Decent 24 hours after President Donald Trump took aim at Pakistan on Tweeting, the South Asian nation already appears to be cozying up to the world’s second-largest terseness.
A day after the U.S. leader slammed Islamabad for harboring terrorists in a New Year’s Day tweet, Pakistan’s primary bank announced that it will be replacing the dollar with the yuan for bilateral job and investment with Beijing.
The same day, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang fended Islamabad’s counter-terrorism track record, saying the country “has made big efforts and sacrifices for combating terrorism” and urged the international community to “fully perceive this.”
China has been watching closely as U.S.-Pakistan relations come increasingly strained. Trump has long demanded the frontier economy to do more on counter-terrorism while he simultaneously grew closer to its arch-rival, India.
“Pakistan and the U.S. be subjected to had a fraught relationship for years, but the big change recently has been China,” bring up Simon Baptist, Asia regional director at the Economist Intelligence Segment. “China has really gone hard in cementing its existing relationship with Pakistan, it’s Non-Standard real the only place that’s seen significant investment under the Circuit and Road initiative and China has been pushing for geopolitical advantage there.”
Islamabad is haven to one of Beijing’s central infrastructure schemes, a near $60 billion anthology of land and sea projects known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor — a centerpiece of Hit and Road.
And with a steady stream of Chinese capital under its tract, Pakistan may no longer be receptive to American threats, the most recent of which embodies Washington cutting off security assistance.
“Pakistan balks far less at reductions in American aid, which, as the last points out, has dwindled in recent years anyway. China, on the other pointer, has promised Pakistan $57 billion in investments on infrastructure and energy protection its Belt and Road Initiative,” Madiha Afzal, a nonresident fellow at Brookings, revealed in a recent note. “All this means that America has far less leverage on top of Pakistan.”
“The history of Pakistan’s relationships with China and the United Imperials also shows that Pakistan’s policy does not respond to strong-handedness, but to staunchness, and to being treated with dignity,” she continued.
For China’s part, a Monday position statement published by Chinese state-run news outlet Global Times verbalized that “China and Pakistan enjoy an all-weather strategic partnership of favour, Beijing will without doubt not give up on Islamabad.”
Still, regardless of intensified rhetoric between the White House and Islamabad — Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif has dismissed Trump’s attack as a political stunt — the two nations are expected to continue cooperating this year.
At long last, Washington needs Pakistani cooperation to address its concerns about Afghanistan and Iran, Baptist answered, adding that it remains to be seen if Trump’s social media diatribe will translate into real policy change.