Prevailing wisdom suggests that trade can help bridge the gap between Pakistan and India, in turn reducing conflict. However, this requires a total overhaul of Pakistan’s foreign policy, which successively weak governments appear incapable of achieving. Pakistan’s current foreign policy is shaped by three impulses: the normative, statist, and structural. The normative impulse pertains to the constitutive element of the Pakistani nation-state, including ideological and self-definitional tropes such as culture, values, religion, and history based on its Islamic identity. The statist strand concerns Pakistan’s traditional paradigm of security as a defense against external threats; while the structural is indicative of the impact of policy inputs from the international system, which Pakistan has little control over.
Of these, the normative impulse is the most publicly visible determinative of Pakistan’s foreign policy. The country’s Islamic identity and national interests are intrinsically linked with its outreach to the Muslim world, which have gathered pace in recent years. This was not always so; In 1956, then-prime minister Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy lamented over the state of the Muslim world: “zero plus zero plus zero plus zero is after all equal to that, zero.” National interest was also paramount in dictating foreign policy choices when India revoked Article 370, abrogating Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status. This effectively ended formal ties between the rival states, though the decade prior was also littered with missed opportunities for peace between them.
Prior to 2019, Pakistan and India were nearest to achieving peace in 2014-15, when interactions between then prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi showed potential for a South Asia connected through trade and business. This bonhomie crumbled, however, when militants attacked the Pathankot Air Force base just two weeks after Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore. The decline has persisted, with recovery appearing more elusive than ever before. The politicization of the Article 370 revocation ensures Pakistan will continue to face difficulty justifying trade and cooperative engagement with India. At the same time, Islamabad is currently caught between China and the United States, whose rivalry in the international system has gone global. This is evident in the U.S.’s sharp criticism of Pakistan’s participation in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which leaves Pakistan stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place, as it strives to appease both its “all-weather” friend, and its traditional strategic ally.