Tarique Niazi Foreign Policy in Focus
Pakistan’s Chief of Defense Forces Field Marshal Asim Munir’s trip to Iran on August 24 has ignited new hope for a negotiated end to the the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. He arrived in Tehran with “fresh proposals” to end the current deadlock between Iran and the United Sates and, more importantly, to restart the stalled talks between the two. Munir undertook the trip with the blessings of the top leadership in the United States. Although Islamabad and Washington have been in “constant” conversations as to how to resolve the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, Field Marshal Munir spoke with President Trump as recently as a week ago, which resulted in his hurriedly planned trip to Tehran.
Prior to the Munir-Trump call, Pakistan invited Iran’s foreign minister and the speaker of parliament, who are the chief negotiators on the Iran-U.S. conflict, for talks that Tehran agreed to “at an appropriate time.” The Iranians’ proposed visit to Islamabad was still in the works, when the Iranian foreign minister twice spoke to Munir, respectively on August 19 and August 22. On Sunday, August 23, a number of news outlets in Pakistan reported that Munir would instead arrive in Tehran on Monday.
Both Iran and Pakistan presented the trip as if it were a routine bilateral affair. But it is not. Field Marshal Munir has nothing to do with “routine bilateral affairs,” as Pakistan has vast diplomatic infrastructure to address such matters.
Pakistan’s military leadership became actively involved in the continuing Middle East conflict in February, when Israel and the United States launched joint strikes against Iran. This involvement was not Pakistan’s choice. Instead, Pakistan’s good offices were sought to defuse the conflict. This is how Pakistan’s prime minister and its chief of defense forces came to play the role of principal mediators.
Pakistan has since hosted landmark talks between Iran and the United States in Islamabad, which were led by the Vice President J.D. Vance and Iran’s Speaker of Parliament Bagher Ghalibaf. These marathon talks, which lasted 22 consecutive hours, were landmark in the sense that they were, for the first time, held face-to-face between two adversaries with decades of mutual antagonism. Pakistan again hosted the second round of these talks at the Burgenstock resort in Switzerland, which too was headed by Vance.
The Switzerland talks followed the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (IMOU) that was respectively signed by President Trump, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and cosigned by Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif of Pakistan. Later, talking to the media, Trump defended the signing of the document saying: “The one president I did not want to be was the late great Herbert Hoover.” He was referring to the dire global depression that occurred on Herbert Hoover’s watch and that Trump feared could recur if the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continued.
Munir’s travel to Iran is part of the persistent U.S. efforts to keep the Strait open. What makes his visit urgent is the urging of the United States and its regional partners, especially Saudi Arabia whose transit trade through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz has come to an almost complete halt, to help revive the stalled talks around the IMOU.
What are, then, the “fresh proposals” he is carrying to the Iranians to have them agree to reopening the Strait? More specifically, what is “fresh” about the fresh proposals? What’s new is that the reopening of the Strait now overshadows all other issues that the United States initially set out to negotiate with Iran, including the headline issue of denuclearization.
Vice President Vance said as recently as on August 13 that the administration’s “goal number one” is to “keep oil and gasoline cheap for Americans all over our country” and that preventing Iran from never getting a nuclear weapon is secondary to this goal. Munir’s “fresh proposals” echo Vance. The two talk to each other a lot. Vice President Vance confirmed this on June 21 at the Burgenstock Resort in Switzerland, where he was leading the United Staes at the four-way talks hosted by Pakistan. He said he had two favorite people with whom he would have long and frequent conversations, one Indian and the other Pakistani. The “Indian” was his reference to his wife Usha Vance who is an American of Indian descent, not an Indian, and she has no rival in Pakistan for her husband’s attention as the vice president jokingly implied. Since the start of the Middle East conflict in February, Vance said, he had been speaking with Munir more often than any other person. Vance channels President Trump whose singular focus is now to get the Iranians to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a focus that sits atop Munir’s “fresh proposals.”
On the other hand, Iranians know why they have shut down the Strait and why they will reopen it: to end the war and wring concessions out of Washington. This knowledge seems to make them bear any hardship, no matter how severe. So, what does the United States have to offer, beyond promising retribution to Iran in exchange for reopening the Strait and is that offer included in Munir’s “fresh proposals?” Munir’s proposals indeed include economic incentives for Iran to return to the basic principles agreed in the 14-point IMOU, although details of his proposals have been kept under wraps.
Photo by Basil Minhaj on Unsplash
Of immediate concern to Iran is an end to economic sanctions and the unfreezing of Iranian assets in exchange for reopening the Strait. The United States is more willing to agree to this arrangement as the cost of the Strait’s closure keeps revealing itself in market fluctuations and price increases. Sanctions relief is nothing new. Both Iran and the United States have been visiting this issue for years now. The only difference that has since occurred is in the “exchange value” of sanctions relief. Prior to now, sanctions relief was for nuclear non-proliferation; now it is for the reopening of the Strait that has morphed from being a “means” to becoming an “end.”
The reopening of the Strait is now the number one U.S. goal. The remainder of the “political” agenda that bears upon the cessation of hostilities in the region, and the restarting of talks on nuclear nonproliferation, can wait as a “secondary” objective. Both Iran and the United States seem to have a lot of impetus to accomplishing these goals and both trust that Pakistan’s mediation can make it happen. This is Pakistan’s Chief of Defense Forces Field Marshal Asim Munir’s third visit to Iran since February. The Trump administration is hoping that this third time’s the charm.
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