Lorenzo Maria Pacini
The success of its mediation effort between the U.S., Israel, and Iran would position Pakistan as a stabilizing and regulatory power.
Pakistan's nuclearization and deterrence point of view
In the current regional crisis in the Gulf, with the Third War underway and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz reshaping the markets, Pakistan is emerging as one of the most credible mediators capable of balancing the powers at play.
The notion of strategic stability emerged during the Cold War as a conceptual tool for understanding how nuclear-armed rivals might avoid catastrophic escalation despite persistent rivalry and mutual suspicion. In the South Asian context, this idea acquired particular relevance because India and Pakistan entered independence in 1947 amid unresolved territorial disputes, repeated military confrontations, and deep structural asymmetries in conventional power. From the beginning, Pakistan sought to offset India's superior size and resource base through a combination of qualitative military enhancement, external balancing, and, eventually, nuclear deterrence.
In the decades following partition, the Indo-Pakistani relationship was shaped by war, border conflict, and competing security narratives. Pakistan's early strategy relied heavily on alliance politics, especially security cooperation with the United States and later China, in an effort to compensate for its relative material weakness. Yet the 1971 war constituted a decisive turning point: Pakistan discovered that external patrons would not necessarily intervene to preserve its territorial integrity, and the loss of East Pakistan fundamentally altered Islamabad's strategic calculus. In the aftermath, Pakistani elites increasingly concluded that future security could not depend on outside guarantees alone, but had to rest on indigenous deterrent capabilities.
The widening gap between Indian and Pakistani conventional capabilities, together with India's advancing nuclear program, intensified Pakistan's security anxieties and encouraged a search for an equalizer. The Multan meeting under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto signaled the political commitment to developing a nuclear fuel cycle and, more broadly, a nuclear option that could be transformed into an operational capability under adverse security conditions. India's first nuclear test in 1974, codenamed Smiling Buddha, accelerated this process by convincing Pakistani policymakers that reliance on latent capability alone would be insufficient.
The Indian test also had wider consequences for global non-proliferation politics. It contributed to the tightening of export controls and the gradual institutionalization of regimes such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which made access to sensitive technologies more difficult for states outside the established nuclear order. From Islamabad's perspective, this created a structural disadvantage: Pakistan faced increasing barriers to acquiring the very technologies that India had already been able to exploit earlier in the nuclear age. The 1974 Indian test therefore acted both as a regional shock and as an international regulatory watershed.
When India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons openly in May 1998, South Asia entered a new strategic era. India's tests at Pokhran were followed by Pakistan's own tests at Chagai, restoring a measure of strategic symmetry and signaling that Pakistan would not allow the regional balance to shift unchallenged. Although the tests were widely expected to inaugurate greater stability, they instead produced a deterrence environment marked by recurring crises, coercive signaling, and doctrinal innovation. In practice, nuclearization did not eliminate competition; it transformed its forms.
After 1998, the central strategic problem in South Asia became the relationship between nuclear deterrence and conventional conflict. India and Pakistan both attempted to interpret the post-nuclear environment in ways that preserved freedom of action while avoiding uncontrolled escalation. Yet their doctrines developed in sharply different directions, and those differences have repeatedly shaped crisis behavior.
India's doctrinal evolution has been marked by ambiguity and periodic debate. Although the 1999 draft doctrine emphasized no first use and minimum deterrence, the official 2003 statement introduced important caveats and deepened uncertainty about the future direction of Indian nuclear policy. Later political statements and doctrinal discussions revived concern in Pakistan that India might be moving toward counterforce thinking or greater flexibility in nuclear use. This uncertainty has strategic consequences, because any erosion of credibility around declared restraint can intensify insecurity and encourage reciprocal adjustments by the adversary.
Pakistan's nuclear posture has been characterized by deliberate ambiguity, partly because Islamabad has never issued a fully detailed public doctrine. Instead, Pakistani officials have repeatedly emphasized credible minimum deterrence, later supplemented by the concept of full spectrum deterrence as a response to perceived Indian efforts to develop limited war options. This posture is intended to deny India confidence that any conventional operation can remain neatly below the nuclear threshold. At the same time, the absence of clearly articulated red lines has also created interpretive uncertainty, which can complicate crisis signaling and raise the risk of miscalculation.
Limited war and cold start
India's search for limited war concepts became especially visible after the 2001-2002 military standoff, when the mobilization of large forces failed to produce decisive political leverage. Scholars and practitioners have argued that Operation Parakram exposed serious weaknesses in India's older conventional warfighting model, particularly the slow deployment of large strike corps and the resulting inability to preserve strategic surprise. The episode suggested that a large-scale mobilization could be neutralized by delay, international mediation, and Pakistani countermobilization before India achieved meaningful coercive effect.
It was in this context that the Cold Start doctrine emerged. In simplified terms, Cold Start sought to enable rapid, shallow, and limited conventional strikes against Pakistan before outside powers could intervene, while remaining below the nuclear threshold. The doctrine envisaged smaller, more agile integrated battle groups, supported by close air support, capable of quick offensive action across multiple axes. The strategic logic was to punish Pakistan without triggering the kind of escalation that would compel nuclear use.
Yet the doctrine's own logic generated instability. As multiple analysts have noted, limited war in South Asia is difficult to control because crises may expand through deliberate escalation or inadvertent escalation. From Pakistan's perspective, Cold Start represented not a defensive refinement but an attempt to erode the credibility of deterrence and create space for coercive operations under the nuclear umbrella. Pakistan therefore responded by strengthening its own posture, including the development of short-range systems designed to complicate Indian planning and reinforce deterrence at lower levels of conflict.
The years after overt nuclearization have been characterized by repeated crises rather than stable deterrence. The 2001-2002 standoff, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 2016 Uri episode, the 2019 Pulwama-Balakot crisis, and other episodes have all demonstrated that nuclear weapons do not prevent conflict; they shape its intensity, tempo, and escalation risks. Each crisis has revealed both the resilience and fragility of deterrence in South Asia.
The 2019 crisis was especially important because it illustrated the interaction between airpower, cross-border retaliation, and international crisis management. India's airstrike at Balakot was followed by Pakistan's retaliatory response, and the episode rapidly escalated into an aerial confrontation before external diplomatic pressure helped de-escalate the situation. The episode underscored two important realities: first, that both sides are increasingly willing to use conventional force in limited forms; and second, that third-party mediation remains central to crisis termination in South Asia. However, reliance on external crisis management is itself destabilizing because it can encourage brinkmanship and create incentives to test the limits of restraint.
More recent scholarship has argued that South Asian deterrence does not mirror Cold War stability. Unlike the U.S.-Soviet dyad, India and Pakistan operate under conditions of deep asymmetry, recurrent sub-conventional conflict, and limited institutionalized crisis-management mechanisms. The result is a form of "fragile stability," in which nuclear weapons suppress full-scale war but do not eliminate conflict escalation risks.
Military asymmetry and new strategic stability
A central driver of instability remains the widening conventional imbalance between India and Pakistan. India's larger defense budget, broader industrial base, and greater access to advanced systems have all reinforced Pakistani perceptions of vulnerability. This asymmetry shapes Islamabad's reliance on nuclear weapons as a comparatively economical means of preserving deterrence. In this sense, nuclear weapons are not simply instruments of prestige; they are viewed in Pakistan as essential correctives to a structural imbalance.
The conventional imbalance also affects doctrinal evolution. India's investments in missile defense, precision strike systems, submarines, and long-range delivery platforms have been interpreted in Pakistan as efforts to improve warfighting options and weaken deterrence. Pakistan has responded by pursuing systems such as short-range missiles, cruise missiles, and sea-based second-strike capabilities, all of which are intended to ensure that no Indian strategy can assume a disarming or low-cost success. The net effect is a classic security dilemma: each side's effort to improve its own safety is interpreted by the other as a threat.
Recent studies emphasize that strategic stability in South Asia must now be understood as dynamic, not static. It is influenced not only by nuclear doctrine and force posture, but also by great-power competition, technological change, missile defenses, precision strike systems, drones, cyber capabilities, and the growing salience of non-state actors. In this environment, the old Cold War notion of equilibrium is increasingly inadequate.
Pakistan's official and quasi-official discourse continues to present its nuclear posture as one of restraint, responsibility, and deterrence management. The argument is that Pakistan has preserved strategic stability by preventing India from converting conventional superiority into coercive dominance. Yet this position is inherently defensive and vulnerable to escalation pressure, particularly if India interprets restraint as weakness or believes that limited strikes can be executed with impunity.
The most credible conclusion is that strategic stability in South Asia remains contingent and fragile rather than assured. Nuclear deterrence has prevented full-scale war, but it has not prevented crises, localized violence, coercive signaling, or doctrinal escalation. Pakistan's security behavior should therefore be understood as a continuous attempt to preserve an unfavorable but survivable balance under conditions of asymmetry and recurring challenge.
And this is where Pakistan's efforts to assume a leadership role in the region come into play: the success of this mediation effort between the U.S., Israel, and Iran would position Pakistan as a stabilizing and regulatory power, effectively enclosing the geographical and geopolitical space of the Islamic region of West Asia within a framework of nuclear and technological protection.