The Pak-US relations have reached a new high under President Trump's second tenure after remaining in the Obama-Biden trough for over a decade. The reasons for this new-found bonhomie and its strategic dividends are still shrouded in opacity, though both sides have evinced a palpable keenness to forge a mutually beneficial partnership, based on sustained security and economic cooperation, as opposed to the past transactional ties. The rollercoaster nature of Pak-US ties in the past hangs like a miasma of doubt over sanguinity of assessments about the durability of new relationship, premised primarily upon trade, investment and resource exploration.

In the past the US strategic community and the deep state had viewed Pakistan from the lens of Cold War driven common geopolitical interests the congruence of which was mostly evanescent. Consequently, after each geopolitical project's culmination the ties snapped rather unceremoniously and remained in limbo till the discovery of another project. Some of these projects included the Cold war, US-China thaw, anti-Soviet Afghan war, and the war against terror. What is the nature the project this time around, however, is the pearl of the high price being chased by the political and strategic Cassandras.

The answer may lie in an interesting debate between the leading political thinkers and strategic minds of this century like Mearsheimer and Jeffery Sachs who hold differing views about US role in an anarchic yet interdependent world. While Mearsheimer believes that as the regional hegemon of the western hemisphere, the US is viewing the rise of another hegemon in Asia i.e. China with trepidation, Jeffrey Sachs rejects........

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