The White House-Pindi Tango – Analysis

Key Takeaways:

US-Pakistan ties have revived through personalised, transactional diplomacy: Since January 2025, warmer relations have been driven by President Trump’s personal circle, Pakistan’s offers on trade, critical minerals, and crypto, and its useful role as a go-between in the US-Iran conflict, rather than any deep strategic realignment.
The relationship remains episodic and does not displace China: Despite tariffs, minerals MoUs, and high-level visits, cooperation stays narrow and patron-client in nature; Pakistan continues to rely on China for roughly 80% of its arms and is advancing CPEC II while enjoying dual patronage.
India faces short-term strain but no lasting strategic rupture: The White House–Rawalpindi bonhomie has complicated crisis management and tariff talks, yet core India-US defence ties persist; New Delhi is recalibrating by diversifying partnerships and insisting that de-hyphenation must be actively maintained.

The trajectory of United States (US)-Pakistan relations since January 2025 represents a symbolic, if not yet substantive, upswing in bilateral ties—the sharpest since the early 2000s. Any deliberate strategic reassessment in Washington has not driven this resuscitation. It rests instead on personalised diplomacy centred on President Donald Trump, transactional offerings from Islamabad in trade, critical minerals, and cryptocurrency, and a sequence of regional crises in which Pakistan, hedging its bets as ever, made itself diplomatically useful as the go-between in the US-Iran conflict. Because policymaking in Washington is largely concentrated in Trump’s personal circle rather than through the interagency process, Pakistan understood this early.

The developments of the past 18 months suggest that the resulting relationship remains episodic and patron-client in character rather than structural; it has not altered Pakistan’s fundamental economic and military dependence on China, and it will again struggle with a change of administration in Washington. The ongoing bonhomie between the White House and Rawalpindi has put some strain on India-US relations, with possible short-term implications but no long-term disturbance to strategic ties.

The Trajectory of US–Pakistan Ties

Pakistan’s re-entry into Washington’s favour preceded the Indo-Pak military conflict in May 2025. In March, Trump thanked Islamabad for the arrest and extradition of the Islamic State-Khorasan operative responsible for the 2021 Abbey Gate bombing in Kabul, and the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) Commander Michael Kurilla described Islamabad as a “phenomenal partner” in counter-terrorism (CT). In April 2025, days after the Pahalgam terrorist attack, World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture owned substantially by the Trump family, signed a letter of intent with the Pakistan Crypto Council. Operation Sindoor, the four-day military confrontation that India initiated against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan, ended on 10 May with Trump announcing the cessation of hostilities before either government, claiming that he had used trade as leverage to secure it.

India demurred and rejected this characterisation. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s telephone conversation with Trump on 17 June, the Indian government asserted that “no talks were held at any level on the India-America trade deal or on the mediation between India and Pakistan by America.” Within 36 hours of that call, Trump hosted Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir for lunch at the White House. To further ingratiate itself, Pakistan nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize soon after while almost simultaneously condemning American strikes on Iran, underlining the deftness of its outreach.

The second half of 2025 underscored what Islamabad’s tactical approach yielded. On 31 July, Trump announced a trade agreement under which Pakistani exports were subject to a 19 per cent tariff in exchange for near-zero Pakistani duties on more than 4,000 American products and a joint commitment to develop oil reserves, the commercial viability of which is largely doubtful. Soon after, Washington doubled tariffs on Indian goods to 50 percent as a penalty for purchases of Russian crude. In September, US Strategic Metals signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on critical minerals with the army-run Frontier Works Organisation, with a reported investment commitment of US$500 million. Later that month, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Munir were received at the Oval Office, and Pakistan subsequently accepted a place on the US-sponsored Board of Peace for Gaza in January 2026.

Nonetheless, the institutional track of India-US relations continued normally. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh signed a 10-year bilateral defence framework in Kuala Lumpur, even as the tariff dispute remained unresolved, and Sergio Gor was confirmed as the US Ambassador to India with an additional mandate as Special Envoy for South and Central Asia.

The first half of 2026 consolidated these trends. On 14 January, Pakistan’s finance ministry signed a memorandum with SC Financial Technologies, an affiliate of World Liberty Financial, to explore integrating the firm’s dollar-pegged stablecoin into Pakistan’s payment system. On the same day, Gor presented his credentials as the new US Ambassador to New Delhi. In early February, India and the US announced an interim trade framework under which the additional 25 percent tariff was rescinded and the reciprocal rate reduced to 18 percent, with India committing to end Russian crude purchases and buy US$ 500 billion of American goods over the next five years. The framework’s durability came into question when the US Supreme Court struck down the validity of the tariffs agreed in the interim trade deal.

On 28 February, the United States and Israel launched a military campaign against Iran that prompted Tehran to close the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas flowed. The war left the security architecture of the Middle East in tatters, with a hardened divide between the Arab states and Iran and established Gulf mediators constrained by the American bases on their soil. While Qatar remained engaged as a co-mediator, Pakistan alone combined a border with Iran, the absence of American bases on its territory, and Munir, who enjoys Trump’s personal confidence. As a result, Islamabad emerged as a key intermediary, and in April, it hosted a direct high-level engagement between the US and Iran. These moves culminated in an MoU signed by Trump on 17 June. Meanwhile, an American strike enforcing the naval blockade killed three Indian sailors, for which Washington offered no apology. Still, Trump and Modi met on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Evian on 17 June, their first meeting in 16 months, during which Trump stated that “if anybody attacks that man [referring to Modi], we’re going to be there,” showing a clear sign of a thaw in the relationship amid differences over tariffs, Washington’s closeness to Rawalpindi, and the domestic implications of the West Asian crisis in India.

Beyond the Optics

An assessment of the substance of the US-Pakistan relationship suggests that its durable elements are narrower than the diplomatic activity of the past year would indicate. The bilateral counter-terrorism and intelligence cooperation between the two countries remains intact and is anchored in CENTCOM’s regional security requirements. The tariff differential is real, as is American diplomatic support for Pakistan in multilateral financial institutions. Beyond these areas, most of the announcements on cooperation since January 2025 remain just that.

Six months after the stablecoin memorandum, no pilot project has begun, no licences have been issued, and no transactions have taken place. Pakistan has used the memorandum as an instrument of diplomatic access in the Trump administration rather than as a financial undertaking. The rare earth and minerals commitments face a sector that contributes barely 3 percent of Pakistan’s GDP, an active insurgency in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where most deposits are located, and the fact that the only proven asset, the Reko Diq copper and gold deposit, is already under development by a Canadian company.

Unlike in the 2000s, the present US-Pakistan relationship involves no security treaty, no coalition support funds, and no major weapons platform transfers. Moreover, historical distrust on both sides persists despite growing closeness. Trump has claimed that Pakistan was among the countries secretly testing nuclear weapons. Scepticism about Pakistan also endures in the US Congress, and Washington has flagged the “significant threat” posed by Pakistani ballistic missiles to the Homeland.

The China dimension limits the significance of the warming of US-Pakistan relations. According to SIPRI data, China supplied around 80 percent of Pakistan’s arms imports in 2021-2025, and the two countries continue to expand their bilateral defence partnership. Despite delays in phase-one projects, disputes over outstanding debt payments, and concerns about the security of Chinese nationals, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) II was launched in September 2025. However, nothing in the recent American engagement alters these underlying dynamics. Beijing has tolerated—and even welcomed—Western financial support to Pakistan because it improves Islamabad’s capacity to service Chinese debt. Islamabad has achieved not a realignment with Washington but a state of dual patronage, drawing economic and diplomatic benefits from the US while its strategic dependence on China remains intact. In other words, the US does not appear to see Pakistan as a long-term strategic partner.

Implications for India

For New Delhi, one consequential outcome of US-Pakistan ties since last year is crisis management with Islamabad. Trump has repeatedly claimed to have mediated the May 2025 ceasefire, and Pakistan has actively endorsed this narrative because the internationalisation of India-Pakistan crises serves its strategy of drawing international attention to Kashmir and re-hyphenating India with Pakistan. The US had largely remained sensitive to any mediation role between India and Pakistan, especially during a crisis event, until Operation Sindoor.

India’s position—that the ceasefire was agreed through military channels at Pakistan’s request and that no mediation occurred or will be accepted—contradicted Trump’s mediation claims on social media. In New Delhi, it was largely seen as a breach of long-held trust with Washington and allowed Pakistan to hide its operational losses. In any future confrontation, Pakistan will likely possess both the incentive and the access to invite American intervention in the early days of a crisis. India and Pakistan now deal with the US, whose commitments attach to individuals rather than states—an arrangement that rewards flattery, penalises distance, and expires with every election. Islamabad has used these tactics to win over the Trump administration to the extent of playing a peacemaker’s role in the US-Iran conflict, while simultaneously conducting regular airstrikes in Afghanistan and backing cross-border terrorism in India.

The second outcome concerns the limits of the India-US partnership as a safeguard against coercion. India absorbed 50 percent tariffs and curtailed its purchases of Russian crude in exchange for a tariff reduction, only to confront the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which undermined the energy assumptions behind that concession, as well as the deaths of Indian seafarers during US military operations. The lessons are evident in India’s subsequent behaviour, including the 2025 annual summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the acceleration of trade agreements with the European Union (EU) and the UK, and a broader diversification of strategic partnerships. This is not a reversion to ideological non-alignment but a recalibration of strategic autonomy in response to growing American unpredictability.

Pakistan’s gains, by contrast, are so far tied to a single presidency and the US-Iran military conflict, in which its geography proved useful. The relevant indicators for Indian planners will be whether the US-Pakistan critical minerals deal moves forward, whether there is new defence and security cooperation, and how Washington conducts itself in the next India-Pakistan crisis.

In the US strategic calculus, Pakistan is a key swing state. It could play a role in the new security architecture of the Middle East, where India has its own strategic interests to preserve in the face of the US’ transactional approach to bilateral ties. In contrast, as an emerging geopolitical power pursuing strategic autonomy, India has its own strategic calculus in the Middle East and beyond.

New Delhi also needs to manage and counter Islamabad’s understanding of multipolarity. For Pakistan, it signifies a regional order in which China, Bangladesh, and Pakistan emerge as equally important strategic, economic, and political poles alongside India, rather than remaining peripheral or subordinate actors. In addition, Islamabad’s ambition is to anchor itself near the fulcrum of the post-crisis Middle East security structure, trading frontline services to the US in exchange for sustained financial and military support. Countering it will require a quiet and patient approach from New Delhi that closely tracks ongoing developments in the US-Pakistan relationship and continues to push for multi-sectoral bilateral cooperation with Washington. More importantly, India needs to understand that de-hyphenation vis-à-vis Pakistan was never a permanent feature of the US calculus. It is a condition that should be actively maintained with every administration in Washington, especially during military crises.