May 23, 2026
Leon Hadar
Vice
President J D Vance, left, talks to Pakistan’s Chief of Defense Forces and
Chief of Army Staff Field Marshall Asim Munir, right, and Pakistani Deputy
Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar, center, before boarding
Air Force Two after attending talks on Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, Sunday,
April 12, 2026. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin / Pool
In the gilded
conference rooms of Islamabad, where Field Marshal Asim Munir has lately played
host to American envoys and Iranian diplomats alike, one can almost hear the
echoes of an older diplomatic theater — Oslo, Camp David, even the Geneva of
1985. The casting is unfamiliar but the script is the same: a junior power,
suddenly indispensable, shuttling between two adversaries who cannot yet bring
themselves to speak directly.
The proposition that Washington’s commentariat is now being asked to swallow whole is that Pakistan — that perennially fragile, perpetually broke nuclear state on the Indus — is about to deliver what five decades of American statecraft could not.
Color me unconvinced. Not because Pakistan has done nothing — it has done a great deal, more than its detractors in New Delhi care to admit — but because the very things that make Islamabad useful as a postman also limit what it can deliver as a peacemaker.
Consider first what Pakistan actually brings to the table, since the realist tradition demands we begin with capabilities rather than aspirations.
Pakistan shares a 900-kilometer border with Iran and has spent decades cultivating the awkward, transactional relationship that geography imposes on neighbors who would rather not be. It maintains warm-enough ties with Tehran, whose forbearance keeps Balochistan from becoming entirely unmanageable.
It maintains close ties with Riyadh, whose checkbook keeps Pakistan’s lights on.
Most importantly, in the era of Donald Trump’s second presidency, Pakistan has cultivated something more valuable than institutional partnerships: a personal rapport between Munir and the American president, who has reportedly taken to calling the field marshal his “favorite fighter.” In a White House where personality trumps process — pun intended — that matters.
It is also true, and worth conceding to Islamabad’s defenders, that Pakistan has already done something tangible. The April 8 ceasefire that paused the joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran, following the strikes that killed Ayatollah Khamenei, did not negotiate itself.
Pakistani officials carried the fifteen-point American proposal to Tehran in March. They hosted the Islamabad Talks in April. They are now, as of this week, shuttling Iranian counter-proposals back to Washington while Trump publicly warns that the talks are on “the borderline” between a deal and renewed strikes.
This is not nothing. It is, in fact, considerably more than the European Union, the United Nations, or the Gulf states have managed.
But here we must distinguish — as Hans Morgenthau insisted we always must — between the mediator who facilitates and the mediator who delivers.
Oslo did not succeed because the Norwegians were clever; it succeeded, for as long as it did, because Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, each for his own structural reasons, had concluded that the existing arrangement had become more costly than compromise.
Egypt and Israel made peace at Camp David because Anwar Sadat had decided, after October 1973, that he could not afford another war and Menachem Begin had decided that Sinai was negotiable in exchange for permanence elsewhere. Jimmy Carter and his team mattered, but they were the catalysts, not the cause.
What, then, are the structural conditions on which Pakistan’s mediation must rest? Here the picture darkens considerably.
The American proposal — an end to Iran’s nuclear program, limits on its missile arsenal, the reopening of Hormuz, restrictions on its regional proxies, conditional sanctions relief — is essentially a demand for Iran’s strategic surrender, dressed in the language of negotiation.
The Islamic Republic, even bloodied and leaderless, has been here before; it is the same package Washington has placed on the table since the Bush administration, with cosmetic adjustments. That Pakistan is the courier does not change what is in the envelope.
Meanwhile, Iran has used the ceasefire to do what wounded states always do when given a pause: It has, according to American military assessments, restored access to thirty of its thirty-three missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz and rebuilt its missile stockpile to roughly seventy percent of pre-war levels.
Tehran’s hardliners — and after Khamenei’s killing, the moderates are a vanishing species — are not preparing for capitulation. They are preparing for the next round. Pakistan cannot mediate that away.
Nor should we forget Islamabad’s own predicament, which the city’s mediators rarely advertise to their American interlocutors.
Pakistan is simultaneously fighting a war on its Afghan frontier, managing an energy crisis worsened by the Hormuz disruption and contending with a public that does not particularly want its government to do Washington’s bidding against a Muslim neighbor. The Munir government’s room for maneuver is narrower than the Atlantic Council’s panel discussions suggest.
The honest assessment, I think, is this:
Pakistan is performing the role of indispensable postman with skill and, by the standards of South Asian diplomacy, remarkable discretion. It deserves credit for keeping channels open at a moment when the alternative is American B-2s returning to Iranian skies.
But the structural distance between Washington’s maximalist demands and Tehran’s diminished but still defiant red lines is not a distance that any mediator, however gifted, can talk away. Munir is not Henry Kissinger, and even Kissinger — let us recall — needed Mao and Zhou Enlai to want the opening before he could engineer it.
If the Iran War ends in 2026, it will end because Trump, facing midterm elections and a domestic electorate furious about gasoline prices, decides he wants a “deal” he can sell as a win, and because Tehran’s new leadership concludes that survival is worth more than enrichment percentages.
Pakistan will be the venue, perhaps the photographer of the handshake. It will not be the reason.
That is no small thing. But it is not what the headlines, in their excitement, are promising.
Leon Hadar
The very things that
make Islamabad useful as a postman also limit what it can deliver as a
peacemaker
The proposition that Washington’s commentariat is now being asked to swallow whole is that Pakistan — that perennially fragile, perpetually broke nuclear state on the Indus — is about to deliver what five decades of American statecraft could not.
Color me unconvinced. Not because Pakistan has done nothing — it has done a great deal, more than its detractors in New Delhi care to admit — but because the very things that make Islamabad useful as a postman also limit what it can deliver as a peacemaker.
Consider first what Pakistan actually brings to the table, since the realist tradition demands we begin with capabilities rather than aspirations.
Pakistan shares a 900-kilometer border with Iran and has spent decades cultivating the awkward, transactional relationship that geography imposes on neighbors who would rather not be. It maintains warm-enough ties with Tehran, whose forbearance keeps Balochistan from becoming entirely unmanageable.
It maintains close ties with Riyadh, whose checkbook keeps Pakistan’s lights on.
Most importantly, in the era of Donald Trump’s second presidency, Pakistan has cultivated something more valuable than institutional partnerships: a personal rapport between Munir and the American president, who has reportedly taken to calling the field marshal his “favorite fighter.” In a White House where personality trumps process — pun intended — that matters.
It is also true, and worth conceding to Islamabad’s defenders, that Pakistan has already done something tangible. The April 8 ceasefire that paused the joint US-Israeli campaign against Iran, following the strikes that killed Ayatollah Khamenei, did not negotiate itself.
Pakistani officials carried the fifteen-point American proposal to Tehran in March. They hosted the Islamabad Talks in April. They are now, as of this week, shuttling Iranian counter-proposals back to Washington while Trump publicly warns that the talks are on “the borderline” between a deal and renewed strikes.
This is not nothing. It is, in fact, considerably more than the European Union, the United Nations, or the Gulf states have managed.
But here we must distinguish — as Hans Morgenthau insisted we always must — between the mediator who facilitates and the mediator who delivers.
Oslo did not succeed because the Norwegians were clever; it succeeded, for as long as it did, because Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, each for his own structural reasons, had concluded that the existing arrangement had become more costly than compromise.
Egypt and Israel made peace at Camp David because Anwar Sadat had decided, after October 1973, that he could not afford another war and Menachem Begin had decided that Sinai was negotiable in exchange for permanence elsewhere. Jimmy Carter and his team mattered, but they were the catalysts, not the cause.
What, then, are the structural conditions on which Pakistan’s mediation must rest? Here the picture darkens considerably.
The American proposal — an end to Iran’s nuclear program, limits on its missile arsenal, the reopening of Hormuz, restrictions on its regional proxies, conditional sanctions relief — is essentially a demand for Iran’s strategic surrender, dressed in the language of negotiation.
The Islamic Republic, even bloodied and leaderless, has been here before; it is the same package Washington has placed on the table since the Bush administration, with cosmetic adjustments. That Pakistan is the courier does not change what is in the envelope.
Meanwhile, Iran has used the ceasefire to do what wounded states always do when given a pause: It has, according to American military assessments, restored access to thirty of its thirty-three missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz and rebuilt its missile stockpile to roughly seventy percent of pre-war levels.
Tehran’s hardliners — and after Khamenei’s killing, the moderates are a vanishing species — are not preparing for capitulation. They are preparing for the next round. Pakistan cannot mediate that away.
Nor should we forget Islamabad’s own predicament, which the city’s mediators rarely advertise to their American interlocutors.
Pakistan is simultaneously fighting a war on its Afghan frontier, managing an energy crisis worsened by the Hormuz disruption and contending with a public that does not particularly want its government to do Washington’s bidding against a Muslim neighbor. The Munir government’s room for maneuver is narrower than the Atlantic Council’s panel discussions suggest.
The honest assessment, I think, is this:
Pakistan is performing the role of indispensable postman with skill and, by the standards of South Asian diplomacy, remarkable discretion. It deserves credit for keeping channels open at a moment when the alternative is American B-2s returning to Iranian skies.
But the structural distance between Washington’s maximalist demands and Tehran’s diminished but still defiant red lines is not a distance that any mediator, however gifted, can talk away. Munir is not Henry Kissinger, and even Kissinger — let us recall — needed Mao and Zhou Enlai to want the opening before he could engineer it.
If the Iran War ends in 2026, it will end because Trump, facing midterm elections and a domestic electorate furious about gasoline prices, decides he wants a “deal” he can sell as a win, and because Tehran’s new leadership concludes that survival is worth more than enrichment percentages.
Pakistan will be the venue, perhaps the photographer of the handshake. It will not be the reason.
That is no small thing. But it is not what the headlines, in their excitement, are promising.
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