CONNECTIVITY, CONFLICT AND DIPLOMACY:

PAKISTAN’S MIDDLE POWER JOURNEY

Abstract

This study examines Pakistan's bilateral relations with India and the US after Phase II of CPEC; it further studies the transformation in relations that transpired after the India-Pakistan military confrontation in May 2025. Based on a neorealist theoretical framework, the paper maintains that CPEC at first deepened Pakistan's partnership with China while concurrently intensifying India's anger and cooling Washington's engagement with Islamabad. The military operations of May 2025, namely India's Operation Sindoor and Pakistan's counter-offensive Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos, upturned suppositions about the conventional military balance in South Asia. These military events set in motion a chain of diplomatic outcomes that no state had predicted. Within the period of twelve months after the ceasefire, Islamabad hosted the first direct Washington-Tehran engagement in over forty years and also procured a partnership with the US. These developments are an indication that CPEC, while restricting independent action in some respects, also presented the strategic foundation from which Pakistan set up a credible deterrent in May 2025 and successively re-positioned itself as a diplomatic middle power of the region. India's response to this repositioning, evidenced by its rejection of US mediation claims and the suspension of the Indus Waters Treaty, reflects New Delhi’s unease with an emerging regional order it did not design.