Beijing’s emergence as a self-styled peace broker in two simultaneous conflicts, the US-Iran war and the Afghanistan-Pakistan armed confrontation, is drawing scrutiny, not least because it arrives precisely as Islamabad has been deepening its ties with Washington, straining the “all-weather friendship” in ways neither side is willing to openly acknowledge.
The US-Iran war is putting China-Pakistan ties under strain, as Beijing’s ‘wedge strategy’ faces a test amid Islamabad’s growing engagement with Washington and shifting regional dynamics. A wedge strategy refers to a geopolitical approach in which a country seeks to drive a wedge between two partners or allies to weaken their relationship and advance its own strategic interests.
Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar flew to Beijing just two days after sustaining a hairline shoulder fracture, an urgency that few read as coincidental. On the very day he sat down with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Beijing unveiled a joint “five-point initiative for restoring peace and stability in the Gulf and Middle East region,” as carried by state-controlled People’s Daily.
The timing was deliberate. China had been watching with growing discomfort as Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir extended an increasingly warm hand toward Washington. Their White House luncheon with President Donald Trump in June 2025 deepened Beijing’s unease considerably.
Publicly, China maintains that the partnership with Islamabad is unshakeable. Privately, its strategists are running a different calculation, assessing how far Pakistan can lean toward Washington before China’s privileged position in South Asia is genuinely threatened. An Al Jazeera report flagged the tension plainly after the Sharif-Munir meeting with Trump, noting that China remains Pakistan’s most consequential partner across economic, military, and strategic dimensions, even as Beijing’s rise has made it Washington’s principal rival on the global stage.
South Asia security researcher Muhammad Faisal of the University of Technology, Sydney, put the bind plainly: managing simultaneous ties with both superpowers will push Islamabad’s “no-camp politics” posture to its limits.
The complications do not stop at great-power rivalry. The Pakistan-Afghanistan war has been squeezing China’s Belt and Road Initiative access through both countries. The Taliban government’s outreach toward India has unsettled Beijing further. And the recent consolidation of independently elected governments in Bangladesh and Nepal, both quietly shifting toward nonpartisan diplomacy and away from Beijing’s orbit, has added to China’s sense of a shrinking South Asian footprint.
Analysts had already flagged the Iran crisis as a forcing function. With full-scale US-Israeli strikes on Iran now a month old, Islamabad faces the diplomatic pressure those analysts anticipated, pulled by its China ties in one direction, and its recalibrated Washington relationship in another.
The United States, for its part, views China’s peace overtures with scepticism, citing Beijing’s deep trade and security entanglement with Iran and Pakistan, its strategic contest with Washington, and its continued assertiveness across the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
For Beijing, the anxiety is structural. The question is no longer simply whether Pakistan will one day abandon it; it is whether Islamabad will settle into a careful balance between the two powers. That outcome, a Pakistan that refuses to be wholly China’s, may be the scenario Beijing is most determined to prevent.
(With IANS inputs)
