Pakistan’s strategic autonomy paradox : hedging in the U.S.–China rivalry from 2013-2025

Abstract

Pakistan’s foreign policy is one of the most puzzling foreign policy scenarios in the modern world. Islamabad has been making it clear for the past many years that it does not side in the U.S.–China rivalry, but it is now sourcing 81 percent of its key arms imports, has its largest bilateral debt of US$28.79 billion, and enjoys 89.2 percent alignment on votes in the United Nations General Assembly with China. The question this study poses is simple that, has Pakistan’s hedging policy after 2013 maintained strategic autonomy or has it created strategic dependencies it sought to avoid? The current hedging literature falls short of providing a satisfactory answer to this question because it is lacking a threshold concept, an explanation of why states hedge, but not the structural level at which hedging is no longer possible. This study does so in two novel ways. The first is a structural threshold condition: the argument is that when economic, military and institutional dependency is focused at the same time across all three dimensions and there are no credible alternatives in any dimension, then hedging is structurally not possible, no matter what the elites want. The second is constrained alignment: the strategic category referring to a situation in which the state carries out a process of neutrality in the strict sense of the word, since its material conditions have been fragmented, a state with material conditions that have been fragmented has the last leverage of its non-alignment process, the neutrality process itself. The study utilizes theory-guided systematic case analysis of Pakistan based on critical realist epistemology to apply the dual framework of neoclassical realism and asymmetric dependence theory. Four findings are presented in this thesis, first the problem with CPEC is not a fiscal entrapment, it is a strategic leverage, the beneficiaries of Chinese arms purchases confirms that the arms buys have created a military-technological lock-in. Civil-military concordance has been institutionalized to foster and perpetuate the preference for China over the past several civilian governments. In the post-2020 period, Pakistan is unable to meet all three of Kuik’s hedging benchmarks at the same time. The thesis culminates in the strategic autonomy paradox, which is the fact that every tool which Pakistan employed for the purpose of achieving strategic independence created the structure of dependency which it aimed at avoiding. Pakistan is not a country with an inefficient foreign policy, this is a structural case history of how partnership is pursued asymmetrically, with no maintained exit routes.