WASHINGTON: Pakistan has enough problems of its own and does not want the added headache of a new Cold War between China and the United States, says Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Hina Rabbani Khar.

In an interview with Washington-based news outlet Politico this week, Ms Khar insisted that Islamabad had no appetite to pick a side in the growing global rivalry between Washington and Beijing.

The interview was recorded before US President Joe Biden called his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping a dictator at a political event in California on Tuesday. The comment earned a swift and angry response from Beijing which said the remarks “seriously contradict basic facts, seriously violate diplomatic etiquette, and seriously infringe on China’s political dignity”.

Political analysts in Washington warn that Mr Biden’s remarks, and Beijing’s response, would make it more difficult for countries like Pakistan to maintain ties with both China and the United States.

Minister says splitting of world into two blocs ‘threatening’ for Islamabad

In its report on Ms Khar’s interview, Politico too highlighted the problems countries like Pakistan face in maintaining good ties with both Beijing and Washington.

“As a nuclear-armed heavyweight of 250 million people, Pakistan is one of the most closely watched front-line states in the contest for strategic influence in Asia,” the newspaper commented.

“While Pakistan’s old Cold War partner Washington is increasingly turning its focus to cooperation with Islamabad’s arch-foe India, China has swooped in to extend its sway in Pakistan — particularly through giant infrastructure projects.”

Ms Khar, however, insisted that an all-out rupture between the US and China would present Pakistan with an unpalatably binary strategic choice. “We are highly threatened by this notion of splitting the world into two blocs. We are very concerned about this decoupling … anything that splits the world further,” she said.

“We have a history of being in a close, collaborative mode with the US. We have no intention of leaving that. Pakistan also has the reality of being in a close, collaborative mode with China, and until China suddenly came to everyone’s threat perception, that was always the case.”

Politico recalled that Ms Khar grabbed headlines in April when a leaked memo appeared in The Wall Street Journal in which she was cited as warning that Pakistan’s instinct to preserve its partnership with the US would harm what she deemed the country’s “real strategic” partnership with China.

She declined to comment on that leak, but took a more bullish line on continued American power in her interview in Brussels, saying the US was unnecessarily fearful and defensive about being toppled from its plinth of global leadership, which she argued remained vital in areas such as healthcare, technology, trade and combating climate change.

Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2023