How Pakistan Became the Mediator Between the US and Iran

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Pakistan has spent the last year or so carefully building Washington’s confidence while maintaining a functional relationship with Tehran.

On April 7, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced that a ceasefire between the United States and Iran had been reached. “Both parties have displayed remarkable wisdom and understanding,” he posted on X, extending an invitation to both delegations to convene in Islamabad the following weekend.

Pakistan did not stumble into this mediation role. It arrived here through a combination of geographic necessity, deliberate positioning, and diplomatic restraint. What follows is the story of how Islamabad became the only broker that Washington and Tehran could both trust, and what it stands to gain from the moment it spent years preparing for.

Iran and Pakistan’s Close Proximity

Pakistan’s foreign policy toward Iran has never been fully voluntary. It is shaped and constrained by their proximity. The two countries share a 900-kilometer (565-mile) border. For Pakistan, Iran is a transit corridor, an energy supplier, and a potential source of instability that arrives most acutely in Balochistan, where cross-border militancy has long tested the bilateral relationship. That geographic reality has conditioned Islamabad’s doctrine of studied neutrality toward Tehran, which predates the current government and will certainly outlast it.

The clearest historical expression of that doctrine came during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, one of the most destructive conflicts of the 20th century. Despite intense pressure—from Washington, which was tacitly backing Baghdad, and some Arab states financing Saddam Hussein’s war machine—Pakistan refused to take sides. President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq maintained official neutrality throughout, preserving functional relations with Tehran even as much of the Sunni world tilted towards Iraq. 

Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 had already demonstrated that instability across that border does not stay there. Pakistan, with no buffer and a significant Shia population of its own, had to learn that lesson early.

That calculation has only grown more urgent since Pakistan watched India deepen its ties with Iran through the Chabahar port project—a deliberate effort to build an alternative trade corridor to Central Asia that bypasses Pakistan. It watched Tehran become a variable in Afghan politics, Baloch militancy, and sectarian tensions within Pakistan........

© The National Interest