Tehran keeps both levers in hand as Pakistan channel stays open

At 08:11 UTC on 13 July 2026, Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei laid out a doctrine in a single sentence, transmitted through the Tasnim News Agency's Persian-language feed. "Wherever it is necessary, we will use the tools of war and wherever it is necessary, we will use the tools of diplomacy," he said. "We cannot stand still. The art is to choose the best way to help secure benefit." Three minutes later, at 08:14 UTC, the same channel carried a second line that pulled the doctrine back from abstraction: contacts with Pakistan continue. Diplomacy, Baqaei added, is not a tool for closing doors. By 08:17 UTC, Fars News International had published a parallel formulation in English: "We use any necessary means and methods to secure our interests and national security."

The pattern is deliberate, and it is the story. Tehran is signalling, simultaneously, that it is willing to escalate and that it is willing to talk, and that the choice between the two is not a question of ideology but of cost. Read together, the three dispatches describe a foreign policy operating in two registers at once: a public posture calibrated to a domestic audience that has watched successive rounds of sanctions and isolation, and a quieter operational channel with Islamabad that has stayed open across the very hours in which the more warlike language was being broadcast.

The doctrine of choice

Baqaei's framing rests on a small but consequential distinction. War and diplomacy are not, in his telling, rival moral claims about the world; they are instruments, and instruments are chosen by what they deliver. The line about Pakistan is the proof of concept. The same official, in the same news cycle, asserted that all necessary means would be used to secure Iranian interests, while confirming that the channel to a nuclear-armed neighbour of more than 240 million people had not been allowed to lapse.

That posture has a long pedigree in the Islamic Republic's messaging. It permits Tehran to retain maximum optionality at moments when the cost of commitment, in either direction, is high. To a Western audience, the message reads as a threat. To a Pakistani or Gulf audience, the same words can be read as an invitation to mediate, to clarify, to deconflict. Both readings are available in the original text because the original text is built to carry both.

Why Pakistan, and why now

Pakistan matters to this calculation for three reasons that have nothing to do with any single crisis. It shares a roughly 900-kilometre border with Iran's Sistan-Baluchestan province, the country's poorest and most insurgency-prone region, and the corridor through which cross-border militancy, fuel smuggling, and refugee flows have moved for decades. It sits between Iran and the broader Muslim-majority world, with which Tehran has sought warmer relations since the 2023 rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the reopening of diplomatic ties. And it is one of the few regional states with the relationships, in both Tehran and the Gulf, to act as a credible intermediary.

That third point has become more rather than less valuable in 2026. Mediation channels in the Middle East have thinned as the war in Gaza has continued, as the maritime front in the Red Sea has imposed costs on global shipping, and as the question of what to do about Iran's nuclear file has moved back toward the top of Western agendas. Pakistan has, in fits and starts, played that role before. The Baqaei line suggests that Tehran wants it to be visibly playing the role again.

What the words do not say

The official line is not a strategic blueprint; it is a posture. What it does not specify is the threshold at which the cost-benefit calculation tips from one tool to the other. There is no metric in the three dispatches for what counts as an Iranian interest sufficiently threatened to warrant war, nor for what kind of Pakistani good offices would qualify as diplomacy successfully "securing benefit." The text, in other words, is a guardrail on expectations, not a roadmap.

This is worth saying because the same elision has, in past cycles, been read by outside observers in opposite directions. Hawks in Western capitals have treated identical language from Tehran as evidence of imminent escalation. Doves in regional capitals have read it as a face-saving way to climb down. Both readings find something to point at, and neither is on solid ground. The disciplined reading is that Tehran is buying time and preserving its move set, and that the next signal will come not from a press briefing but from a movement of personnel, hardware, or agreements.

The limits of the channel

A working channel with Islamabad is not the same thing as a settlement with Washington, with the Gulf, or with Israel. Pakistan can carry messages and can host talks; it cannot deliver the kind of structural relief, in the form of sanctions unwinding or security guarantees, that an Iranian leadership weighing escalation against diplomacy would ultimately want to see on the table. What it can do is lower the temperature on a particular day, in a particular theatre, and create the space for longer conversations to continue.

That is what the Baqaei line is, on the most plausible reading, asking for: space. The "necessary means" formulation tells the domestic audience that no option has been foreclosed. The Pakistan line tells regional counterparts that the door is still ajar. The two messages will live side by side, in the same news cycle, until something concrete forces a choice between them.

What to watch

The next signal is unlikely to be a speech. It will be a movement: a meeting of foreign ministers in a third capital, a shipping notice through the Strait of Hormuz, a drone incident attributed to one side or the other, or a sanctions waiver that lands on a Friday evening in Washington. The Tasnim and Fars feeds will carry the framing; the underlying reality will be in the operational tempo. Until that tempo shifts, Tehran's posture is best read as it was written: two tools, held in the same hand, with the choice still being made.

Monexus framed this story against the Persian-language wire rather than the Western-dubbed translation, because the elision in Baqaei's "necessary means" formulation is sharper in the original.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/JahanTasnim
• https://t.me/JahanTasnim
• https://t.me/FarsNewsInt