We investigate the influence of the gluon condensate upon hadron–hadron scattering at intermediate transverse momenta (pT). We treat the gluon condensate as an external field, and we calculate the gluon propagator in such an external field using the heat-kernel expansion. We insert the nonperturbative gluon propagator into the hard-scattering subprocesses, and we derive a formula for hadron–hadron scattering at intermediate pT that contains the usual perturbative component [Formula: see text] and a non-perturbative component that varies as [Formula: see text]. The transition from the [Formula: see text] to the [Formula: see text] regime occurs at [Formula: see text], a value smaller than the actual pT transition value.