Method in Trump's Pakistan romance: US' Gulf security

The Print

10-08-2025

Even his friends didn't like him,' a biographer would later recall , his mind a congealed mass of Cold War fears and delusions that birthed a perpetual-motion machine of global violence. Ensconced in his office one morning in 1954, known by the delightful metonym Foggy Bottom, America's secretary of state was attempting to explain to columnist Walter Lippman why a mutual-defence agreement with Pakistan was necessary. 'The only Asians who can really fight are the Pakistanis,' John Foster Dulles declared. 'That's why we need them in the alliance. We could never get along without the Gurkhas.'
'No, I'm afraid they're not Moslems, either,' Lippman persisted. The eminent journalist was wasting his breath.
For weeks now, strategic affairs experts across the world have been trying to make sense of President Donald Trump's courtship of Pakistan's Generals, the most sustained effort in seven decades. Explanations include anger over Prime Minister Narendra Modi's rejection of Trump's account of how the Four-Day War in May ended, resentment at India's stonewalling of his repeated efforts to mediate on Kashmir, and even plain-vanilla racism.
All of these may well be part of the truth—but there is one consequential motive India should pay special attention to. For decades, the United States has maintained tens of thousands of soldiers at bases strung across the Middle East, securing the flow of energy from the region to global markets.
Ever since his first term, Trump has wanted Middle Eastern regimes to commit their own forces to regional security operations. Many experts also argue that American troops should pivot to preparing for future great-power conflicts. The key to doing that, some of Trump's advisors say, lies in sprawling military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from where a Pakistani general commands an army that does not—yet—exist.
Also read: Asim Munir is playing good jihadi-bad jihadi game. Suicide bombing shows he's failing
An old new Cold War
The significance of the 43-member Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Force (IMCTC), commanded since 2016 by former Pakistan army chief General Raheel Sharif, is entwined with the story of how the United States became the primary power in the Middle East. The discovery in 1938 of massive hydrocarbon deposits in Saudi Arabia was followed by huge American investments in its energy infrastructure. To protect that infrastructure during the Second World War, America set up bases in Iran, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.
Even before the dawn of the Cold War, American leaders were clear about what this entailed. In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told a British diplomat, 'Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it's ours.' For the first century of its existence, the United States had been relentlessly opposed to entanglement in overseas military operations. The historian John Gaddis notes that America, without setting out to create an empire, had ended up with one.
The implications of this empire were understood clearly by American diplomats. In a famous 1946 diplomatic cable from Moscow, diplomat George Kennan noted that the Soviet Union saw itself as surrounded by a hostile ring of capitalist states. The Soviets, however, were relatively weak and had no grand imperial designs. Thus, Kennan argued, 'the problem is within our power to solve—and that without recourse to any general military conflict.'
From now-declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents, it is clear the United States considered the consequences of involving Pakistan in its containment strategy somewhat more carefully than Dulles' Gurkha remarks might suggest. Late in 1949, the Director of India's Intelligence Bureau, TS Sanjevi, reached out to the CIA seeking help in containing the Left-wing insurgency in Telangana. The meetings convinced Kennan, historian Paul McGarr records, that the country would eventually have to 'look beyond India's borders and seek to influence policy in regard to dangers from without.'
Through the early 1950s, India resisted taking sides in the Cold War, prompting the United States to examine an alliance with Pakistan more closely. Pakistan had influence in the Middle East due to the religion of its population, its large military, and its borders with three critical regions—Iran, a tempting target for Soviet expansion; Soviet-allied China; and Afghanistan.
One CIA assessment warned that granting military aid to Pakistan would confirm Indian suspicions that the real problem in Asia was not the threat of communist revolution, but the 'unreasonable policies of the military-minded West.' To deny Pakistan military support, however, would weaken the élites who ran the country and strengthen 'reactionary religious elements which oppose close ties to the West and favour a more militant policy regarding Kashmir.'
Ties that bind
From the outset, Pakistan enjoyed an advantage that transcended pure balance-of-power calculations: as Trump does today, American leaders contrasted their highly Westernised, pro-capitalist interlocutors in Pakistan with ideologically hostile, and sometimes culturally provincial, Indians. In 1955, Horace Hildreth, the American ambassador to Pakistan, wrote to Dulles urging him to invite General Iskander Mirza on a state visit, in violation of protocol. The letter makes clear Hildreth was influenced by his son-in-law, Humayun Mirza—General Iskander's son, then a student at Harvard.
Leaders in India, by contrast, made no secret of their anti-imperialist beliefs, criticising the United States' security pacts with Turkey and Egypt—issues in which Washington believed New Delhi had no strategic equities. The growing anti-communist climate in Washington consolidated in 1954, when the Geneva Accords partitioned Vietnam. To President Dwight Eisenhower and Dulles, the accords left Asia more vulnerable to communism.
Thus, in 1954, the United States and Pakistan signed a mutual defence assistance agreement, opening the doors for military aid. Islamabad also became part of the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO)—comprising the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand—intended to function on the model of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Europe.
Islamabad's attempts to leverage the alliance for its own benefit were not always successful, historian Damien Fenton notes. For the most part, SEATO commanders were dismissive of Pakistan's claims that West Pakistan needed to be equipped to face an attack from eight Soviet and four Afghan divisions through Afghanistan and eastern Iran, as well as a secondary attack by two People's Liberation Army (PLA) divisions through the mountains of Xinjiang, China. The United Kingdom, in particular, stressed that the real threat from the Soviet Union lay with the oilfields of the Middle East, not Pakistan.
The relationship did yield real dividends, however: between 1954 and 1961, the Pakistani Air Force was equipped with 130 F-86F Sabre jet fighters, 24 Martin B-57 jet bombers, and became the first country outside NATO to receive the Lockheed F-104A Starfighter high-altitude interceptor.
Towards the Middle East
Following the 1973 war, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government snapped ties with SEATO and began building a deeper relationship with China. A number of circumstances, however, ensured Islamabad remained a key asset for the West. Ever since 1970, military ruler General Yahya Khan had brokered contacts between the United States and China, which had broken from its partnership with the Soviet Union. This relationship gave Islamabad real strategic utility. Then, after the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's regime became a key conduit for arms and training to Islamist insurgents.
Another important strategic axis had also developed in SEATO's waning years, scholars Marvin Weinbaum and Abdullah Khurram note. From the mid-1960s, fearing support from President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalist regime in Egypt to its allies in Yemen, the Saudi monarchy turned to Pakistan for training and support.
Although Saudi Arabia had been suspicious of Islamabad's ties to Iran's monarchy—formalised through the American-led CENTO military pact of 1958—events brought the two countries closer. In 1969, Pakistani pilots flew the first Royal Saudi Air Force fighter jets, used to repel a South Yemeni incursion into the Kingdom. A Pakistani battalion was also deployed along the Saudi-Yemeni border. In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Pakistan sent 5,000 troops to the Kingdom.
That relationship lies at the heart of what Trump's Pakistan strategy now seeks to harness. The costs of the expansive US base network protecting the Middle East—which includes a direct presence in over a dozen countries, nine permanent facilities, and naval assets—are difficult to calculate. Economists have estimated the figure at between $73 billion and $100 billion annually (in 2017 dollars), or at least 15 per cent of the US defence budget.
Arthur Herman estimated in 2014 that 'keeping the region's shipping lanes, including the Strait of Hormuz, open to tanker traffic costs the Pentagon, on average, $50 billion a year—a service that earns us the undying enmity of populations in that region.'
Though there are plenty of arguments for retaining forward bases—among them, reassuring countries like Saudi Arabia that they need not acquire nuclear weapons and providing robust anti-missile defences—economic pressures have proved relentless, expert Jonathan Stevenson notes.
Like Turkey and Egypt, Pakistan is one of a handful of powers with the human resources and infrastructure to help secure the Persian Gulf as Trump's America draws down its military presence. Pakistan's military can provide many of the services America needs—base logistics, port security, guard duties—at relatively low cost. And the real costs of expending Pakistani troops for long-drawn counter-terrorism missions, the objective of the IMCTC, are immeasurably cheaper than losing American lives.
Field Marshal Asim Munir has shown he's willing to be courted—but what his price will be remains to be seen.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)