Iran and the Indispensable Broker: How Pakistan Outmaneuvers India on the World Stage

In Sept. 2025, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a mutual defense pact, formalizing what decades of quiet cooperation had already made real. The defense pact signed in Riyadh was presented in official communiqués as a natural deepening of bilateral ties. It was that, but it was also something larger: The latest installment in a pattern that has persisted for half a century and that continues to confound the logic of power politics. Pakistan, a state dependent on International Monetary Fund b...