Pakistan’s bet: Power without becoming a pawn

Small and middle powers rarely choose their geography. They only choose what to do with it. Pakistan sits at the seam of South Asia, the Gulf, and China. It cannot out-produce Beijing. It cannot out-spend Riyadh. It cannot match Washington’s reach. But it can make itself impossible to bypass. That is the calculation now unfolding in Islamabad, and it deserves to be read through the cold lens of realism, not the warm language of diplomacy.

Start with the concept itself. Zbigniew Brzezinski gave it a name in The Grand Chessboard: the geopolitical pivot. He defined pivots as states “whose importance is derived not from their power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location and from the consequences of their potentially vulnerable condition for the behavior of geostrategic players.” Pakistan fits that description almost too neatly. It borders Iran, China, and India. It sits astride the routes that connect Gulf capital to Central Asian resources. Its relevance comes from where it stands, not from what it can build alone.

The new Makkah Joint Defense Agreement with Saudi Arabia and Turkey formalises that relevance. It ties Pakistan’s security posture to Gulf dynamics. It gives Riyadh a defence partner with nuclear-armed depth. It gives Islamabad access to Saudi capital and industrial reach toward Europe. Meanwhile, the relationship with Beijing supplies economic ballast and military weight that no Gulf state can offer. And Pakistan’s quiet channel to both Tehran and Washington, where trust runs thin on both sides, adds a third leg that neither Riyadh nor Beijing can replicate.

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Beijing’s stake in this arrangement runs deeper than friendship. China buys roughly 90 percent of Iran’s sanctioned oil exports, most of it at a steep discount, through a shadow fleet that routes around Hormuz sanctions. It will not fight for Tehran. University of Chicago political science Professor John Mearsheimer’s theory explains why: great powers pass the buck when the cost of direct defence outweighs the gain.

But Beijing cannot afford Iran’s collapse into an American sphere either, because the Belt and Road Initiative’s ambitions in the Gulf, the region’s energy wealth and its capital markets, run through Iranian territory or around it. And Pakistan sharpens that calculation.

India sits inside the Quad, the American-led grouping built explicitly to contain China. Every mile of daylight between Iran and Washington is a mile closer to a Gulf sealed off from Beijing on both flanks, Indian-aligned to the east, American-aligned to the west. Pakistan’s strategic value to China, then, is not just Gwadar and CPEC. It reminds Beijing what containment looks like when it works, and why it must ensure Iran never joins it.

This is not alliance-building in the traditional sense. John Mearsheimer would recognise it as a hedge against dependency. In The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer writes that “all of the major states around the globe still care deeply about the balance of power among themselves.” States do not maximise friendship. They maximise position.

Pakistan’s leadership understands this instinctively. The country is not trying to win a bloc. It is trying to remain useful to every block at once, without belonging to any.

Henry Kissinger offers the clearest warning about why this is hard to sustain. In World Order, he observes that “the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.” A hinge state’s leverage is not a fixed asset. It decays the moment one relationship deepens at the expense of the others. If Pakistan tilts too far toward Riyadh, it loses standing with Tehran. If it leans too heavily on Beijing, it forfeits utility to Washington. The hinge’s value lies precisely in its refusal to close.

Brent Scowcroft, the only man to serve as national security adviser to two American presidents, practiced a version of this discipline from the American side. His biographer, Bartholomew Sparrow, describes him as a man who saw the United States as having “congruent and ultimately reconcilable interests” with much of the rest of the world, without ever mistaking that congruence for permanent friendship. Scowcroft’s realism rested on narrow interest, not sentiment. Islamabad would do well to apply the same discipline to its own commitments. Warmth is not strategy. Interest is.

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Moscow’s Yevgeny Primakov, the architect of Russia’s post-Soviet foreign policy, made a related point about the international system itself. He argued that the “modern world is really multipolar, complex, and dynamic,” and that any attempt to organize global decisions around a single pole was “doomed to failure.” Primakov was writing about great powers, not middle ones. But the logic scales down. A world that no longer bends to one center creates room for states like Pakistan to matter more, not less. Multipolarity is the atmosphere in which hinge power breathes.

None of this is free. Three risks sit underneath the strategy. Bloc capture is the first. Suppose Beijing or Riyadh comes to see Pakistan as already theirs; its diplomatic value to Washington and Tehran collapses. Overextension is the second. Commitments across four theaters, without the force posture or industrial capacity to back them, invite a shock that Islamabad cannot absorb everywhere at once. Trust deficit is the third and most corrosive. A hinge power survives only as long as every side believes it will hold to its word. The moment one partner concludes that Pakistan is playing them, the leverage does not weaken. It disappears.

The stakes for Islamabad are not abstract. Success means Riyadh, Beijing, Tehran, and Washington all calculate Pakistan’s likely response before they act and adjust accordingly. Failure means Pakistan becomes what Brzezinski called a vassal rather than a pivot, valuable to one capital and disposable to the rest.

The Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, and the National Security Adviser now share one task. Keep the hinge open. Close it, and the leverage is gone before anyone notices.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.