PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s foreign policy actions and pronouncements have created geopolitical upheaval at an already unsettled time in the world. It has sent countries scrambling to find ways to navigate the new global terrain and figure out how to engage with Washington under Trump’s mercurial management. He has upended US foreign policy on several fronts including the Middle East and Ukraine, jettisoned Western allies, all but abandoned the transatlantic alliance, and deliver­­ed more blows to multilateralism. His imposition of tariffs on friends and competitors alike has rai­sed the spectre of a global trade war. Trump’s ‘Am­­erica First’ unilateralist approach is further fragmenting the global order and ushering in a disruptive and volatile phase in international affairs.

This is the context in which Islamabad is weighing where it will figure with Trump’s America. Both the government and opposition have been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to elicit the new ad­­minis­tr­ation’s attention. In fact, relations between the US and Pakistan have been at an inflection poi­­nt since the American withdrawal from Afg­h­anistan in 2021. For over two decades, the war in Afgha­n­istan provided the principal basis for engagement between the US and Pakistan even as it became a source of mutual mistrust and disenchantment.

After that ended, Pakistan’s diminished geopolitical importance for Washington drove relations to a low point. On the other hand, Pakistan’s long-standing strategic ties with China continued to intensify. Increasingly, America was seen as a self-absorbed and inconsistent partner as well as a reluctant regional player. China was perceived as having the will, money and growing global clout needed for a more constructive and enduring relationship that met both Pakistan’s defence and economic interests.

Benign disengagement between Pakistan and the US may be the best option for now.

Nevertheless, Pakistan sought a reset in ties with the US. But this proved elusive. President Joe Biden’s tenure saw little high-level engagement and he showed no interest in interacting with Pakistan’s leaders. The low point in relations was also reflected in the fact that the US secretary of state never once visited Pakistan during the Biden years. Military-to-military contacts, however, continued as did CT cooperation. The Biden administration’s parting shot was to impose sanctions on several Pakistani entities aiding its missile programme. Although this had little impact, the tough statement accompanying the move, promptly denounced by Islamabad, did sour ties.

In Trump’s first term, relations got off to a turbulent start when he accused Pakistan of “lies and deceit”, claiming it was not helpful in Afghanistan despite receiving “billions of dollars” in US aid. He went on to suspend security assistance including coalition support funds. But re-engagement got underway when Trump decided on exiting Afghanistan and sought Pakistan’s help for talks with the Taliban to strike a deal at Doha. Apart from that and the evident geniality between Trump and former prime minister Imran Khan, the bilateral relationship remained undefined and shorn of substance.

This posed the challenge then as it does today of resetting ties in a fundamentally changed global and regional environment. The history of the roller coaster relationship, with cyclical swings between intense engagement and deep estrangement, shows that positive transformations in ties were always driven by geopolitical storms or superpower dynamics extraneous to the bilateral relationship. America’s shifting geopolitical concerns that shaped its regional priorities also defined relations with Pakistan. They drove bilateral ties into different phases with security issues determining the relationship.

In the Cold War, when the US aim was to contain communism, Pakistan became America’s ‘most allied ally’. Then after 1979 there was a mutual interest to roll back the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The third, post-9/11 phase involved defeating Al Qaeda in the ‘war on terror’. This ended with the US pullout from Afghanistan.

Despite their close cooperation in these three phases, there was always an elephant in the room. In the first, it was India. The US priority was to defeat communism, but for Pakistan ties with Washington were part of its external balancing strategy of seeking extra-regional support to address its security dilemma given the vast power asymmetry with a hostile India. In the second phase, the elephant in the room was Pakistan’s nuclear programme even as the two collaborated in the joint struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This divergence was to surface after the Russian defeat when the US imposed wide-ranging sanctions on Islamabad on the nuclear issue and Pakistan became America’s most sanctioned friend.

In the most recent phase, Pakistan’s communication channels with the Taliban produced a disconnect with the US. Islamabad believed that one day everyone would have to deal with them but Washington saw this as evidence of Pakistan’s ‘double game’.

It is against this backdrop that Islamabad seeks to reconfigure ties with the US based on Pakistan’s intrinsic importance and not as a sub-set of Ame­rica’s other concerns. But a reset faces many challenges.

For a start, Pakistan does not figure in the Trump administration’s recast priorities. There are other constraining factors. America’s top strategic priority is to contain China. Although Pakis­tan says it wants to balance relations between the US and China, it sees its strategic future to lie with China and will not be part of any anti-China coalition. This limits the space for Pakistan-US relations. So does America’s growing strategic and economic relationship with India, its partner of choice in the region in its strategy to project India as a counterweight to China. Finding space betw­een these two strategic realities is a challenge for the Pakistan-US relationship. Another limiting factor is Pakistan’s economic weakness which acts as a major impediment for meaningful relations.

Important as future relations with the US are, perhaps until Pakistan is able to empower itself economically and fix its domestic problems a phase of benign disengagement between the two countries is preferable. Keeping its head down — for now — with an administration that only wants to play by its own rules and whose proclivity for capricious conduct can create unnecessary problems is an option worth considering by Pakistan. This is not an argument to put diplomacy on hold but to consider whether over-eagerness for engagement with a preoccupied and transactional Wash­ington without having much to offer or gain is in Pakistan’s interest. Showing strategic patience and waiting it out may serve the country better.

The writer is a former ambassador to the US, UK and UN.

Published in Dawn, March 3rd, 2025