On April 7, as the deadline approached for U.S. President Donald Trump’s ultimatum to the Iranian government to open the Strait of Hormuz or face the destruction of “a whole civilization,” a Pakistani general placed a phone call that helped avert disaster. Field Marshal Asim Munir—the chief of Pakistan’s army, the country’s most powerful institution—pressed Trump and Iran’s surviving leadership to stop the war. Within hours, Washington and Tehran announced a cease-fire. Trump and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi publicly thanked Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Days later, U.S. Vice President JD Vance sat across from Iranian negotiators in Islamabad for more than 20 hours, the highest-level direct contact between the two countries since the 1979 revolution.

The future of the resulting cease-fire, and the formal truce and plans for a broader settlement that followed, is now deeply uncertain. But Pakistan’s mediation was nevertheless a remarkable development. For most of the postwar era, the attributes that made countries geopolitically influential were settled: they included major-power status, economic weight, liberal normative credentials, and convening authority over other major states. At no point during its history did Pakistan meet these criteria. It was a nuclear-armed country on the fringes of the Western order, associated more often with regional instability than with conflict resolution, with a limited economy and few liberal democratic bona fides. And yet, during the most dangerous Middle East crisis in a generation, Pakistan did what China, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and other geopolitical heavyweights could not.

Islamabad’s efforts are emblematic of a broader shift in global politics. A disordered international system shaped by multipolar competition is starting to reward different kinds of states that lack traditional geopolitical credentials. With the United Nations and other multilateral bodies proving unable to mitigate modern conflicts, nontraditional powers, including Pakistan, Qatar, Turkey, and others, are beginning to fill the gaps by engaging in order-stabilizing statecraft. The ability of these states to foster trust across geopolitical blocs and open channels of communication between adversaries who cannot or choose not to engage has allowed them to mediate hostage and prisoner releases, negotiate the opening of commercial corridors, and open meaningful political dialogue, all in service of managing conflicts before they spiral out of control. In the coming decade, this type of statecraft will make them invaluable geopolitical assets.

Not all of these states will pass the litmus tests the United States typically uses to sort partners, such as democratic credentials, liberal governance, or political distance from China. Washington may believe that it should rely only on established allies and partners who share its values and strategic objectives in its competition with Beijing. But if the United States........

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