Islamabad:
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will hold a bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trump in Washington on Thursday, in what officials describe as part of a renewed impulse to restore the ties of Pakistan-United States.
According to diplomatic sources, the prime minister will briefly travel to Washington from New York, where he attends the UN session of the UN General Assembly, for the meeting with President Trump.
This will be the first meeting between the president of the United States and the Pakistani prime minister at the White House since July 2019, when then Prime Minister Imran Khan traveled to Washington and met with President Trump.
The successor of Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, had completely ignored Pakistan and had never talked to any of the prime ministers by phone, much less invite them to the White House.
However, since President Trump assumed the position in January, there has been a dramatic and unexpected change in the Pakistan-United States relationship.
The next Trump-Shehbaz meeting is in the context of a remarkable defrosting in relations between Islamabad and Washington. In June of this year, Trump celebrated a rare individual meeting with the head of the Army staff, the general also, at the White House, a sign that the icy approach of the Biden administration had given way to the most transactional but open commitment style of Trump with Pakistan.
Diplomatic observers see the Shehbaz-Trump group as a continuation of that restart. “The optics of the Army Chief Meeting in June was significant. This meeting institutionalizes that opening,” said a senior Paquistani official familiar with the process to Express PAkGazette.
The Trump administration has also been recalibrating its ties with India, with Washington increasingly frustrated by the New Delhi commercial barriers and Moscow’s inclination following the Ukraine War.
Recent strains in ties between the United States and India have opened a window of opportunity for Pakistan to projected as a useful partner, particularly in regional security and counterterrorism.
Officials in Islamabad believe that the meeting will focus bilateral ties, regional and international problems, including Afghanistan’s opportunities, cooperation against terrorism and commercial opportunities.
Analysts warn, however, that although Trump’s White House seems interested in involving Islamabad, the restart is still tentative.
The prime minister will return to New York on the same day to continue his commitments to the Unga.
