US President Donald Trump’s first social media post of 2018, during his initial presidential term, highlighted his mounting frustration with Pakistan.
He lamented that over the preceding 15 years, the US had “foolishly” handed the country more than US$33 billion in aid and gotten “nothing but lies and deceit” in return.
He subsequently suspended security assistance to Pakistan over its support for terrorists, including its concealment of Osama bin Laden for almost a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Illustration: Mountain People
Today, Pakistan continues to provide safe haven, as well as military and intelligence aid, to terrorist groups. It also remains a close ally of China — which, despite reaching a trade truce with the Trump administration earlier this month, remains Washington’s leading rival.
Yet, far from admonishing Pakistan, the US is now eagerly pursuing closer ties with it.
Trump administration officials have justified this reversal by casting Pakistan as a valuable partner in efforts to contain Iran and rein in terrorist groups that could threaten US interests in the region, but Pakistan has proved time and again that it is not a reliable security partner and there is no reason to think that has changed.
The real explanation for Trump’s embrace of Pakistan probably lies in the convergence of his personal financial interests and his transactional approach to foreign policy.
Consider the controversial investment deal Pakistan signed in April with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm majority-owned by the Trump family. The firm’s chief executive officer, Zach Witkoff — son of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East — leads a company in which the Trump and Witkoff families are the principal beneficiaries. The deal has alarmed ethics watchdogs and former US officials, who warn that Trump’s business entanglements are bleeding into US foreign policy.
Trump insists that conflict-of-interest rules do not apply to him.
It has also reinforced a regional perception that personal enrichment is Trump’s top foreign-policy priority, further undermining US credibility.
The romance continued in July, when the US and Pakistan announced that they had reached a trade agreement. While the details have not been fully disclosed, Pakistan has celebrated the reduction in US tariffs and the prospect of increased US investment.
Pakistani officials declared that the deal “marks the beginning of a new era of economic collaboration especially in energy, mines and minerals, IT, cryptocurrency and other sectors.”
Since then, Pakistan has sought to build an image as a potential supplier of critical minerals that could help the US reduce its dependence on China’s near-monopoly over rare earths. In September, its military-linked Frontier Works Organization signed a US$500 million agreement with the private firm US Strategic Metals to develop critical-mineral deposits in Pakistan.
For Pakistan, this was not so much a business deal as a diplomatic coup. When Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Pakistan’s powerful military leader, Field Marshal Asim Munir, subsequently met with Trump in the Oval Office, they presented him with a polished wooden box containing mineral samples. Soon after, Pakistan dispatched a token shipment of enriched rare earths and other critical minerals to the US — a largely symbolic gesture meant to seal the new alignment.
However, it is far from clear that Pakistan will be able to deliver meaningful quantities of rare earths to the US. The country’s oft-repeated assertion that it possesses US$6 trillion to US$8 trillion in mineral wealth is based on unverified estimates, and most of the claimed reserves lie in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, where insurgencies make large-scale extraction highly risky.
As one analyst quipped: “Pakistan has long promised gold and delivered gravel.”
Trump is particularly susceptible to such grand promises, especially when they are accompanied by personal flattery. It is no accident that Pakistan’s leaders have lavished Trump with over-the-top praise, even nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets. For a president whose diplomacy often hinges on personal rapport, such gestures can have an outsize impact. It seems that Pakistan has cracked the Trump code. Emboldened, Pakistan’s leaders have pushed through a constitutional amendment that elevates the army chief — whom Trump extols as his “favorite field marshal” — to the position of de facto ruler, reducing the elected government to little more than a civilian facade.
For India, the Trump administration’s embrace of Pakistan feels like betrayal. The country has spent more than two decades cultivating a strategic partnership with the US, grounded in shared democratic values and a mutual desire to counter China. Now, the US is working against India’s diplomatic and security interests.
The problem extends beyond Trump’s dealmaking with Pakistan. In May last year, after a three-day military clash between India and Pakistan ended in a ceasefire, Trump publicly took credit for stopping the fighting. India flatly denied the claim, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying that he had never even spoken to Trump during the conflict.
Trump stuck to his story, crediting his own trade threats, rather than India’s targeted airstrikes, for the truce.
This undermined Modi’s standing at home and reinforced the view in India that the US cannot be trusted. Modi’s refusal to endorse Trump’s bid for a Nobel Peace Prize deepened the rift. Soon, the spat spiraled into a trade war, with Trump imposing a 25 percent tariff — later raised to 50 percent — on imports from India, supposedly over India’s own trade barriers and continued purchases of Russian oil.
In India’s view, the tariffs amounted to political retribution — an extension of the diplomatic feud over Pakistan. After all, the EU, Japan and Turkey have not faced secondary US sanctions over their large Russian energy purchases, and pro-Trump Hungary, which gets about 90 percent of its energy from Russia, received an explicit sanctions exemption from his administration.
For India, these are more than diplomatic setbacks. They threaten to unravel a hard-won strategic partnership, which successive US administrations have recognized as critical to security in the Indo-Pacific region. By letting Pakistan win him over with flattery, symbolic gestures and the promise of personal enrichment, Trump is putting the entire region at risk, much like the US’ Cold War leaders did with their cynical policies toward South Asia.
Brahma Chellaney is professor emeritus of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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