Pakistan’s recent change of government, which occurred under scandalous circumstances following former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s claims that it was actually a US-orchestrated regime change against him as punishment for his independent foreign policy and especially its Russian dimension, has prompted plenty of speculation about the future of Russian-Pakistani relations. Their fast-moving rapprochement in recent years has been mutually beneficial and wasn’t ever aimed against any third parties like the US or India no matter what some ill-intended observers might imagine.

The new authorities who replaced the previous government insist that they came to power through a purely legal constitutional process that wasn’t influenced by any foreign factors. Nevertheless, the former premier’s narrative has proven itself compelling enough to inspire some of the largest rallies in Pakistan’s history against what he describes as its imported government. The innuendo is that they’re influenced – if not directly controlled – by the US and are therefore incapable of implementing independent policies.

Their decision whether or not to continue the Russian dimension of former Prime Minister Khan’s foreign policy will serve as a bellwether of their independence. This is especially the case after he revealed during his massive rally in Karachi on Saturday that President Vladimir Putin offered to export his country’s agricultural and energy products to Pakistan at a 30% discount during their talks in Moscow in late February. That arrangement is arguably in Pakistan’s national interests, yet the new authorities have been silent about this deal in the days since the former premier disclosed these important details.

They only just swore in their new cabinet, though, so it might be that some clarification about this crucial deal will soon be forthcoming as well as some sense of direction about the future of Russian-Pakistani relations more broadly. President Putin already congratulated newly inaugurated Prime Minister Shehbhaz Sharif and expressed his hope that bilateral ties will continue to flourish, which means that everything is now dependent on whether or not Pakistan’s new authorities plan to reciprocate this.

With the intent of encouraging a positive response, Russia reportedly sent Pakistan a comprehensive geo-economic roadmap for the next four years according to Business Recorder. Per the outlet’s cited sources, this concerns close cooperation in the following spheres: industrial; transport; aviation; pharmaceutical; chemical; oil/gas; mining; hydrological and other renewable energy; and conventional power generation. If these details are accurate, then they’re fully in line with the geo-economic vision articulated in Pakistan’s newly promulgated National Security Policy from January.

It’s important to remind the reader of some crucial background context to this reported proposal. RT reported in December 2019 that a 64-member delegation led by the Russian Minister of Industry and Trade traveled to Pakistan for a four-day visit, during which time literally billions of dollars’ worth of deals were discussed in multiple spheres. These included what’s now known as the Pakistan Stream Gas Pipeline, which is one of Eurasia’s multipolar flagship projects. It can be assumed from Business Recorder’s report that the geo-economic roadmap that Russia just proposed originated from that visit.

This implies that detailed negotiations have been occurring for almost the past two and a half years, which shows how closely former Prime Minister Khan’s government was working with Russia behind the scenes. He prioritized the Russian vector of his country’s multipolar grand strategy that was articulated during April 2021’s inaugural Islamabad Security Dialogue not because of any Russophilia or anti-Americanism, but simply due to geostrategic pragmatism related to diversifying Pakistan’s partnerships in the Multipolar World Order that’s emerging from the ongoing global systemic transition.

Contrary to the US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) narrative and that which has since been pushed by most of Pakistani media following their country’s scandalous change of government, it wasn’t former Prime Minister Khan who’s to blame for troubled ties with the US, but US President Joe Biden and his administration. America took its new military-strategic partnership with India for granted at Pakistan’s expense, but it also counterproductively started mistreating New Delhi as a vassal state from summer 2020 into the present day.

This even egregiously manifested itself through the US’ public demands for India to abandon its multi-alignment policy that’s nowadays taken the form of its principled neutrality towards Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine. That will never happen since India’s grand strategy is to preemptively avert Russia’s potentially forthcoming disproportionate dependence on China by becoming its supplementary valve from Western pressure in order to maintain the balance of influence across Eurasia between these three multipolar partners. As such, Indian-US ties have since suffered.

That development coupled with Pakistan’s scandalous change of government has resulted in those two South Asian states having the chance to powerfully shape the contours of the New Cold War. India’s role was already explained regarding its efforts to maintain the balance of influence in Eurasia by becoming Russia’s most important pressure valve while Pakistan’s is explained in this analysis that summarizes its global importance. In short, it has the potential to become the “Zipper of Eurasia” for accelerating the supercontinent’s multipolar integration, but only if it retains the Russian dimension of its foreign policy.

The new authorities must therefore ask themselves whether it’s really worth slowing down the pace of this policy or even potentially abandoning it outright in a misguided attempt to repair relations with the US. Some have begun to speculate that this might be in the cards following former Prime Minister Khan’s scandalous claims about their rise to power as well as their subsequent silence about the details that he revealed related to Russia’s deal with Pakistan. Moscow seems eager for some clarity as well, hence its reported four-year comprehensive geo-economic roadmap that it just shared with Islamabad.

Remembering that it was the US that ruined relations with Pakistan due to the discredited supremacist ideology of “American Exceptionalism” that influences its policymakers to aggressively impose their hegemony onto all others, and not former Prime Minister Khan’s well-intended efforts to restore balance to their relationship through his independent foreign policy that aimed to finally earn his country the respect that it deserves as its counterpart’s equal in the eyes of international law, there’s no reason to credibly expect that Pakistani-US ties will improve if Islamabad dumps Moscow.

To the contrary, any speculatively reduced importance (let alone outright removal) of the Russian variable in Pakistan’s foreign policy equation would only result in exacerbating the grand strategic asymmetry between that country and the US, thereby tempting America to return to mistreating its counterpart as badly as it had in the past. It might attempt to obscure this reality from the public by manipulating financial markets in such a way that the rupee-dollar rate improves in order to distract people from its reassertion of hegemonic influence over Pakistan, including its foreign policy.

Retaining and especially expanding the excellent relations that former Prime Minister Khan cultivated with Russia, however, would enable Pakistan to maintain a comparatively better balance between itself and the US that could in turn be leveraged to encourage America to treat it more equally and with respect. For instance, the new authorities could request that the Biden Administration builds upon its predecessor’s ambitious plan to scale up trade by 10-20 times through the conclusion of an updated free trade agreement and more investments into its very promising economy.

This can be achieved without needlessly sacrificing the strategic autonomy that the Russian dimension of former Prime Minister Khan’s foreign policy provides for Pakistan. By staying the course, the country’s new authorities would earn the respect of their compatriots and those many governments across the Global South who sincerely suspected that the US had already sunk its claws into Pakistan’s foreign policy following the country’s scandalous change of government. If they change course, including by abandoning the 30% discount deal with Russia, then they’ll confirm suspicions of US influence.

With these calculations in mind, continuing to build ties with Russia is therefore in the new authorities’ own political and soft power interests as well as in Pakistan’s objectively existing national ones. There’s no credible reason why they wouldn’t positively respond to Russia’s reported sharing of a four-year comprehensive geo-economic roadmap that was presumably in the works for nearly the past two and a half years since that Eurasian Great Power sent its enormous trade and investment delegation to Pakistan in December 2019. The whole world is eagerly awaiting Pakistan’s clarification about all of this.