It is now unquestionable that, after suffering more than two decades of declining international interest, when China appeared to be its sole powerful friend, Pakistan is entering a new period of resurgence. Recent pictures of the meeting between Pakistan Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir and US President Donald Trump at the White House, which streamed across South Asian television screens and social media, were quite emblematic.
The emerging trajectory, if it continues, may well return Pakistan quite strongly to the arms of the United States. A further international fillip has been provided by Saudi Arabia’s defence pact with Pakistan. Thus, Pakistan is likely to enjoy closeness with the US, China and Saudi Arabia, all at the same time. This is dramatically different from its relative isolation of recent years.
No economic revival for Pakistan
We should first clearly specify the boundaries of Pakistan’s resurgence on the international stage. It is important to note that there are no great signs of Pakistan’s economic revival. In the 1960s and 1980s, it was often said that Pakistan’s economy was ahead of India. Though starting in 1947 at a much lower economic level, by 1990, the per capita incomes of India ($371) and Pakistan ($344.5) had become roughly similar. However, by December 2024, India’s per capita income had shot up to nearly $2,800, whereas for Pakistan, at $1,485, it was a little over half as much.
In 1991, India’s GDP was nearly six times larger than that of Pakistan. Now, India’s economy is ten times larger. Since 1993, India’s economic growth rate has been more or less consistently higher. And since 2019, Pakistan’s economic distress has become so acute that, faced with the risk of default on financial obligations, it has been bailed out by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
So the revival is not economic. The resurgence has happened primarily in the strategic and political realm.
Let us first look at the strategic dimensions. During the Cold War, Pakistan was an alliance partner of the US. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States lost interest in Pakistan and moved increasingly closer to India. By 2000, a bipartisan consensus on India emerged in the US. Both Democratic and Republican administrations cultivated India, partly to counter China, and the salience of the US-Pakistan relationship dramatically declined.
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Trump’s U-turn
Donald Trump is breaking away from this bipartisan consensus. Slapped with very high Trump tariffs, India today has a troubled relationship with the US. In addition, a different security angle has also emerged. When the Kargil war occurred in 1999, the US intervened in support of India and forced Pakistan to end the war. Compare that to the military conflict in May. The US did intervene, but it took a neutral position, not one supporting India.
Moreover, not only are America’s tariffs for Pakistan among the lowest in Asia, but the US under Trump has also been exploring a larger economic relationship with Pakistan, based on cryptocurrency and rare earths (which formed part of the recent discussion with Trump). Even an economically unresilient Pakistan has its uses.
The emerging shift towards Pakistan is fundamentally rooted in Trump’s own worldview, which is driven by deals and transactions, not by geopolitics. Had he been driven by geopolitics, he would not have embraced one of the most important allies of China. That is also the reason one should believe that, instead of thinking of China as a prime adversary of the US, Trump would look for a transactional relationship with China. Taiwan’s anxieties are inevitably rising: would its interests be bartered away in an economically, not geopolitically, governed US approach to China?
Geopolitics has been a fundamental driver of alliances and foreign policy in the post-1945 era. For Trump, either deals are manifestly superior, or geopolitics should be reduced to a transaction.
Let us now turn to Pakistan’s internal politics, which may well be turning away from its chronic instability, at least for the foreseeable future. Pakistan is not known for stable civilian rule. Rules-based democratic turnovers have been few and far between. The military either topples the civilian leadership or presents severe challenges to it, causing uncertainty and confusion at the highest levels of power and authority.
The civil-military relationship plumbed new depths with the incarceration of Imran Khan, the most popular civilian political leader of recent times. Today, Pakistan has what political scientists call a hybrid regime, in which the elected civilians don’t wield ultimate power and the military, for all practical purposes, is a superior partner of civilians, a situation Imran Khan challenged but failed to overturn.
How is the internal political order evolving now? Highly suggestive is the public opinion data collected by Christopher Clary and Niloufer Siddiqui, both professors at the State University of New York, Albany. Compared to December 2024, the favorability ratings of Sharif registered a nearly 30% increase after the May conflict with India. In the same period, the Pakistani army’s favourable ratings went up by 37 per cent. Thus, there was a huge “rallying around the flag”, and the proverbial friction between the military and the civilians went down in a big way.
What are the implications of these developments for India-Pakistan relations? India’s strong military response to the Pahalgam attack, argues the Indian government, has increased the costs of Pakistan’s state-sponsored terrorism vis-à-vis India. The data above suggests the opposite. In fact, it has increased the legitimacy of the military and civilian leaders and might have created a certain equilibrium in their hybrid relationship. And since Pakistan’s relations with the US have also improved, Pakistan’s military and civilian elite are likely to view the recent military conflict with India as a purveyor of multiple benefits.
Would this not embolden the Pakistan state and its militant allies further? It is not hard to imagine the answer to this question. Conflict with Pakistan will increase, not go down.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)