ISLAMABAD: The Strategic Studies Institute Islamabad (SSII) organised a roundtable discussion on “The Evolution of Pakistan – Russia Relations”. The guest speaker was Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst. According to Korybko, the rerouting of global trade and creation of new marketplaces through the One Belt One Road (OBOR) would inevitably have political consequences because it would help pioneer the creation of new multipolar institutions whose members would eventually divest from their unipolar counterparts in replacing US-led Western globalisation with Chinese-led Silk Road globalisation. He said that Russia and Pakistan are stakeholders in OBOR through the Eurasian Land Bridge and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) respectively, as they each believe that they have more to gain from a progressively reformed international system. He indicated that China wants to integrate with Russia and Pakistan as it seeks to develop new trade routes, access new marketplaces, and contribute to the long-term stabilisation of its neighbouring Great Powers, while the US wants to obstruct this partnership. Accordingly, Afghanistan emerges as the most crucial focal point of American pressure because of the potential that this state’s prolonged destabilisation has in disrupting China’s multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects with Russia and Pakistan. He emphasised that a positive suggestion would be to promote the Central Asian and Siberian connectivity potentials of CPEC to Russian and Pakistani businessmen, both state-connected and private, since they’ll eventually become the vanguard ambassadors of their homelands in each other’s country as they pioneer the next person-to-person phase of the Russian-Pakistani rapprochement.
