When the United States released its National Defence Strategy 2026 last week, it signalled a notable shift in Washington’s China policy under President Donald Trump. Anchored in the National Security Strategy 2025, the document reframes China not as an imminent military or ideological enemy, but as a long-term strategic competitor to be managed through deterrence, economic strength and restraint rather than confrontation. This recalibration is central to Trump’s broader effort to reorder American priorities, and it carries important implications for countries navigating US–China competition. For Pakistan, it offers meaningful strategic relief.
The new defence strategy is unusually explicit in what it rejects. It states that the United States does not seek to dominate, isolate or weaken China. Nor does it aim to humiliate or strangle it. Instead, the focus is on preventing any power from dominating others, maintaining balance, and avoiding escalation while preserving deterrence. China is recognised as a major power whose rise cannot be reversed through containment alone.
Managing China
This outlook reflects a broader reassessment in Washington. China is no longer approached primarily through ideological confrontation or crisis-driven military planning. Competition is defined instead in economic, technological and industrial terms. Military strength remains important, but it is no longer presented as the organising principle of policy. Stability and long-term positioning have taken precedence over urgency and brinkmanship.
Trump’s National Security Strategy reinforces this shift. It frames the Indo-Pacific as the world’s economic centre of gravity and places economic competitiveness, supply chains and industrial resilience at the heart of US strategy. Military deterrence is retained to prevent conflict, not to provoke it. The underlying assumption is that sustained competition is unavoidable, but war is neither inevitable nor desirable.
China is no longer treated as a war to be prepared for, but as a rivalry to be managed.
Equally important is the reordering of American global commitments. The National Defence Strategy 2026 places clear responsibility on Europe to take primary charge of its own security, including support for Ukraine. NATO allies are expected to shoulder greater burdens, while the United States narrows its focus towards homeland defence, economic renewal and long-term strategic balance. This reflects Trump’s long-held view that American power has been overstretched by underwriting global security without adequate returns.
US-backed de-escalation, combined with Pakistan’s demonstrated deterrence capability, restored Islamabad’s strategic visibility. It also challenged long-standing assumptions about India’s role as Washington’s primary strategic partner in South Asia
This marks a clear break from earlier US approaches to China. Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, Washington largely sought to accommodate China’s rise through engagement and economic integration. Over time, this approach gave way to growing mistrust. The shift became explicit under President Obama, whose “pivot to Asia” redirected US strategic focus away from the Middle East and towards the Indo-Pacific.
President Trump’s first term intensified rivalry on the economic front, particularly through tariffs and trade restrictions, but did not fully convert competition into a rigid ideological or military framework. President Biden went further, elevating China to the centre of US grand strategy and portraying it as an ideological and military challenger, even as the United States became deeply entangled in the Russia–Ukraine war. The expansion of Indo-Pacific alliances, the prominence of the Quad and the emphasis on containment appeared increasingly disconnected from China’s actual priorities.
China, meanwhile, avoided military confrontation. Its focus remained economic: expanding trade, deepening connectivity through the Belt and Road Initiative, strengthening regional institutions and growing its footprint in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Beijing showed little interest in exporting ideology or provoking conflict, preferring integration and economic influence. The divergence between Washington’s containment instincts and Beijing’s behaviour widened, while the costs of sustained confrontation rose for the United States and its partners.
Pakistan’s Dilemma
For Pakistan, this environment was especially constraining. Since independence, its foreign policy has been shaped by rivalry with India and the need for external partners to offset regional asymmetries. Pakistan aligned with the West during the Cold War, while India, despite claiming non-alignment, maintained close strategic ties with the Soviet Union. This imbalance shaped South Asia’s security landscape for decades.
The limits of Pakistan’s partnership with the United States became painfully clear in 1971, when Washington failed to prevent the dismemberment of East Pakistan. Strategic co-operation resumed during the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, where Pakistan played a pivotal role. Yet once the Cold War ended, Pakistan was again sidelined. Sanctions, disengagement and neglect defined the 1990s.
After 9/11, Pakistan re-emerged as a frontline partner of the United States and was designated a major non-NATO ally. Yet the relationship remained deeply strained. Strategic co-operation in Afghanistan coexisted with mutual mistrust, public recriminations and sharply divergent priorities. Washington increasingly viewed Pakistan through a narrow counter-terrorism lens, while Islamabad saw US policy drifting steadily towards India.
The American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 marked a decisive rupture. With the war over, Pakistan’s immediate utility to Washington diminished, and under the Biden administration, it was largely pushed to the margins of US regional strategy, even as India’s strategic salience continued to grow.
By that point, Pakistan was economically fragile and diplomatically constrained, while its strategic partnership with China had steadily deepened. Islamabad was not actively hedging between Washington and Beijing so much as adjusting to irrelevance in US calculations. Yet, intensifying US–China competition increased Pakistan’s exposure by default. In a more polarised strategic environment, even passive alignment carries costs. Hedging ceased to be a source of flexibility and instead became a liability, demanding economic resilience and diplomatic leverage that Pakistan, at the time, did not possess.
Strategic Relief
Trump’s China reset has altered this dynamic. Under his leadership, Pakistan has regained relevance in Washington. High-level political and military engagement has resumed. Co-operation on counter-terrorism and regional stability has revived. Pakistan has received rare public acknowledgement for its role against transnational terrorism, reversing years of diplomatic coldness.
The May 2025 India–Pakistan conflict further reinforced this shift. US-backed de-escalation, combined with Pakistan’s demonstrated deterrence capability, restored Islamabad’s strategic visibility. It also challenged long-standing assumptions about India’s role as Washington’s primary strategic partner in South Asia.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and several other Muslim-majority states linked through the Belt and Road Initiative and Trump’s Board of Peace now find themselves broadly aligned in resisting further destabilisation, while maintaining channels to both Washington and Beijing
Crucially, this renewed engagement has not affected Pakistan’s “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership” with China.
That relationship, unlike Pakistan’s uneven experience with the United States, has grown steadily since diplomatic ties were established 75 years ago. China supported Pakistan during wars with India, assisted its defence and nuclear programmes, and emerged as its most reliable strategic partner. Over the past decade, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor has taken the relationship decisively into the economic domain, with a growing focus on technology, trade and industrial co-operation.
The May 2025 conflict further highlighted the operational dimension of Sino-Pakistani co-operation. Chinese technology, combined with Pakistani operational performance, altered regional perceptions and reinforced deterrence. The partnership is no longer viewed solely through an economic lens.
Pakistan once played a quiet but consequential role in bridging the gap between Washington and Beijing during the opening of US–China relations in the early 1970s, facilitating secret diplomacy at a moment of profound global realignment. Today, its objective is more modest but no less important: ensuring that renewed competition between the United States and China does not once again reduce Pakistan to a peripheral casualty of great-power rivalry.
Beyond Hedging
By reframing China as a competitor rather than an enemy, emphasising burden-sharing and stepping back from containment-driven escalation, Washington has reduced the zero-sum pressure on countries like Pakistan. This strategic space should not be assumed to be permanent. A future US administration could yet revert to the instincts of the traditional security and foreign policy establishment, where institutional inertia often outweighs presidential intent.
For now, however, Trump’s approach is distinctive in that foreign policy is driven directly from the White House, limiting the influence of entrenched hawkish orthodoxies. By claiming credit for resolving or de-escalating several conflicts, Trump has placed peacemaking at the centre of the legacy he seeks to leave behind. Even within this more favourable environment, Pakistan will need to proceed with care.
Its participation in Trump’s proposed Board of Peace reflects renewed diplomatic relevance, but the initiative’s scope extends beyond Gaza to other potential conflict zones. Even if the Board’s agenda extends beyond Gaza, it offers Pakistan a discreet opportunity to test Trump’s openness on Kashmir, particularly in a forum where India is absent and several Muslim-majority states are present (China will support this step). This grouping also strengthens diplomatic resistance to further Israeli expansionism, reinforcing a convergence of interests that Pakistan alone could not mobilise.
While members of the Board of Peace retain freedom of action, China remains wary of arrangements that bypass multilateral frameworks, preferring the United Nations or platforms aligned with its own global initiatives. Trump’s attempt to recast elements of the post-war international order is therefore not one Beijing subscribes to, even as it seeks a workable relationship with Washington.
Recent US intervention in Venezuela illustrates why coordination with China remains essential. Framed within Trump’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine logic, the move prioritised strategic control and resource access over normative concerns or international law. Beijing views such actions through an economic lens, wary that similar approaches towards energy-rich states, including Iran, could eventually disrupt supply chains critical to China’s growth.
Pakistan’s deeper engagement with the Trump administration, therefore, makes sustained coordination with China essential.
The Middle East presents an even sharper test. Israel’s expanding military ambitions—from Gaza to Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and now over regime change in Iran through US military intervention—have heightened the risk of regional escalation. China strongly opposes any widening of the conflict, as does Saudi Arabia, whose relations with Iran were normalised through Chinese mediation. Saudi reluctance to support military action against Iran amid recent unrest has so far constrained US escalation, a restraint Trump has largely accepted.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and several other Muslim-majority states linked through the Belt and Road Initiative and Trump’s Board of Peace now find themselves broadly aligned in resisting further destabilisation, while maintaining channels to both Washington and Beijing.
In this evolving landscape, Pakistan’s challenge is no longer one of hedging anxiously between rival powers, but of coordinating prudently with both. Active consultation with China, careful participation in new diplomatic initiatives under Trump and alignment with key regional partners will be necessary to prevent unilateral actions, particularly in the Middle East, from undermining wider stability. The relief from strategic hedging offered by Trump’s China reset does not eliminate complexity, but it does allow Pakistan to pursue a more coherent foreign policy, grounded in coordination rather than constant anxiety over choosing sides.