On September 18-19, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk paid a two-day visit to Islamabad. During his stay, he held meetings with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar, and Chief of Army Staff Asim Munir. Mr. Alexei Overchuk was accompanied by a high-level delegation representing a number of Russian ministries, agencies, state corporations and major private companies, who held substantive talks with their Pakistani counterparts. According to Pakistan foreign office spokesperson, “Deputy Prime Minister/Foreign Minister Mohammad Ishaq Dar held delegation-level talks with the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The two sides reviewed the entire spectrum of bilateral cooperation and agreed to pursue robust dialogue and cooperation in areas of trade, industry, energy, connectivity, science, technology and education. The two sides also agreed to continue coordination on multilateral fora including at the United Nations and the Shanghai Cooperation.” The parties also discussed ways to improve economic ties and bilateral trade that touched the $1 billion mark during 2023. The visit saw the signing of the MoU on Trade, Connectivity and Other Areas of Mutual Cooperation between the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Russian Federation, and the MoU between the St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange (SPIMEX) and the Pakistan Mercantile Exchange (PMEX). More importantly, the Russian deputy prime minister said that Moscow would support Islamabad’s bid to join the BRICS bloc of developing economies; which must have rung alarm bells in the American and allies’ ears and subsequent tremors among the ultra-pro-West political and bureaucratic elite in Pakistan. It goes without saying that the coverage of the said visit was not even half as glitzy as normally arranged for an insignificant person from a tiny Arab Island or for a third tier American bureaucrat visiting Pakistan. Well the reasons are too well known to be stated in a column. Pakistan’s imprisoned former Prime Minister visited Moscow in February 2022 to meet with President Vladimir Putin when the Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed imminent. Since then, Pakistan has avoided condemnation of the Russian invasion, though it wants the resolution of the conflict through peace talks.
Pakistan rightly applied last year for membership in the BRICS alliance that has a stated aim to amplify the voice of major emerging economies to counterbalance the Western-led global order. Founded in 2006, it included Brazil, Russia, India and China, with South Africa joining in 2010. Recently, it expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. As stated in a number of pieces published earlier, the re-emergence of Russia and emergence of China as formidable international competitors especially with SCO, BRI and BRICS looking eye to eye with American led Western hegemony over global economy, security and technology domains; the survival of smaller countries and economies are seeing better prospects in benefiting from the rising options; leg pulling and backstabbing notwithstanding. Within our region, Iran appears quite ahead in forging much balanced and formidable strategic partnership with both Russia and China. On September 20, 2024, a proposal forwarded by Russia’s foreign ministry for signing of a strategic partnership agreement with Iran was approved by the president of the Russian Federation. The development came a day after Russia’s Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu visited the Iranian capital Tehran, meeting with senior Iranian officials, including President Masoud Pezeshkian. Russia and Iran had signed a 10-year deal, dubbed the Treaty on the Basis of Mutual Relations and Principles of Cooperation in 2001. Upon the conclusion of its period, the agreement was extended for two five-year terms, extending its expiration date until 2026. In January 2022, late president Ebrahim Raisi, visited Moscow and said that he had presented Putin with draft documents on strategic cooperation that would cement collaboration between the two sides for the following two decades. On September 12, 2024 Putin said that he planned to meet and hold talks with Pezeshkian on the fringes of the upcoming meeting of the BRICS group of countries, which is scheduled to be held in the western Russian city of Kazan next month.
It may also be recalled that Iran and China signed such an agreement in March 2021. Titled the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement, the deal sets the outlines of Sino-Iranian cooperation in political, cultural, security, defense, regional, and international domains for the period in question. I had opined a few weeks ago in my column titled “Puzzling Geopolitics” that ‘The worsening of the geopolitical hostility will sooner or later lead to a larger widening of positions on both the left and the right. Pakistan's internal, foreign and economic policies can best be served and balanced, keeping in view this puzzling evolution of the geopolitical environment. Any more confusion or failure to clearly pick up the correct strategic re-alignment with formidable economic and security blocs like SCO and BRICS, is prone to cost us dearly’. “Once bitten twice shy” is the axiom that ought to be deeply ingrained in Pakistani policy makers’ brains as a main historical lesson”. The extended strategic arms by Russia and China need to be grabbed rather than sinking into the quagmire, which we chose to walk on 77 Years ago.
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