From Mediator to Ally: Pakistan’s Balancing Act in a Volatile Middle East

In the space of a single year, Pakistan has moved from the periphery of Middle Eastern diplomacy to its center. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and army chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir have positioned the country as both a mediator between Washington and Tehran and, more recently, a formal treaty partner of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The result  the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, signed on August 7 in Islam’s holiest city  marks one of the most consequential shifts in South Asian foreign policy in decades. Yet it also raises hard questions about who is really steering Pakistan’s course, and at what long-term cost.

A war that reshaped the region

The backdrop is a war between the United States and Iran that erupted on February 28, drawing in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Iraqi militias and Yemen’s Houthi movement, and disrupting roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne energy supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. Missile and drone exchanges reached Saudi cities, unsettling a region that had spent years trying to de-escalate after the 2015 nuclear deal’s collapse.

Pakistan, one of the few states with working channels to both Washington and Tehran, stepped into the gap. Sharif’s government hosted preliminary contacts that produced the so-called Islamabad Memorandum, under which Iran signalled it would not pursue nuclear weapons  a pledge it had already made under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 2015 accord  in exchange for a mechanism allowing it to dilute stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian later thanked Islamabad for its “constructive engagement” in securing a ceasefire and agreed to send negotiators to further talks in the Pakistani capital. Analysts at the Washington-based Stimson Center have noted that Munir personally staked considerable political capital on the diplomacy, given how easily it could have collapsed.

The Makkah pact

That mediating role fed directly into last week’s agreement. Saudi Arabia, repeatedly struck during the war by Iranian missiles and by Tehran-aligned forces in Yemen and Iraq, had already signed a bilateral defence pact with Pakistan in September 2025  struck, notably, just over a week after an Israeli strike on Hamas negotiators in Doha rattled Gulf capitals’ confidence in American security guarantees. The Makkah agreement extends that arrangement into a trilateral pact with Turkey, declaring that an armed attack on any one of the three signatories will be treated as an attack on all.

Pakistani officials describe the pact as purely defensive. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said this week it was “not directed against any country” and remained open to other regional states. President Asif Ali Zardari called it a reflection of “shared resolve for peace and security,” while Sharif credited Munir’s “tireless efforts” in securing an arrangement he said had been years in the making. For Riyadh and Ankara, the pact offers a hedge against dependence on any single outside power at a moment when American commitments to the region look less certain than they once did. For Pakistan, it offers closer ties with two wealthy allies, a symbolic role as guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, and outsized influence for a country whose economy remains fragile.

Praise, and pointed scepticism

The agreement has been celebrated in much of Pakistan’s domestic media as evidence that the country’s leadership  civilian and military alike  is finally translating decades of geopolitical positioning into tangible strategic weight. Supporters point to a similar dynamic in May, when a brief but intense military confrontation with India ended within days, after which the government promoted Munir to the rare, largely ceremonial rank of Field Marshal, only the second officer in Pakistan’s history to hold it.

But that same promotion has drawn sharp criticism from analysts who see it as part of a broader consolidation of power by the military at the expense of elected institutions. Munir, appointed army chief in November 2022, has presided over a period in which  according to critics including jailed former prime minister Imran Khan’s supporters  courts, the media and Sharif’s own coalition have operated increasingly under military direction, a system some commentators have dubbed a “hybrid regime.” The Middle East Institute has described Munir’s elevation as “a thunderous declaration of the military’s unassailable supremacy,” while other analysts note that his growing role in foreign and economic policy  well beyond the traditional remit of an army chief  blurs the line between civilian governance and military command in a country with a long history of that line collapsing altogether.

What comes next

None of this diminishes the immediate diplomatic achievement: a ceasefire process that, however fragile, has held; a new pact that binds three influential Muslim-majority states more closely together; and a Pakistan that finds itself, for now, indispensable to great-power diplomacy in a region convulsed by war. Whether that translates into durable stability  for the Gulf, for the broader Middle East, or for Pakistan’s own democratic institutions  remains an open question. The coming months, as the Islamabad talks resume and the Makkah pact’s practical implications become clearer, will test whether this new era represents a genuine diplomatic breakthrough or a further tightening of military control dressed in the language of strategic necessity.