On a train from Pakistan to Russia via US-sanctioned Iran

AllAfrica

24-02-2025

Pakistan Railways Freight CEO Sufiyan Sarfaraz Dogar announced last week that the first Russian-Pakistani freight train service will launch on March 15, transiting across Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.
The line will facilitate Russian energy and industrial product exports to Pakistan and Pakistan's agricultural and textile exports to Russia, according to reports.
This has been a long time in the making and represents the latest milestone in their relations. Here are three top takeaways.
Next month's plans show that Russia and Pakistan are prioritizing Iran over Afghanistan as the irreplaceable transit state for expanding their bilateral trade. That's sensible considering continued Pakistani-Taliban tensions, but it also carries risks.
Trump has already revived his first administration's 'maximum pressure' policy against Iran and is therefore expected to impose secondary sanctions against all companies that still trade with it without a waiver.
Trump's so serious about this that he threatened to modify or rescind the waiver that his first administration extended to India, which has invested heavily in Iran's Chahabar Port, so he'll predictably come down harshly against Pakistan, too.
Therein lies the problem since Pakistan has proven in the past that it will comply with American sanctions against Iran, most infamously the one that's obstructing their over-decade-long pipeline plans.
So, it will likely do the same with the US' latest sanctions crackdown and, therefore, abandon this route for trade with Russia.
Russian-Pakistani trade could be conducted more effectively in terms of cost and time by relying on Afghanistan as their transit state, but that's not possible so long as Pakistani-Taliban tensions persist.
In a nutshell, those tensions boil down to the Taliban suspecting that Pakistan's de facto military junta is secretly allied with the US against it.
Pakistan, meanwhile, accuses the Taliban of backing Pashtun and Baloch terrorist groups (perhaps as an asymmetrical means of restoring the lopsided balance of power).
Although Russia is better positioned than anyone else to mediate between them, it hasn't yet formally done so, nor might it ultimately succeed in resolving the security dilemma at the core of their disputes.
That's regrettable since remaining reliant on Iran carries with it the abovementioned risk that Pakistan capitulates to US secondary sanctions pressure.
The self-evident solution is to patch up their problems for the greater good of Eurasian connectivity, but that's a lot easier said than done.
Laudably, the will exists on both sides to expand bilateral trade in spite of the described obstacles. Quite clearly, there is still a faction/school of the Pakistani establishment that is serious about diversifying their country's economic dependence on China and testing the limits of its traditional political dependence on the US, each by means of Russia. This suggests that higher-ups are hedging their bets a bit on both.
From the Russian side, there's a consensus on the need to comprehensively develop relations with non-traditional partners like Pakistan at this historic phase of the global systemic transition to multipolarity, though nobody should be under any illusions about this ever being done at India's expense.
The combined effect of the above mentioned imperatives is that the parties are sincerely attempting to make good on their economic agreements from last year in pursuit of their complementary interests.
The impending launch of the first Russian-Pakistani freight train service across Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan is a big deal, but the obstacles posed by Trump's 'maximum pressure' policy against Iran and continued Pakistani-Taliban tensions might limit bilateral trade.
The best-case scenario would, therefore, be for Pakistan to defy the US on Iran, patch up its problems with the Taliban and thus rely on two trade routes to Russia instead of just one, but that might be asking too much of its de facto military junta.
This article was first published on Andrew Korybko's Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become an Andrew Korybko Newsletter subscriber here.