Pakistan Must Strengthen Economy, Governance to Navigate US-China Rivalry

In a seminar room in Islamabad, a gathering of Pakistan's diplomatic and military establishment confronted an uncomfortable truth: the country's room to maneuver between the United States and China was shrinking, and the only way to preserve it was to stop waiting for others to solve Pakistan's problems.

The Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies convened the discussion on a November afternoon, drawing former foreign ministers, retired military officers, and policy intellectuals to examine what Pakistan's relationship with Washington might look like as American and Chinese power collided across Asia. The consensus that emerged was blunt: Pakistan had spent decades trading its autonomy for military hardware and financial lifelines, and the bill was coming due.

Ambassador Inam-ul-Haq, who had served as foreign minister, laid out the core diagnosis. Pakistan's ability to navigate the intensifying US-China competition, he argued, rested entirely on whether it could first fix itself—building a functioning economy, establishing reliable institutions, and addressing the domestic crises that had festered for decades. Population growth, education, healthcare: these were not peripheral concerns but the foundation on which any credible foreign policy had to rest. He also cautioned that Pakistan would face pressure from both superpowers and warned against the habit of speaking for others, specifically noting that Afghanistan's Taliban had proven capable of conducting their own diplomacy in Doha without Pakistan's advocacy.

The economic dimension cut to the heart of the problem. Dr. Usman W. Chohan emphasized that the United States remained Pakistan's single largest export market, yet the country had failed to create the conditions for sustained growth. Ease of doing business remained poor. Institutions were weak. Worse, Pakistan's reliance on international financial institutions had become, in his assessment, strangling. The path forward required not just trade with the US but a deliberate effort to diversify exports and reduce the dependency that left Pakistan vulnerable to external shocks and conditions.

Air Vice Marshal Shahzad Aslam Chaudhry (Retd) addressed the military dimension with candor. Pakistan's armed forces had built themselves on imported technology—high-end and mid-range platforms sourced from abroad—because the country lacked the indigenous capacity to innovate. The United States had achieved technological dominance not through secrecy but through human capital, research investment, and a culture of entrepreneurship. Pakistan, he suggested, should neither isolate itself nor align rigidly with any bloc, but rather learn from the model that actually worked.

Ambassador Jalil Abbas Jilani, the director of the centre, framed the larger geopolitical trap. Pakistan was caught between two powers whose rivalry was accelerating, and the country's ability to maintain the careful neutrality it had preserved was eroding. The US-India strategic partnership, Indian lobbying efforts in Washington, and Pakistan's own deepening ties with China were all reshaping how American policymakers viewed Islamabad. He noted, with evident concern, that the Indian diaspora in the United States had become woven into the American political system itself, while Pakistan's diaspora, though growing in influence, remained far less integrated.

Air Marshal Farhat Hussain Khan, chairing the seminar, offered a reckoning in his closing remarks. Pakistan had provided the United States with cooperation that was, by any measure, substantial—helping American interests across South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. That cooperation had brought tangible benefits: infrastructure development, military equipment, financial assistance. But the costs had been severe and often invisible in the ledgers of official accounting. Pakistan's internal security had deteriorated. Its social cohesion had fractured. Foreign investors had grown wary. The country had become dependent on both American military support and American financial goodwill, a position that left little room for independent choice.

The path forward, Khan argued, required a different foundation. Future relations with the United States should rest on mutual respect for each nation's values and interests, on genuine trade and economic cooperation rather than aid dependency, and on American acknowledgment of Pakistan's legitimate security concerns. It also required Pakistan to stop treating its own institutional development as a secondary concern. Negotiation itself needed to be professionalized and institutionalized. And in every international engagement, national interest—not alignment, not ideology, not the interests of patrons—had to come first. The room was full of people who had spent careers managing Pakistan's relationships with great powers. What they were saying, in effect, was that the old model had exhausted itself.