Pakistan’s zero-sum strategic dilemma

The SCO Summit in Islamabad this week highlighted a strategic dilemma that Pakistan’s fragility is forcing it to face earlier than most, just as it did in the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The dilemma is whether Pakistan can avoid the zero-sum game between a superpower and a rising power in the grip of a Thucydide's trap.

Many strategic traps await Pakistan where it might be forced to choose between urgent needs and long-term imperatives. To list a few: Ukraine, wider US sanctions on Chinese technology, Taiwan and the South-China Sea, a US-China trade war, and an India-China war in Ladakh.

As the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close, the international milieu is Antonio Gramsci’s observation writ large: “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.” The post-World War II arrangement is no more. Thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitics has returned with a vengeance.

What one never foresaw happening in one’s lifetime has come to pass: the decline of the US as a harbinger of modernity, champion of human rights, and simultaneously the possessor of the greatest hard as well as soft power. No more. The US is exhausted by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, weakened economically by slow growth, challenged technologically, and emasculated diplomatically by poor leadership.

Increasing US domestic production of oil and gas in the last decade has reduced its dependence on as well as its interest in the Gulf. The US has been unable to impede, let alone stop, a genocide of nearly 42,000. A truth sits exposed amidst the rubble: the US is not in the driving seat there and is being edged out in Ukraine, the South China Sea, and in the arena of new technology.

“Pax Americana is no more,” suggests former senior Chinese official He Yafei. The declining US faces a China whose rise is fuelled, some say, by the inexorable trends of globalization and technological change. “The dominant narrative in China”, writes Elizabeth Economy, “is that the shift in the balance of power is already well underway.”

Globalisation and technological change are not the only fuels for the rise of China. In its bid for global supremacy, China is wielding its own soft power. It has demonstrated for four decades that economic prosperity can be achieved without liberal democracy. This is a model that most elites of the developing world find attractive.

China’s rise is aided by 21st century developments. Social media is a wrecking ball for liberal democracy. The US-inflated scarecrow of terrorism has deflated. Russia’s ground invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – the first such action since World War II – has stirred ghosts of the two world wars in the 20th century.

Pakistan faces a Gramscian dilemma of its own. Ever since September 1953, the principal factor driving Pakistani statecraft has been the need for foreign aid to defend militarily against a hostile India and to prop up recurrent authoritarian regimes. This was as true for support against the Soviet Union in the 1960s as against Al Qaeda in the 2000s.

The foreign policy that emerged has been composed of four strands intertwined: a love-hate alliance with the US, a patron-client relationship with Gulf countries strengthened by a common alliance with the US, a limited friendship with China until 2015, and uneasy relations with Afghanistan and Iran.

The US ended its latest engagement with Pakistan in 2013 and maintained the facade of an alliance until its departure from Afghanistan in 2021. Despite conferring ‘major non-Nato ally’ status to Pakistan in 2004, the US failed to provide any substantive, visible support to Pakistan beyond the transaction of Coalition Support Fund in return for two military bases, intelligence cooperation, and provision of ground (GLOC) and air lines of communication (ALOC) by Pakistan for two decades.

The decades-long Pak-China relationship, on the other hand, has been positive and consistent, yet limited until CPEC was signed nine years ago. China came to Pakistan's succour in the darkest hour of terrorism, loadshedding, Karachi target-killing and inflation. CPEC deepened a strategic friendship into an economic partnership and laid the foundation for Pakistan's energy future. Even after CPEC, however, Pakistan’s balance-of-payments crises have kept it tethered to West-based international financial institutions and thereby vulnerable to the influence of a near-hostile US.

Pakistan thus faces a Gramscian dilemma of its own. It is caught between its historic alliance with the US and urgent financial interests on one side and, on the other either side, its precipitating long-term strategic interests as the globe fractures along the China versus the West divide.

Pakistan requires complex and skillful statecraft to avoid this binary. Our long-term interests lie with a rising China, not with the declining US. Yet the challenge is to avoid the zero-sum game of with-us or against-us. Read India’s playbook. Despite a plethora of defence, strategic, and economic agreements with the US, designation of 'net security provider' in the Indo-Pacific, and membership in the anti-China ‘Quad’, India maintains relations simultaneously with rivals in both the East and the West, and maintains a massive trade deficit with China.

What does the government need to do? First of all, it needs to learn what not to do. The list is long: avoid the temptation of megaphone diplomacy; not speak until absolutely necessary; not harangue diplomats; not appoint lackeys to positions demanding proficiency; and not abuse foreign policy as grist for the domestic political mill.

How to walk the non-zero-sum tightrope? Begin with reviewing and analysing Pakistan’s interests ruthlessly by “fitting foundations to the ground on which they rest”, as J L Gaddis recommends. This means deepening the strategic as well as economic relations with China and rebuilding bridges quietly with the US and Europe.

Revamp skilfully, patiently, and discretely our relationships with our benefactors and create relationships with future friends in Europe, Africa, South America, and East Asia. Create a dialectic between foreign relations and security. Make a sustained effort to open and connect the region economically. Reinvent the Foreign Office as a 21st-century organisation that carries economic interests, democratic values, and instantaneous global communications as part of its DNA. Last but not least, provide adequate resources to the diplomats to do their job.

This challenge requires a political and military leadership that can think and conduct statecraft in 'time, space, and scale' simultaneously. It is time for Pakistan to raise its capabilities to its foreign-policy aspirations, and wield statecraft to safeguard our democracy and bring prosperity to our impoverished people.

The writer has served as Pakistan’s minister for foreign affairs, defence, commerce, and energy. He tweets/posts @kdastgirkhan

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer's own and don't necessarily reflect The News' editorial policy.