DA Editorial Desk | Dhruba Deka
When direct channels between adversaries collapse, intermediaries step in to fill the vacuum. Pakistan’s Army Chief Asim Munir carrying a US-drafted framework on the Strait of Hormuz to Tehran this week is the latest instance of this pattern, one that has recurred throughout the history of US-Iran relations whenever formal diplomacy breaks down. But the recurrence of shuttle diplomacy in this relationship is itself instructive: it reveals as much about what this method cannot accomplish as about what it can.
Shuttle diplomacy has genuine strengths. It allows adversarial governments to test proposals, gauge red lines, and signal flexibility without committing to anything publicly, since messages relayed through a third party carry built-in deniability. Neither Washington nor Tehran risks the domestic political cost of appearing to negotiate directly with an adversary each has spent years demonising in official rhetoric. For Pakistan, acting as courier and, at times, interpreter of intent between the two capitals offers a way to remain diplomatically relevant to a great-power relationship it has no direct stake in resolving, while accumulating goodwill with both sides that it can draw on elsewhere.
But the very features that make shuttle diplomacy useful, deniability, distance, and the absence of direct commitment, are also what limit its capacity to produce durable outcomes. A proposal relayed by an intermediary is not a proposal either side has actually agreed to; it is, at best, an invitation to further negotiation, filtered through a third party’s own interpretation, priorities, and occasional misreading of nuance. Iranian sources have already moved to characterise Munir’s visit carefully, with a source cited by Tasnim insisting he carried no explicit US threat, but rather sought to convey Iran’s own conditions back to Washington. That framing matters: it suggests Tehran views the exchange as bidirectional negotiation rather than an ultimatum being delivered, a distinction that shapes how seriously either side treats what follows.
History offers ample precedent for how easily this kind of indirect diplomacy can stall. The Islamabad memorandum that reportedly underpinned the earlier US-Iran ceasefire is, by multiple accounts, already faltering, with Iran now seeking a return to provisions it argues were never properly implemented. If a framework negotiated with intermediary assistance previously failed to hold once implementation began, there is little inherent reason a similarly structured framework, again relayed through Pakistan, would fare differently, unless the underlying trust deficit between Washington and Tehran is addressed more directly than a shuttled proposal alone can manage.
The deeper problem with sustained reliance on intermediaries is that it substitutes the appearance of progress for its substance. Each visit, each relayed framework, each reported development generates headlines suggesting diplomatic momentum, even when the underlying positions of both principal parties may have shifted only marginally, if at all. Verification, the single hardest part of any de-escalation arrangement involving military postures and sanctions relief, is particularly ill-suited to indirect channels. Confirming that Iran has genuinely restrained allied groups, or that the US has followed through on staged sanctions relief, requires a level of direct engagement and monitoring that a courier relationship, however well-intentioned, cannot easily substitute for.
This is not a case against Pakistan’s role, which has value precisely because direct US-Iran contact remains politically untenable for both governments at this stage. Islamabad, alongside Doha and Muscat working parallel tracks, provides a mechanism for keeping communication alive when the alternative is complete silence, and complete silence carries its own escalatory risks in a standoff involving a strategically vital waterway. The point, rather, is that shuttle diplomacy should be understood by all parties, and by outside observers reading these developments, as a bridge rather than a destination. It can keep talks from collapsing entirely and can surface areas of possible convergence. What it cannot do, on its own, is deliver the sustained verification and mutual confidence-building that a durable resolution to the Strait of Hormuz standoff will ultimately require.
If this latest round of intermediary diplomacy is to succeed where the Islamabad memorandum reportedly did not, both Washington and Tehran will eventually need to find some way to engage more directly, whether through back-channel talks that supplement rather than replace Pakistan’s role, or through a multilateral forum that can offer more robust verification mechanisms than any single intermediary can provide. Until then, each new flight to Tehran or Washington will continue to generate speculation and cautious optimism in roughly equal measure, without necessarily bringing the underlying dispute meaningfully closer to resolution.