Pakistan, the Abraham Accords, and the Limits of Mediating the US-Iran War Pro

Foreword: This is not a news report but a piece of analysis. The reporting cited here is drawn from public sources, but the forward-looking assessments and inferences are the perspective of the author, not authoritative fact.

On 25 May 2026, US President Donald Trump publicly called on eight states (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, and Bahrain) to sign onto the Abraham Accords, framing their accession as a “mandatory” component of any settlement to the war between the United States, Israel, and Iran.¹

Pakistan was the first of those states to refuse in public, with Defence Minister Khawaja Asif telling a domestic broadcaster that recognizing Israel “clashes with our fundamental ideologies” and noting that the Pakistani passport still excludes Israel as a valid destination.² The demand would be significant in its own right, but it is doubly so because it arrived in the middle of Pakistan’s most consequential diplomatic undertaking in years, the mediation effort that Field Marshal Asim Munir has led between Washington and Tehran since the spring.

The Mediation and Its Ceiling

The war itself began on 28 February 2026, when US and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, during active negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, with his son Mojtaba Khamenei subsequently installed in his place.³

Pakistan moved quickly into the resulting vacuum, brokering the initial two-week ceasefire, hosting the first round of the Islamabad Talks in April (with the US delegation led by Vice President JD Vance), and dispatching Munir to Tehran on more than one occasion, even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio characterized the process as showing no more than “slight progress.”^{4, 5}

On its face, this represents a considerable diplomatic achievement for a state that, until very recently, sat at the periphery of the region’s principal security conversations.