ISLAMABAD: Former Foreign Minister of Iran Dr Javad Zarif has said that the emerging post-polar world does not automatically guarantee peace, but places greater responsibility on regional states to pursue dialogue, cooperation and shared prosperity.
“The post-polar world does not give us peace automatically; it gives us greater responsibility. We must move from security against one another towards security with one another, building a regional future based on dialogue, cooperation and shared prosperity,” Dr Zarif said while speaking at a roundtable hosted by the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI).
The event was organised by ISSI’s Centre for Afghanistan, Middle East and Africa (CAMEA) under the Distinguished Lecture Series.
Dr Zarif, a veteran Iranian diplomat, scholar and academic, served as Iran’s foreign minister from 2013 to 2021. He played a central role in negotiations that led to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and is internationally recognised for his role in multilateral diplomacy and international negotiations.
Speaking on the evolving international order, Dr Zarif said the post-polar global environment had created both challenges and opportunities for regional states. He called for a shift from a threat-centred security paradigm to a possibility-centred approach based on regional ownership, dialogue, cooperation and shared prosperity.
He said the central question before the international community was not only what kind of world it was entering, but what kind of future it was prepared to build. The future, he said, was not a finished destination, but was being shaped through narratives, institutions, networks and choices made by societies.
Reflecting on the history of the region, Dr Zarif said West Asia had experienced colonialism, partition, sectarianism, occupation, invasion, externally sponsored conflicts, terrorism, sanctions and repeated military aggression. He said the past offered important lessons about the consequences of miscalculation, exclusion, domination and the outsourcing of security.
However, he cautioned that history could become a prison if societies remained trapped in memories of past conflicts and grievances. He said societies needed to confront the past honestly in order to recover possibilities that had been suppressed by history.
Discussing the current international environment, Dr Zarif described it as a post-polar world in which power had become distributed across regions, societies, markets, technologies, networks and public narratives. No single state, he said, had the capacity to control every major outcome, while middle powers and regional states had acquired greater strategic agency.
He said permanent alliances and loyalties were giving way to issue-based coalitions and network relations. Economic interdependence, technology, information and non-state actors were also increasingly shaping security and political outcomes.
Dr Zarif maintained that this environment required a new regional political imagination. He said security had to become more inclusive, as one country could not achieve lasting security by creating insecurity for another. He called for moving from security “against” one another to security “with” one another.
He also spoke about his initiative, the Muslim West Asia Dialogue Association (MWADA), describing it as a framework for replacing enmity with amity through dialogue, cultural ties, economic cooperation and, eventually, a regional non-aggression framework.
In this context, Dr Zarif highlighted Pakistan’s role as an important bridge between West Asia, South Asia and Central Asia. He noted that the broader MWADA framework envisaged the participation of Pakistan, Türkiye and Egypt alongside the Persian Gulf littoral states.
He said MWADA should not be viewed as a finished or static arrangement, but as an institutional possibility that could evolve according to the needs of participating states.
Referring to Pakistan’s role in facilitating dialogue between Iran and the United States, Dr Zarif appreciated Pakistan’s sincere efforts to promote diplomacy and de-escalation. He acknowledged Pakistan’s constructive role in bringing the two sides to the negotiating table and said the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding provided an important framework for dialogue and the peaceful resolution of differences.
He also described Pakistan’s diplomatic experience as an asset in managing complex regional dynamics.
Concluding his address, Dr Zarif said the past had shown that military superiority alone did not produce political legitimacy, sanctions and coercion did not create stability, and foreign guarantees could not substitute for regional arrangements.
He called for learning from history without allowing it to dictate the future. He said the region needed a future in which geography was not a sentence, history was not a prison and differences were not used as a pretext for permanent conflict.
Dr Zarif said the task was not merely to predict what came next, but to build what should come next.
The roundtable was attended by Pakistan’s former foreign ministers, foreign secretaries, ambassadors, senior civil and military officials, leading academics and security analysts.
