Minister Zulfikar Bhutto’s pronouncement, after the 1965 war, that Pakistan would build a bomb even if its citizens had to eat grass, led Pakistan into fraught waters. There was a price to be paid for being the only Muslim country to have a nuclear bomb, and some, including Bhutto himself, believed that he was ousted as punishment for his pursuit of the nuclear agenda. 

After the country’s 1998 nuclear tests, the Clinton administration slapped sanctions on Pakistan for its defiance of the unspoken rule that a Muslim country should never be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. Yet Pakistan pivoted out of that situation when Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf agreed to side with U.S. President George W. Bush in the War on Terror and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan as long as it received economic and military benefits in return, including keeping control of its nuclear weapons, with some oversight and safety protocols enacted by the U.S. The “Islamic Bomb,” contentious to many in concept, became even more alarming when Pakistan made it a reality. Today, safeguarding its nuclear stockpile is one of Pakistan’s highest priorities, guaranteeing the nation an obvious strategic advantage over other economically powerful Muslim countries that lack nuclear force.

2. The Shia Bridge

Pakistan lives with a lot of internal divisions — Shia-Sunni, ethnic, military versus civilians. And despite recent political tensions between Pakistan and Iran, Pakistan’s Shia population, which numbers between 15-20% of the population, is a strong point of connection with Iran. More than half a million Pakistanis travel to Iran annually to pilgrimage to the holy sites on their way to Karbala and Najaf in Iraq. Despite Western sanctions on Iran, in 2025 Pakistan agreed to increase agricultural trade from $1.4 to$3 billion in trade with Iran and both signed a bilateral trade agreement aiming toward $10 billion. With continued U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran possibly triggering unrest among Pakistan’s Shia population, Pakistan has an even bigger incentive to try to mediate peace talks in good faith.

3. The Gulf Umbrella

At the same time, Pakistan has channeled its large, young population into a powerful military force and an equally powerful labor force in the Gulf countries, ensuring that these countries and Pakistan are mutually interdependent. Pakistan has recently sent a sizeable number of troops and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province under an existing defense pact with the kingdom. This signals Pakistan is powerful enough to play a monitoring role in the region, to patrol the Persian Gulf, perhaps, or even send a pointed message from the Muslim bloc to Israel about checking its expansion into Lebanon, most currently, by waging war in the Middle East.

4. Iron Brothers

Pakistan’s economy may be unstable, but it has very good friends with booming economies, like Turkey and China. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) accord, which connects China to Pakistan’s warm-water port in Gwadar and a host of other development projects, remains one of Pakistan’s strategic and economic lodestars. Pakistan also has rare minerals and reserves of coal and gas that are largely undeveloped and untapped, which it can leverage in its cooperation with the United States and other economically stable countries to access more economic assistance and financial capital.

“Pakistan’s economy may be unstable, but it has very good friends with booming economies, like Turkey and China.”

A strong agricultural backbone positions Pakistan favorably to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries like Saudi Arabia, which can’t grow its own food, and China, which needs to feed a vast population. Pakistan has direct agricultural trade with both regions. This agricultural diplomacy, along with water diplomacy, will be the currency of Global South regions over the next 20 years. China also continues to assert itself as a guardian of Pakistan’s access to the rivers that originate in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountain range and flow through Indian territory.

5. Military Grit

Pakistan has 40 years of experience fighting the War on Terror and the Afghan-Soviet war, giving Pakistan’s military an edge in one of the world’s harshest asymmetric war theaters. Pakistan’s military has integrated surveillance systems and modern warfare techniques into its air force, as the wars of this age are fought in and from the air; it is also building cyberattack capabilities. Pakistan’s prioritization of the military in its domestic budget is controversial at home. But doing so has allowed Pakistan to maintain military ties with the U.S., regardless of what is happening politically between the two countries.

Pakistan’s Bismarck Moment

Facilitating the peace talks between the U.S. and Iran has not come out of nowhere; it is born out of nearly a century of experience, grim disappointments, near-death spirals and perfidy both at home and abroad. Through all of this, Pakistan maintained important alliances with neighborhood players and watchful, skeptical superpowers. It gained a dogged confidence that defies easy explanation. And it seems to have emerged as the world’s most unlikely peacemaker, as it aims for a position as a middle power in a chaotic world where the 20th-century rules-based order is threatened by a regressive might-makes-right doctrine that could have come straight out of 19th-century Europe, when Prussia leveraged similar challenges under Bismarck to become modern-day Germany.

Noema’s editor-in-chief, Nathan Gardels, recently interviewed Iran scholar Reza Aslan about Iran’s prospects for democracy. Aslan’s reply: “Best-case scenario, Iran becomes Pakistan. At least in Pakistan, there is a democratically elected government and a legislature, though the power is still with the military, as opposed to Egypt or Myanmar, which are military dictatorships.”

America has always worked with dictatorships and military generals in Pakistan: Pakistan’s most significant inflection points have been punctuated by years of military rule. First, Khan in the 1950s. Then General Zia-ul-Haq, who enacted a severe Islamist dictatorship in the 1980s, helped the United States defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, thereby ending the Cold War.

Musharraf similarly took America’s side in the War on Terror after 9/11. America has always done business with these generals, while excoriating Pakistan for its lack of democracy — perhaps because, as Aslan says, “Whatever you want to say about the military, ideology is not part of their calculus. The military is a very pragmatic force. What they’re concerned about is who has the biggest guns.”

Gardels argues in a Noema essay that the case for how “middle power multilateralism — which would include Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia as well as “global South” nations such as India and Brazil, among others” — is “the only imperfect alternative to a world order where might makes right.”

Pakistan is a perfect example of that model, following what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney calls “variable geometry” – “creating different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests for those issues.” This is exactly what Pakistan has done with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Turkey, Egypt and the UAE. This has given Pakistan “strategic autonomy,” especially in its quest to stave off India’s hegemony over South Asia.

In the same essay by Gardels, Finnish President Alex Stubbs declared at the Raisina Convention in Mumbai that “I believe that the Global South will decide what the next world order will look like.”

He outlined a role for India in that world order, citing its high growth rates and its democracy as proof of its suitability for that leading role. “Whether you call it non-alignment or multi-alignment, you’ve been careful not to rely solely on the goodwill of one partner or bloc. You have invested in your own security and actively developed partnerships in many directions. Your approach makes sense.”

But India’s tilt toward right-wing politics with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dominating electorally over the last 12 years has put its democracy in danger. Meanwhile, America — or at least Donald Trump — seems quite happy to do business with Pakistan’s “hybrid” regime, which has been doing exactly what Stubbs thinks India should do — investing in its own security and developing partnerships in many directions.

“Pakistan’s moral position and its commitment to a rules-based international order have remained consistent.”

Pakistan, with all its flaws and missteps, has been taking the lead in the last three years on the international stage, advocating strongly at the United Nations for Palestinian rights and an end to Israeli violence in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon. Whatever can be said about the U.N. and its inability to enforce its resolutions in the Palestinian territories or Kashmir, Pakistan’s moral position and its commitment to a rules-based international order have remained consistent. This is far more than what would normally be expected of a “failed state” or “banana republic,” epithets that Pakistan has weathered with dignity, along with the perennial “terrorist” label.

Beyond this current geopolitical crisis, America will continue to do business with this unexpected new middle power. Right now, America is in the process of reassessing its own position, with his “Donroe Doctrine,” Trump’s pointed rebuff of European nations, and his marked disinterest in the affairs of the Far East has caused geopolitical ruptures that have not yet settled into a coherent foreign policy for the United States.

Trump’s fascination with Field Marshal Munir will sustain the relationship beyond the outcome of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran, with Pakistan perhaps being called upon to safeguard Iran’s highly enriched uranium stores or patrol the Persian Gulf. After Trump, the military ties between Pakistan and the U.S. are likely to remain strong, and Pakistan can use that space to step out of its previous role as a client state and into what it sees as its higher purpose: becoming a regional power across the Middle East and North Africa.

India still aspires to be the regional hegemon; it will continue to court the world’s superpowers and oppose Pakistan’s claim to Kashmir. But India’s stance appears outdated and narrow, compared to Pakistan’s more expansive role in this emerging multipolar world. As the road to peace between Iran and the U.S. continues to twist and turn, the two nations are partners in a paradoxical but not unprecedented peacemaking venture, where their shared history, refracted through the quirks of this particular set of leaders,  has already coalesced into a diplomatic breakthrough with far-reaching ramifications for the Middle East and beyond.