EDITORIAL: Sovereign states base their foreign policies on long-term strategic and economic interests. No third party can tell them with which country to have or not to forge closer ties except the hyper superpower, the United States of America.
The issue came up at the recent weekly briefing by Foreign Office spokeswoman Mumtaz Zahra Baloch when she was asked to comment on the remarks of famous – or infamous, depending on which side one is of the sharp political divide in this country — US diplomat Donald Lu made while presenting the administration’s request of $ 101 million budget for Pakistan to the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee.
The US, he said, will supersede Chinese investments — a questionable claim — and prevent Islamabad’s “further overreliance” on Beijing, adding “China is the past in terms of investment, we are the future.” What lies behind such a confident assertion? Curious minds will want to know.
As expected, Baloch said “we do not believe in situations where relationship with one country can be sacrificed on the altar of relations with another.” That exactly is Washington’s stance regarding relations with Pakistan and its arch rival, India, which State Department officials say stand on their own.
The fact of the matter is that America’s relations with this country have always been transactional whereas India is a newfound strategic partner because of its economic heft and adversarial association with China. Unencumbered by Western sanctions on Iran and Russia, it imports oil from both those countries and is a trading partner with them.
Delhi has also refused to condemn Russia’s “Special military operations” in Ukraine. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Russia to further deepen ties with that country signing a slew of deals. This at a time when Russia had launched a deadly missile barrage on Ukraine that left 44 people dead.
Pakistan’s Iran gas pipeline project, on the other hand, has remained stalled for years due to US sanctions on that country. And former Prime minister, Imran Khan, had earned Washington’s ire for visiting Russia at the start of the Ukraine war.
Pakistan values its relations with the US, but has its own interests to protect and promote. While the latter seeks to offset China’s growing influence in this region and beyond, fresh injection of a hundred million or so dollars in our economy, as Donald Lu stated, is meant to prevent Islamabad’s reliance on Beijing.
That though is not going to wither Pak-China ties, rooted as they are in shared strategic and economic interests. China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, is a major infrastructure development venture.
Besides, Pakistan is the third biggest recipient of Chinese development finance worldwide with a portfolio of $ 70.3 billion, according to a report released last November by Aid Data, a US-based international development research house.
Only 2 percent of it between 2000 and 2021 consisted of grants while the rest was in the form of loans, noted the report. This has been slammed as a debt trap. But right or wrong, it was a choice that Islamabad made. Be that as it may, neither US’ pressure nor its new investment is likely drive a wedge between ‘all-weather’ friends, Pakistan and China.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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