Dr Farhat Asif
THERE is a particular kind of diplomacy that only nations with skin in the game can practice, the kind born not of ambition, but of necessity. Watch the last few months closely and you will see Pakistan practicing exactly that kind of diplomacy in the Middle East, with China standing quietly but firmly at its shoulder. When the war between the United States, Israel and Iran erupted at the end of February 2026, most capitals reacted the way capitals usually do with statements of concern, calls for restraint and not much else. Pakistan did something different. It picked up the phone.
That is not surprising if you understand geography and history the way Islamabad does. Pakistan shares a 900-kilometre border with Iran. It has decades-old, if occasionally strained, ties with Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf. It sits at the crossroads of the Islamic world, a nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state that no serious mediator in this conflict could afford to ignore. So, when missiles started flying and the Strait of Hormuz, the artery through which a fifth of the world’s oil moves, came under threat, Pakistan did not wait to be invited to the table. It built one.
Within weeks, Pakistan was engaging Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt through its own channels, while simultaneously reaching out to Beijing. On March 31, in a meeting between Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Ishaq Dar and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, the two sides unveiled a five-point initiative for restoring peace and stability in the Gulf and the wider Middle East. It called for an immediate cessation of hostilities, the earliest possible start of peace talks, protection of civilian and non-military infrastructure, unimpeded humanitarian access and respect for the territorial integrity of the states involved, including Iran and its Gulf neighbors. It also demanded that shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remain open, a point that mattered as much to Islamabad and Beijing’s own economic interests as to anyone else’s.
Critics will say this was just words on paper. They are entitled to that scepticism; plenty of international statements are exactly that. But look at what followed. Pakistan did not stop at issuing a joint communiqué and moving on. It went further, brokering an actual ceasefire, a two-week pause that was later extended and then hosting something even more remarkable: the first round of direct US-Iran talks on its own soil, in Islamabad, on April 10 and 11. On the American side sat Vice-President JD Vance, alongside Jared Kushner and veteran Middle East negotiator Steve Witkoff. That is not a symbolic gesture. That is a country being trusted, by parties who trust almost no one else in this conflict, to hold the room.
Pakistan’s President, Asif Ali Zardari, underscored how seriously Islamabad was treating this effort when he broke with conventional protocol to visit the Chinese embassy directly, a move meant to signal to Beijing that Pakistan wanted its “all-weather” partner engaged at the highest level. Ishaq Dar followed soon after with a trip to Beijing to brief Chinese leadership on the outcomes of the Gulf foreign ministers’ summit. This was not theatre. It was coalition-building, quiet and deliberate, between two states that have spent decades learning to trust each other’s judgment.
Why does China’s involvement matter so much here? Because China brings something Pakistan alone cannot: heft. Beijing has enormous strategic and economic interests riding on stability in the Gulf, given its dependence on the region’s energy supplies and its stake in the Strait of Hormuz remaining open. China’s global standing and its perception, fair or not, as a power without the baggage of decades of Western intervention in the Middle East, gives it a credibility with Tehran that Washington simply does not have right now, especially with power in Iran increasingly concentrated in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps following the deaths of the country’s top leadership. Put simply: Pakistan brought access to the Islamic world and the credibility of a genuine mediator; China brought diplomatic weight and economic leverage. Together, they built something neither could have built alone.
It would be naïve to call this a formal alliance or the birth of some new security bloc. It isn’t and Islamabad and Beijing have both been careful to say so; this is not an “Islamic NATO,” nor a sectarian axis, nor a China-Pakistan military pact by other means. What it is, is something more mature: a demonstration that developing nations, when they choose to act rather than merely comment, can build consensus where entrenched powers have failed to. As the region has been trapped in a vicious cycle of escalation, confrontation and spillover, it has been Pakistan and China’s joint voice, not another round of Security Council paralysis, that has injected a measure of stability.
There is a broader story here worth telling honestly. Pakistan is a country simultaneously managing its own conflict along its western border with Afghanistan, absorbing domestic protests and grappling with an energy crisis linked directly to the very war it is trying to end. That it has still found the bandwidth and the credibility, to host US-Iran talks and co-author a peace framework with China says something about the seriousness with which Islamabad takes its role as a stabilising force in the Muslim world. It is easy, from a distance, to reduce Pakistan to its crises. It is harder and more honest, to recognize that amid those very crises, it has chosen to lead rather than retreat.
The Middle East’s wounds will not heal because of one five-point plan, one ceasefire, or one round of talks in Islamabad. But peace processes are rarely won in a single move; they are built, patiently, by whoever is willing to keep showing up at the table. For the last several months, that has been Pakistan, with China beside it. In a region starved of trustworthy brokers, that is not a small thing. It may, in fact, be exactly the kind of quiet, unglamorous diplomacy the Middle East needs most.
—The writer is Founder and President of the Institute of Peace and Diplomatic Studies (IPDS).
