The photograph of Pakistan's Army chief being received by Iran's Foreign Minister in Tehran this week has its real backdrop not in the Iranian capital - the real context lies in the White House Oval Office in June 2025. A uniformed Pakistani general serving as America's most trusted diplomatic courier in one of the world's most dangerous standoffs is striking. But once you understand how Donald Trump runs American foreign policy, it is entirely predictable. Trump does not send career diplomats when things get serious. He sends people he has personally decided to trust. Right now, that man is Asim Munir.
To understand why, you have to understand not just the President but the remarkable structural symmetry between the two states he and Munir respectively represent.
Two Systems, One Illogic
Pakistan and the United States are not obvious analogues. One is a nuclear-armed developing state with a GDP per capita below $1,500, perpetually on IMF life support, where the military has historically governed from behind civilian facades. The other is the world's largest economy, a constitutional republic with 2.5 centuries of institutional continuity. And yet, under their current leaderships, both countries are governed by a strikingly similar operating logic: institutions are weak or weakened, personalities dominate, and outcomes depend less on process than on who knows whom and what they have to offer each other.
In Pakistan, this is a structural condition. The military has always been the institution that actually decides. Civilian governments come and go; the army remains. Munir has simply made this arrangement more explicit than most predecessors.
In Trump's Washington, institutional erosion is more recent but directionally similar. Pakistani officials quickly diagnosed it: access to this White House runs through Trump family businesses as much as through the State Department. Career diplomats and inter-agency processes still formally exist, but they are increasingly decorative. What matters is the personal relationship with the President, and what you can offer him and his circle.
The Art of the Offer
Islamabad understood that in a personalised system, the entry point is commerce and flattery, not diplomatic convention. The courtship was methodical. The first move was counterterrorism. Pakistani intelligence helped the US capture a key Islamic State-Khorasan operative responsible for the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing, the kind of concrete, nameable result Trump could announce and claim as his own.
Then came the commercial offers. World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture in which the Trump family holds substantial interests, sent executives to Islamabad, where Pakistan signed an MoU on stablecoin adoption. Munir personally welcomed the delegation, signalling an alignment between Pakistan's military and Trump-linked business entities. Pakistan simultaneously pitched claims to trillions of dollars in rare-earth minerals, and a Missouri-based US firm subsequently signed an MoU with a military-owned Pakistani company to develop rare-earth resources. Neither offering rests on fully verified foundations, but in a system where personal enthusiasm substitutes for institutional due diligence, the offer is the relationship.
Recognising Each Other
Into this environment walked Munir, and Trump responded to him in a register he reserves for a very specific kind of leader. "Trump likes people who are in charge of their countries and he likes strongmen," said analyst Husain Haqqani. "Field Marshal Munir is very much in that category." Both men operate in systems where formal rules are negotiable, loyalty is personal rather than institutional, and the consolidation of authority in a single figure is treated not as a problem but as a solution.
PM Modi is also a strongman by any reasonable definition, but one - according to Trump's view - 'burdened' by institutions that retain real force: courts that rule against the government, a federal structure with genuine provincial weight, a meritorious bureaucracy with its own stygian inertia. For Trump, accustomed to leaders who can simply decide, mediation registers as friction. Munir has none of these 'pitfalls'.
The June 2025 White House lunch was unprecedented, the first time a US president hosted Pakistan's Army chief alone, without civilian officials present. Trump called Munir his "favourite field marshal", a knowing nod to the recently bestowed title that made Munir only the second Pakistani ever to hold it. The civilian-military distinction that organises conventional democratic diplomacy simply does not structure Trump's thinking.
What Was Discussed In The Oval Office
The September 2025 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Munir was notable for what surrounded it as much as what was reported from it. No American officials were present for portions of the discussion. No readout detailed the substance. What is on the record is what happened in Pakistan shortly afterwards.
In November 2025, Pakistan's parliament passed the 27th Constitutional Amendment, entrenching the military's political role, elevating Munir to the new post of Chief of Defence Forces over all three services, and securing for him lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution. Constitutional cases moved from the Supreme Court to a new Federal Constitutional Court whose judges would be appointed by the executive. Two senior Supreme Court judges resigned in protest, with one declaring that "the Constitution I swore to uphold is no more".
We do not know what was said in that Oval Office. It would be speculative to draw a direct line between the meeting and the amendment. But the sequencing is worth noting: Munir visited Washington in September, was received with exceptional warmth by a President who openly admires consolidated personal power, and returned home to preside over the most significant concentration of military authority in Pakistan's constitutional history in November. Whether Trump endorsed this trajectory, encouraged it, or simply created the atmosphere in which Munir felt emboldened to move, the outcome served both men's apparent preferences.
Flattery as Currency
Pakistan also ran what can only be called an industrial-scale flattery operation, and this fits the Trump template precisely because, in a personalised system, ego maintenance is a form of statecraft. Sharif and Munir endorsed Trump's Nobel Peace Prize bid at least half a dozen times, with Sharif telling him at the Egypt summit: "You're the man this world needed most at this point in time." Pakistan hired lobbying firms staffed by Trump's former associates and positioned itself as offering concrete deliverables across counterterrorism, minerals, and crypto. Both men understand instinctively that power in their respective systems is relational, not procedural. The Nobel nominations and the crypto deals are the currency of the system both men inhabit.
The Tehran Crescendo
The Iran mediation role is where this structural alignment has produced its most consequential foreign policy outcome. When Trump needs something done, he calls someone he personally trusts. Trump said he agreed to the Iran ceasefire "based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir of Pakistan", adding that they had "requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran". Munir had access. Munir had the relationship. Munir made the call. Trump this week called him "fantastic" and said Iran talks would return to Pakistan specifically because of his efforts. The State Department was not the story.
A former Pakistani envoy offered the appropriate caution: "No relationships are assured in perpetuity". The warmth of the Modi-Trump relationship of the first term couldn't save India from Trump's tariff aggression in the second term. The envoy argues that personalised systems are contingent on the person; when the individual changes or loses interest, the relationship evaporates because there are no institutions beneath it to hold it together.
For now, in Tehran, Pakistan's army chief carries America's message. Two men, two systems, one illogic. It works, until it doesn't.
(The author is a Research Fellow in the Geostrategy Program at the Takshashila Institution)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
