PAKISTAN has regained strategic significance in the United States’ foreign and strategic calculus without compromising its over six-decade-long steady cordial trajectory with China. Islamabad is striving to sustain a strategic balancing act between being a non-NATO ally of Washington and cementing a strategic economic partnership with Beijing amid increasing strategic competition between China and the United States in international politics. This diplomatic tightrope walk highlights Pakistan’s complex approach to international relations and its embrace of multipolarity. Therefore, observers of international relations are seeking a pertinent question: how does Pakistan manage to balance strategic autonomy in its relations with China and the US in the transforming global strategic environment, especially as regional power shifts influence its options?

The cold-warish rivalry between China and the US is a serious puzzle. To contain China, the Americans have identified and declared India as a natural ally since the end of the Cold War. India’s economic rise, the mega increase in defence spending and its willingness to compromise on its Nehruvian non-aligned foreign policy to be a net security provider in the Indian Ocean, with the patronage of the US, resulted in the Indo-US strategic partnership, including defence agreements, nuclear and space cooperation and increased intelligence sharing, etc.

The increasing strategic cooperation between New Delhi and Washington undermined Pakistan’s relevance in the US strategic outlook. Still, the American war on terror after 9/11and Pakistan’s willingness to cooperate with it during its Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001, once again revived strategic cooperation between the two states. In........

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