Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Pakistan continues relying on Russia to pragmatically rebalance ties with China…

The Russian and Pakistani Navies conducted a passing exercise (PASSEX) in the Arabian Sea last week. This is a standard drill, “during which communication and interaction between them are checked in a military situation or when providing humanitarian assistance”, according to Izvestia. It therefore wasn’t a big deal even though some observers, both within their respective countries and India, might hype it up given those two’s impressive rapprochement over the past decade.

This analysis here from late January explained why Russian-Pakistani defense ties will likely remain limited, namely because of the respect that Russia has for India’s sensitivities and due to Pakistan’s military-technical dependence on China, which disincentivize one another from taking such ties further. Their closer military cooperation in recent years (almost exclusively anti-terrorist and naval drills), however, have been interpreted in the following three ways by observers.

Some believe that Pakistan is pivoting away from the US towards Russia; others that Pakistan is pragmatically rebalancing its ties with China via Russia; while some think that Russia is doing the same with India via Pakistan. The second one is the closest to reality since Pakistan returned to the US’ sphere of influence after spring 2022’s post-modern coup against former Prime Minister Imran Khan while Russia relies on India as a means of preemptively averting disproportionate dependence on China.

It therefore doesn’t compute that Pakistan would pivot away from the US towards Russia, let alone without the US doing anything to obstruct this trend, or that Russia would disrespect India’s sensitivities. Even so, there are some in Russia’s “global media ecosystem” who push the first narrative to craft the optics that Russia “poached” a top US partner, while some in Pakistan’s domestic media ecosystem push the second since it crafts complementary optics of their country “poaching” a top Indian one.

That last narrative is also pushed or implied by some US-friendly Indian commentators so as to misportray Russia as an unreliable partner in order to then justify pivoting towards the US at the expense of India’s strategic ties with Russia on this emotive but nevertheless false pretext. As was written, the only one of the three that’s related to reality is the narrative that Pakistan is pragmatically rebalancing its ties with China via Russia, but with the caveat that this is being done with tacit US approval.

This analysis here from mid-December explained the rationale, namely that private American companies can’t compete with state-run Russian ones for modernizing Pakistan’s resource infrastructure, and obstructing Russia’s associated inroads in Pakistan would only deepen Pakistan’s dependence on China. It therefore follows that the US shouldn’t impede what’ll ultimately be the limited expansion of Russian-Pakistani ties in strategic spheres if it truly wants to see other countries rebalance their ties with China.

Pakistan’s de facto military regime also knows that their country’s closeness with China was one of the implicit pretexts upon which the US pressured it in the past so high-profile engagement with Russia, especially in the context of the nascent Russian–US “New Détente”, might help alleviate some of that. All in all, this insight shows that the latest Russian-Pakistani naval drills were no big deal, though they do align with the trend of closer – and more high-profile – cooperation that the US doesn’t seem to mind.