The recent history of world politics witnessed by the US-withdrawal from Afghanistan and the re-arrival of Donald Trump in American politics as the 47th President of the United States has altered the conventional framework of Pakistan-US relations. The cooperative ties between the two states have a long history of multidimensional bilateral engagements in diverse domains under the shadows of their robust political, communicational, and diplomatic coordination on various regional and international issues.
It has moved the attention of the international strategic community towards changing patterns of cooperative bilateralism between Washington and Islamabad. The consistently altering political dynamics of South Asian regional and global power politics have always identified leading factors shaping the specific behaviours of two states in their bilateral multidimensional interaction.
Aligning with the ongoing academic debates on the changing contours of Washington-Islamabad bilateral cooperation, the recently published book of an emerging intellectual figure of Pakistan, Sadia Sulaiman, traces the exceptional features of cordial ties between the two states. While cultivating a respectable intellectual standing in the international academic community concerning South Asian regional politics under the shadows of great powers, Sadia Sulaiman originally belongs to Islamabad-based academics. Apart from expressing her scholarly position on diverse South Asian issues under the Post-Conflicts Reconstruction: From Extremism to Peaceful Co-Existence and CPEC and SDGs in Pakistan: Measuring Impact on Common Lives, the book under review presents a fresh perspective on the evolving United States-Pakistan historical cordial ties while observing a brief account of two-sided diplomatic disconnects and political estrangement. The book’s central theme is divided into fifteen chapters, summarized in five sub-themes underlining the prospects of bilateral collaborations between two states beyond the fixed security frameworks patterned in two-sided conventional collaborative designs. The five major thematic parts touch on the evolution of US-Pakistan ties, starting from its Cold War genesis to post-9/11 dynamics.
After covering the complex and decades-long history of two-sided and cordial relations between formal state authorities under different political administrations, the book’s debate emphasises a future framework based on soft power projection, augmenting cooperation in higher education, and adopting shared values to achieve a common goal of sustainable development and improvement in societal interconnectedness.
The discussion in the first chapter part started from the views of Michael Kugelman and Ambassador Aziz Ahmed Chaudhry on the impacts of South Asian regional complex geopolitical patterns on the long-standing cordial interaction be tween governments. The initial debate in the first two chapters highlights the major turning points of US-Pakistan collaborations in various domains where the global war on terror played a significant role in designing the recent trends of government-level coordination between the two states.
The discussion in subsequent chapters continued the arguments on the constantly growing regional geopolitical landscape of South Asia and its relevance with the great power politics in which the United States secured along history of active engagement in the region.
The second part concentrates on the inevitable geopolitical shadows on US-Pakistan relations in three chapters authored by Ambassador Nadeem Riyaz, Nabila Jaffar, Huma Baqai, Syed Hussain Shaheed Soherwordi and Saira Aquil, highlighted the strategic positions of Kabul, Beijing, and New Delhi in determining the merits of Washington-Islamabad pleasant bilateral interaction.
The debate’s interesting part appears in the book’s third part, in which Kenneth Holland’s views on human rights and media, Zafar Nawaz Jaspal’s opinion on fair and free elections, and Steven Randoll Hall’s assessment of US economic and cultural aid programs provide substantial learning for Pakistan.
The co-authored chapter by Nasir Jamal Khattak and Ayesha Siddiqa shed light on fostering diverse literary developments in the United States, leaving indispensable learning for Islamabad. The logically convincing and conceptually rational arguments of different authors continued the book’s primary debate and provided a fascinating analytical framework in the fourth part, where Sadia Sulaiman’s combined analysis with Mustansar Klasra attempted to underline the new pathways in Pakistan-US ties while addressing the leading human security concerns.
The intellectual conversation of Ayesha Siddiqa, Saira Auqil, and Alicia Dean further explored the scope of the Fullbright higher education program linked with the production of a knowledge-based economy, the role of diaspora in promoting public diplomacy, and the varying characteristics of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in advancing USPakistan economic and cultural ties in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth chapters.
Akin to the two introductory chapters, the last two chapters in the concluding part portray a concise picture of future pathways comprising of the analysis of Hassan Abbas and Sadia Sulaiman linked with the future of US-Pakistan bilateral cooperative interaction and the role of China in defining the two-sided collaborating models between the United States and Pakistan. In this way, the book’s chapters attempted to cover different topics, respectively, making its core argument a significant contribution to both scholarly literature and policymaking discourse on South Asia-US relations.
Thus, the varying arguments maintained by various authors tried to provide an exceptional examination of different factors designing the historical, geopolitical, cultural, and economic patterns of US-Pakistan relations. The book’s comprehensive approach deserves appreciation for its updated and forward-looking attempt to reframe a historically securitised bilateral relationship between Washington and Islamabad through a multidisciplinary lens. This edited volume compiled by Sadia Sulaiman endeavoured to explore American South Asian engagement by exclusively emphasising Pakistan’s position in Washington’s mainstream foreign relations with South Asian nations.
The scholarly arguments of diverse contributors, including diplomats, academics, and policy practitioners, regarding the book’s central theme make it an incomparable intellectual account presenting diverse perspectives and practical insights on the non-traditional accounts of American foreign policy’s South Asian directions.
Thus, the book could be treated as an appropriate scholarly read for students and scholars of international relations, policymakers, diplomats, and journalists focusing on South Asian geopolitics, which could not be divorced from US foreign policy. It is a valuable scholarly account based on an impartial and balanced analytical framework to study the post-21st century developments of US-Pakistan cooperative bilateralism originating from the Cold War era.
It endeavoured to point out the advancement of apposite learning, promotion of people-to-people connections, and exploration of various untapped potential domains for multilayered collaborations between two states beyond their historical-critical features merely associated with the envisioned scope of shared values and long-term development goals.
