Pakistan's Gulf Equation: The Nuclear-Armed Neighbor That Both Sides Court
Pakistan sits at the northeastern corner of the Arabian Sea, flanked by Iran to its west and with a coastline that extends from the Gulf of Oman toward India. It is the world’s only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state, a country with deep financial and demographic ties to the Gulf Arab states, and a country with a 900-kilometer land border with Iran. Its position makes it relevant to every major regional security scenario, including Hormuz, without giving it decisive influence over any of them. Pakistan is courted and pressured simultaneously by parties whose interests in the Gulf are incompatible, and it manages this position with a hedging strategy that satisfies no one and infuriates everyone.
The financial link to Saudi Arabia and the UAE is the most direct connection between Pakistan and Gulf security. Pakistani workers in Gulf Cooperation Council states number in the millions, and their remittances are a primary source of foreign exchange for a country that is chronically short of it. Saudi Arabia has provided emergency financial assistance to Pakistan at multiple points of economic crisis, most recently in the form of oil on deferred payment terms and direct deposits into Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves. This financial dependency creates leverage that Riyadh has used — and that Islamabad has been acutely aware of — during periods when Saudi Arabia has sought Pakistani military support for Gulf security initiatives.
The most consequential request came in 2015, when Saudi Arabia asked Pakistan to contribute ground forces to the Yemen coalition that it was assembling to counter Houthi advances. The Pakistani parliament voted to decline, in a decision that reflected both the domestic political calculation that involvement in an Arab civil war with sectarian dimensions was dangerous for a country with its own Shia-Sunni tensions, and the institutional assessment by the Pakistani military that deploying forces in Yemen would damage its Iran relationship without achieving a strategic objective worth the cost. Saudi Arabia was offended. The relationship survived, partly because Pakistan’s indispensability to Saudi security calculations did not disappear because of a single refusal.
Iran is the constraint that limits how far Pakistan can tilt toward Saudi Arabia. The shared border creates exposure that a purely adversarial relationship with Tehran would make dangerous. Iranian support for Baloch separatist groups operating in Pakistan’s restive western province — support that Iran has provided at various points as leverage against Pakistani policy — is a real threat. Pakistani military planners cannot design a Gulf-oriented security policy that ignores the Iran variable in their own backyard. The result is a policy of formal neutrality on intra-Gulf disputes that is resented by both Riyadh and Tehran and that Pakistan maintains because the alternative is worse.
For Hormuz specifically, Pakistan matters in two ways. First, its cooperation or non-cooperation with American and coalition naval operations in the Arabian Sea affects the freedom of action available to forces managing the Hormuz approaches from the east. Pakistan’s port at Karachi, its airspace, and its maritime patrol capacity are all relevant to the surveillance and interdiction missions that coalition forces conduct in the western Arabian Sea. Pakistani cooperation has historically been available when American interests and Pakistani financial needs aligned. It has not been guaranteed and has been withdrawn when political conditions changed.
Second, Pakistan’s relationship with China — the deepest strategic partnership that either country maintains, formalized through CPEC and the all-weather friendship that Pakistani officials recite as a formula of reassurance — connects Islamabad to Beijing’s Hormuz exposure in ways that are not fully articulated but that shape Pakistani strategic calculations. China’s dependence on Gulf oil creates an interest in Hormuz stability that it shares with Pakistan’s Gulf remittance economy, even if the nature of the interest is different. When China’s interests and Saudi Arabia’s interests align on strait security, Pakistan’s own alignment becomes somewhat easier to maintain. When they diverge, Pakistan’s position becomes correspondingly more difficult.
A nuclear-armed state that cannot afford to alienate any of the parties with interests in the Persian Gulf, positioned on the strait’s eastern approaches, making the strategic calculations that follow from that geometry. Pakistan is not a Gulf power. It is a Gulf problem that no Gulf power has solved.