It has come around again: the baring of American imperial fangs, rule by executive orders, ‘America First’, callous pandering to the extreme-right, tariff threats, a transactional Manichean worldview, and the new spectacle of in-your-face plutocratic reality show. Donald John Trump has returned to the White House as the forty-seventh president of the United States and it is going to be a wilder ride than the forty-fifth. Pakistan is facing a most interesting and challenging four years in its foreign relations.
All the more reason to recount objectively Trump’s dealings with Pakistan. In what Time magazine termed the ‘Trumpiest Phone Call’, the then president-elect said to PM Nawaz Sharif on November 30, 2016: “You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people”.
The words remained just words. President Trump launched his first attack on Pakistan on August 21, 2017, saying Washington could “no longer be silent about Pakistan’s safe havens for terrorist organisations. We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting.”
Two months later, the then-secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, became the first high-level official from the Trump administration to visit Pakistan. Mr Tillerson repeated Trump’s threats in diplomatic parlance and carried a laundry list of demands from Pakistan in the failing US war in Afghanistan. Pakistan did not agree. The demands were repeated weeks later in the same autumn by the then secretary of defence, James Mattis. Pakistan did not agree.
New Year’s Day 2018 brought a frustrated tweet from President Trump: “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies and deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools,” Trump said. “They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!”
It fell upon the present writer to respond the same day as Pakistan’s minister for defence: “Pak as anti-terror ally has given free to US: land & air communication, military bases & intel cooperation that decimated Al-Qaeda over last 16 yrs, but they have given us nothing but invective & mistrust. They overlook cross-border safe havens of terrorists who murder Pakistanis.”
Trump’s frustration with the Pakistan government manifested as economic pressure. The US moved a motion against Pakistan in the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in February 2018. The US was not alone. In July 2021, India’s minister for external affairs boasted that the BJP government had ensured that Pakistan remained on the FATF’s grey list. “Due to us, Pakistan is under the lens of FATF, and it was kept in the grey list", said S Jaishankar.
In early 2018, the Trump administration suspended most of its military aid to Pakistan for alleged failure to act against terrorist groups and also excluded Pakistani officers from the International Military Education and Training Program. After the US ambassador to Islamabad was posted out in August 2018, President Trump did not appoint a new ambassador in Islamabad for the rest of his term.
Islamabad was without a full American ambassador for nearly four years, from August 2018 to May 2022. This was through the 2020 US-Taliban agreement in Doha, the Covid-19 pandemic, the end of the Trump administration and the beginning of the Biden administration, and the precipitating US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover in August 2021.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s government changed in July 2018, and the new PM Imran Khan’s [IK] ministers signalled softness to the US by public statements against the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). CPEC remained on the back burner as long as Khan remained PM. But backing down from CPEC was not enough for a US that continued to face accelerating setbacks in Afghanistan. President Trump’s frustration with Pakistan spilled out in an interview with Fox News in November 2018: “We’re giving [Pak] $1.3 billion a year, which we don’t give them anymore by the way. I ended it because they don’t do anything for us, they don’t do a damn thing for us.”
Pakistan buckled under pressure and released key Afghan Taliban leaders in its custody in November 2018 to facilitate US negotiations for withdrawal. The blustery Trump then became a nice Trump and wrote Pakistan a civilised letter in early December 2018 stating that Islamabad’s assistance was “fundamental” to the health of the two countries’ strained relationship. After the February 2019 Balakot attack by India, PM IK crumbled under international pressure – including US pressure – and returned Flt-Lt Abhinandan to India without any quid pro quo.
IK’s visit to Washington DC and meeting with Trump in July 2019 raised thorny suspicions that have not been allayed since. “The problem was Pakistan – this is before you – Pakistan was not doing anything for us", Trump told journalists at the White House in IK’s presence. “They were really, I think, subversive. They were going against us. And I tell you what: To be honest, I think we have a better relationship with Pakistan right now than we did when we were paying that money.”
IK’s statement upon return from Washington that “I feel I have won a second world cup” was, however, followed exactly eleven days later by the Indian annexation of Occupied Kashmir, which has been formalised and instituted in the nearly six years since. Trump’s offer of mediation with India on Kashmir never materialised. The canny dealmaker he is, President Trump did not provide even a cent of military and civilian support to Pakistan throughout his term.
The Biden administration and Western countries needed Pakistan’s support in 2021 for the months-long withdrawal process; IK delivered abundantly. IK’s “shackles of slavery” raised heckles and stoked anti-Pakistan vindictiveness in the US military and civilian establishment. The only bright spot post US withdrawal from Afghanistan was Pakistan’s removal from the FATF grey list in October 2022, but American vindictiveness returned in the shape of excruciating IMF conditions both in 2023 and 2024.
With Donald Trump taking oath on Monday, Pakistan is not on his horizon. US interests in Pakistan in 2025 are likely to be the same as in Trump’s 2017 National Security Policy: Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent and the threat of terrorism. Trump has not changed either: he is defined by his mastery of attention-seeking, mercantilism, Manichean transaction, and lack of concern for democracy and human rights, abroad as well as in the US.
Trump is returning this time having learnt certain lessons from the chaos and resistance from within in his first administration. He is likely to have his hands full with Ukraine, the Middle East, import tariffs, and an egregious use of executive authority to impose his prejudices as American policy. In his first term, Trump took seven months to make a substantive mention of Pakistan. Eight years later, it is not clear how soon Pakistan will be on his radar.
But China is on Trump's radar, where he has seen his 2017-21 policies continued largely during 2021-25 by his successor. Writing in the journal 'Foreign Affairs', Richard Fontaine observed recently that "In the underlying substance of their policies, however, there was more continuity than the casual observer might have appreciated". President Biden maintained the Trump tariffs on China and increased controls on technology transfers ushered by Trump. He executed the Afghanistan withdrawal agreement negotiated between Trump’s team and the Taliban and did not take the US back into the P5 Iran nuclear deal.
Particularly since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan nearly four years ago, Washington has become a hard town for Pakistan. PM Shehbaz Sharif and his team have their work cut out on Capitol Hill as well as in the White House and Foggy Bottom. PM Sharif will have to move nimbly and deploy non-traditional, multi-faceted diplomacy to protect and propagate Pakistan’s interests i.e., maintaining the US as the single largest destination of Pak exports, and to forestall US wielding of the economic sabre against Pakistan, foremost being to maintain the necessary support in IMF to continue the current programme.
The writer has served as Pakistan’s minister for foreign affairs, defence, commerce, and energy. He tweets/posts kdastgirkhan. These are his personal views.