As the United States slaps steep tariffs on Indian imports, a former Pakistani official wants Donald Trump to consider a 'reset' in South Asia, by looking back.
In an essay for Foreign Affairs magazine, Moeed Yusuf, former national security adviser of Pakistan and now a Harvard fellow, urges Washington to revisit its strategic calculus: scale down its India-first approach and consider engaging Islamabad more deeply.
Yusuf argues that the U.S. made a “strategic misread” by betting on India as its counterweight to China. According to him, India hasn’t delivered. Its pursuit of “strategic autonomy,” refusal to toe Washington’s line on Russia, and recent outreach to China and Russia are cited as reasons for this supposed drift.
The 50% tariffs imposed by the Trump administration in August, he notes, reflect growing frustration in Washington.
Meanwhile, Yusuf sees new opportunity in U.S.-Pakistan ties. He points to Trump’s outreach to the Pakistani military, talks on critical minerals and cryptocurrency, and Islamabad’s nomination of Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. He credits Trump with diffusing tensions in a recent India–Pakistan border flare-up—something India has denied happened.
The solution, Yusuf suggests, may lie in the past. He invokes 1971, when Pakistan helped broker the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China, and suggests Islamabad could once again help Washington engage with Beijing and stabilise the region. Connectivity, infrastructure, and counterterrorism are cited as areas of potential trilateral cooperation.
In his telling, Pakistan is not seeking to choose between camps, but to offer itself as a bridge—between the U.S., China, and perhaps even India.