Foreign policy — Trump style

Interviewed on the BBC about the foreign policy speech given by President Trump, one commentator said that it harks back to yesteryear and would have not been out of place in the early 19^th century. There was also much in it that President Putin would resonate with. The world through the Trump prism sees three principal challenges to the US and they come from China, Russia and Iran. China has been demoted from the status of ‘strategic partner’ to ‘revisionist strategic competitor’. The change is not merely semantic and is going to have implications for Pakistan as it forges ahead with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Iran and North Korea are ‘rogue states’, and ‘jihadis’ are transnational threat organisations — about which the rest of the world probably agrees.

America has no shortage of rivals on the global stage and China is now seen as a real threat to the American hegemony. China and Russia challenge the power of America says Trump, and with Uncle Sam in retreat all over the world this is hardly surprising. Nature abhors a vacuum and the void left by America was only going to be filled by one or both of them. The nature of the challenge and by implication the threat is military, political and economic as the world makes itself comfortable in a coat of different colours.

Just as China looms large on US horizons as a threat, quite the reverse is true in Pakistan where it is opportunity rather than threat that is the preoccupation. This gives Pakistan a problem as the US has never embraced CPEC wholeheartedly seeing it as a vehicle for China to project its power — it is — and to subvert the military status quo with the development of Gwadar port and the infrastructure links into Central Asia. Pakistan is already under a cloud and has been told in no uncertain terms to toe the line regarding divergence-convergence. Given that the US administration generally has ripped up the playbooks of the last half-century the world has become a more uncertain place, and arguably a more dangerous one. War may indeed be just a tantrum away.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 20^th, 2017.

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