In the summer of 1971, the world was boiling, as usual. Suddenly, a dangerous secret was revealed: the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was “undergoing treatment” in the city of Islamabad. But for what illness? For the “China illness.” It would reshape the strategic balance of the world since Mao Zedong came to power in Beijing. Through that agreement, the Soviet Union would be “isolated.” The rapprochement triggered an almost unbelievable political spectacle. That agreement came to bear the name of China.
Once again, China’s name emerges in a secret deal. While the world burns along every edge, the US president stands in a calming posture, announcing an agreement, or a draft agreement, with Iran. Pakistan is back in the picture half a century later. Weeks earlier, Indian leader Narendra Modi made a visit to Israel described as the most consequential in Asia’s history. What is happening? Asia is overturning. The “new” is not the Middle East, which Benjamin Netanyahu boasts of having shaped, but Greater Asia, toward which the world is shifting.
Not only in demographic weight, but in scientific advancement that places India and China in a shared cockpit, bound only by a long history of mutual barriers. Is it not striking that India today ranks among capitalist states - and so too, perhaps even more so, China. Have we not said the world is overturning, or rather, that it has already overturned and the matter is settled?
Kissinger had passed the age of one hundred when he made his final visit to China. There is little doubt that the US–China rapprochement was the most important political act of his career. He failed in the Middle East, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, and in Latin America, while working in secret to alter strategic balances and enable the rise of the Chinese giant.
The reality is that the strategic game in Pakistan today is a long-range, multi-impact process. To describe it as a surprise is an oversimplification and a disregard for major recent developments, including the Pakistan–Bangladesh tensions, after relations between them had remained distinctive for decades.
The “international game” has returned to Asia as a struggle over influence, resources, and historic corridors. Pakistan’s strategic importance has re-emerged, particularly as it is regarded as the possessor of the “Islamic nuclear bomb.” Are all these merely coincidences?
