Foreign policy dilemmas – Newspaper

Pakistan faces SEVERAL foreign policy challenges in 2025. They must be faced in an unstable global environment of rising geopolitical tensions, intense competition between the United States and China, concern of major powers over wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the uncertainties generated for the imminent second term of Donald Trump. The regional landscape is also tense and unstable, with security challenges casting a long shadow, as evidenced by recent hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Furthermore, these challenges must be addressed when the country’s economy remains fragile and dependent on external financial resources while the political situation remains uncertain. As all foreign policy begins at home, these realities weigh heavily on the conduct of your diplomacy.

All challenges in priority areas of Pakistan’s foreign policy need to be addressed skillfully. They include the country’s relations with China and the US, while avoiding the crosshairs of their confrontation, addressing an increasingly problematic relationship with Afghanistan, managing the adversarial relationship with India, balancing ties between Saudi Arabia and Iran and maintaining relations with the EU. on a positive path.

The big unknown is how relations with Trump’s United States will develop, especially now that Pakistan’s geopolitical importance has diminished for Washington since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The relationship remains at a crossroads and a reset remains elusive during President Joe Biden’s term. The low-level engagement of the last four years was reflected in the fact that the American secretary of state never visited Pakistan. Biden also showed no interest in engaging with Pakistani leaders. In Trump’s previous term, relations got off to a rocky start when he announced an end to assistance to Pakistan, including the Coalition Support Funds. For more than half of his term, there was no American ambassador in Islamabad. After Trump decided to withdraw the United States from Afghanistan, ties grew closer when Washington needed Pakistan’s help to start talks with the Taliban and forge an agreement with them in Doha. This finally paved the way for the American withdrawal. Beyond that (and the obvious bonhomie between Trump and former Prime Minister Imran Khan), the relationship remained largely devoid of bilateral content.

Pakistan has to face challenges in an unstable global environment and a tense regional environment.

It is in this context that Islamabad seeks to re-engage with Washington to build a relationship based on the intrinsic importance of Pakistan. The United States remains the largest destination for Pakistan’s exports, a potential source of FDI and a global power with significant influence, including over the international financial institutions, whose assistance the crisis-prone Pakistani economy constantly needs.

However, a reboot faces several limiting factors. The United States’ top strategic priority is containing China. Since Pakistan cannot be part of any anti-China coalition, that limits the space for Pakistan-US relations. Another limiting factor is Washington’s growing strategic and economic relationship with India, its preferred partner in the region in its strategy to project India as a counterweight to China. The challenge, therefore, is to find space for the Pakistan-US relationship between these two strategic realities. This will not be easy as Pakistan is unlikely to feature among Trump’s foreign policy priorities.

China, of course, remains Pakistan’s top foreign policy priority. This time-tested relationship meets both the country’s economic and security interests, but faces issues that must be resolved to keep ties on a strong and positive trajectory. The most important is to ally with Beijing’s security concerns about Chinese personnel working in Pakistan. A series of attacks that killed Chinese workers last year led China, Pakistan’s largest investor, to publicly urge Islamabad to ensure the safety of thousands of its workers. During a senior Chinese official’s visit to Islamabad in June, Beijing’s message was conveyed publicly in a blunt manner. Liu Jianchao warned that security issues could threaten the future of CPEC and were already “shaking the confidence of Chinese investors.” Meanwhile, Pakistan’s constant requests for financing/loan renewal and debt rescheduling to independent power producers are straining relations with its closest ally. There has been no progress in the talks on this last issue. Publicly calling for debt relief has also put China in an awkward position, due to the implications for its loans to other countries.

India, with whom a prolonged diplomatic impasse persists, poses an imposing challenge. Relations have remained frozen and trade suspended since August 2019, when Delhi illegally annexed the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, bifurcated it and absorbed it into the Indian union. He then carried out demographic and electoral changes to consolidate control over a population whose willingness to resist the Delhi government, however, has failed to diminish.

India’s claim to have “resolved” Kashmir and its refusal to talk to Pakistan on the issue presents the most formidable obstacle to normalization of ties. The Modi government has shown no interest in resuming dialogue, apparently concluding that this hurts Pakistan, not India. This follows the lack of an Indian response to peace overtures by Pakistani leaders over the past year. As no moves are expected in the short term, the immediate task is to manage tensions with India to prevent a crisis from breaking out.

Relations with Afghanistan have fallen to another low after Pakistan recently carried out airstrikes inside Afghanistan against hideouts of the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. Islamabad’s decision has been forced by Kabul’s refusal to take action against the TTP, which continues its cross-border attacks, which intensified in 2024. While diplomatic engagement continues, it has not yielded results in this regard. Although Pakistan has increasingly adopted a coercive approach towards Afghanistan, this has its limits as it cannot risk breaking off relations. This makes dealing with Kabul a difficult political dilemma for Islamabad in 2025.

Pakistan today has problematic relations to varying degrees with all three neighbors. For decades, Pakistan’s foreign and security policy aimed to avoid a two-front scenario of hot borders with its neighbors. Today, it has ended unstable or insecure borders with two neighbors and unresolved border problems with a third neighbor: Iran. It is necessary to correct this situation.

Pakistan’s membership in the UN Security Council, which has just begun for a two-year period, will provide an opportunity to elevate the country’s diplomatic standing on the world stage and contribute to discussions and actions on issues of peace and international security. But it is unlikely to make it any easier to address his foreign policy challenges.

The writer is a former ambassador to the United States, the United Kingdom and the UN.

Published in Amanecer, January 6, 2025.



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *