Pakistan's Army Chef Munir spoke with US President Trump ahead of his visit to Tehran, according to Pakistani sources

Direct military-to-leader contact of this kind between Rawalpindi and Washington, timed ahead of a visit to Tehran, fits the long-running pattern in which Pakistan has served as a backchannel or intermediary on Iran, a role it has played across repeated cycles of US-Iran tension given that Islamabad maintains relations with both capitals. The detail worth noting is that the interlocutor is the army chief rather than the civilian government, consistent with the established reality that Pakistan's foreign and security policy on Iran runs through the military. Episodes of this kind tend to matter to crude and gold through the perceived probability of escalation or de-escalation in the Gulf rather than through any concrete deliverable, and backchannel headlines of this sort have historically moved those markets briefly before retracing absent follow-through. The sequencing to observe is whether the Tehran visit produces a readout, whether either side confirms the substance of the call, and whether official Iranian channels acknowledge any mediation. Single-source attribution to Pakistani officials, without US or Iranian confirmation, has in past instances been used for domestic or diplomatic positioning and warrants caution on weighting.