At a moment when global arms control is fraying, Pakistan has assumed the presidency of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, the forum where the world’s most consequential security questions still converge: nuclear risk, fissile materials, outer space, emerging technologies, and the future of strategic restraint.
The presidency is being led by Ambassador Tahir Hussain Andrabi, Additional Secretary for Arms Control and Disarmament and spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who brings to Geneva a distinctly Pakistani arms-control perspective rooted in the belief that durable restraint must rest on equity, non-discrimination, and equal security for all states. For four weeks, Pakistan will preside over the only multilateral negotiating forum bringing together all major nuclear-armed states, including the United States, Russia, China, India, Israel, and North Korea. As the final president of the Conference’s 2026 session, Pakistan will guide the consultations closing out the year’s proceedings and steer the Conference’s annual report toward the UN General Assembly.
This is a significant diplomatic moment for Pakistan, not because the presidency confers unilateral power, but because it places the country at the center of a conversation from which South Asian security concerns are too often relegated to the margins.
A Forum in Distress, Yet Still Relevant
The Conference on Disarmament is no ordinary UN body. Its predecessor institutions produced the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, and its agenda remains strikingly relevant today: halting the nuclear arms race, preventing nuclear war, avoiding an arms race in outer space, securing legally binding security assurances, addressing new weapons of mass destruction, and improving transparency in armaments.
Yet the institution is also visibly struggling. It hasn’t negotiated a major treaty since the CTBT in 1996, has repeatedly failed to launch substantive negotiations on a fissile-material treaty, and its consensus rule, requiring agreement from all 65 members before any movement can occur, has become synonymous with paralysis. That deadlock, however, shouldn’t be read as proof the Conference is irrelevant. It reflects deteriorating political conditions for arms control more broadly. Institutions cannot manufacture strategic trust where none exists, but they can preserve the diplomatic space in which trust might eventually be rebuilt. That is precisely why Pakistan’s presidency matters.
A Seat at the Table, on Equal Footing
Pakistan enters this role as a nuclear-weapon state outside the NPT, yet a full member of the Conference on Disarmament, a distinction that carries real weight. The broader nuclear order remains structured around the divide between the five NPT-recognized nuclear-weapon states and everyone else, and Pakistan is routinely discussed through the language of exception, challenge, or regional instability. In Geneva, however, Pakistan participates as a member of the world’s principal arms-control negotiating forum on equal procedural footing with established nuclear powers, a reminder that the future of the nuclear order cannot be built while ignoring the security realities of states outside its traditional centers of power.
South Asia isn’t an exception to the global nuclear order; it’s one of its clearest stress tests, combining conventional military asymmetry, unresolved political disputes, nuclear deterrence, missile competition, growing technological integration, and recurring crises. The issues debated in Geneva—fissile materials, missile defense, space security, artificial intelligence, nuclear risk reduction, and strategic stability—are not abstract for Pakistan. They describe the strategic environment the country actually lives in.
Equal Security, Not Selective Restraint
Pakistan has consistently argued that arms control cannot endure if built on selective restraint and unequal security. A credible fissile-material treaty, for instance, cannot simply freeze existing asymmetries and call that disarmament; it must be non-discriminatory, verifiable, and attentive to both future production and existing stockpiles. Likewise, global disarmament cannot become a language used to discipline some states while others modernize their arsenals, secure strategic exceptions, or pursue capabilities that shift regional deterrence balances.
This isn’t an argument against arms control, but for arms control to be serious enough to actually last. Pakistan’s longstanding emphasis on equal and undiminished security is often dismissed as a mere negotiating position, but it functions as a more basic test: whether the international community is genuinely prepared to address why states seek security in the first place. Arms control succeeds when it lowers insecurity; it fails when it simply redistributes vulnerability. The presidency gives Pakistan a platform to make this case in a broader, more constructive register.
This should not become an occasion for bilateral point-scoring with India. Pakistan’s strongest argument isn’t that South Asia deserves exceptional treatment, but that South Asian stability and global arms control are inseparable. Any conversation about nuclear restraint that ignores conventional asymmetry, missile defense, counterforce pressures, sub-nuclear crises, or the impact of emerging technologies remains incomplete.
Emerging Technologies and Strategic Stability
The same logic applies to the Conference’s forward agenda. Artificial intelligence increasingly shapes intelligence assessment, surveillance, targeting, military planning, and decision support. Space-based assets have become integral to both civilian life and military operations. Cyber capabilities, missile defense, autonomous weapons, and counter-space systems are reshaping deterrence calculations faster than international rules can keep pace. Pakistan has every reason to insist these developments be examined through the lens of strategic stability rather than technological prestige or the pursuit of absolute security by a handful of powerful states, since no state can make itself permanently secure by manufacturing greater insecurity for others.
What Success Actually Looks Like
There is also broader diplomatic significance here: Pakistan’s assumption of the chair reflects the depth of its institutional engagement with multilateral arms-control diplomacy, allowing it to convene, consult, and guide a conversation among states with deeply competing interests. The role isn’t about commanding the room but ensuring the room keeps functioning even when consensus proves elusive, a task that shouldn’t be trivialized.
The immediate measure of success will be practical: whether Pakistan can run inclusive consultations, prevent procedural breakdown, build enough common ground for an agreed annual report, and leave behind a foundation for continuity into the next session. Four weeks cannot resolve decades of division, nor can any single presidency produce agreements major powers themselves remain unwilling to make. But diplomacy isn’t measured solely by breakthrough treaties. It’s also measured by whether channels of communication stay open, whether the language of restraint remains available, and whether states that disagree fundamentally can still sit across the table from one another.
For Pakistan, this presidency is a chance to demonstrate that it isn’t merely a subject of global nuclear debate but an active participant in shaping it, an opportunity to bring South Asian realities into the heart of international arms-control discussions, argue for non-discrimination and equal security, and reaffirm that strategic stability cannot be built through exclusion. The Conference on Disarmament may be stalled, but in a world drifting steadily toward greater nuclear competition, weaker arms-control restraints, and more dangerous technologies, the table still matters. Pakistan now holds the chair.
