Trump has turned to Pakistan to bail himself out of the self-made Iran war: Brahma Chellaney

The divergent nature of US policy toward Iran and Pakistan defies logic, said geostrategist Brahma Chellaney. Both are Islamic republics, authoritarian in structure, have had links to transnational terrorist networks, and both have long had fraught relationships with Washington, but only one is sanctioned, threatened, and even denied civilian nuclear rights, he said. The other is repeatedly excused even as it built nuclear weapons and fostered terrorist proxies, he said.

According to Chellaney, who wrote in a column for The Hill, Washington treats one as an unacceptable nuclear risk while overlooking the other’s expanding nuclear arsenal.

He said while in the Western political discourse ‘Islamic Republic’ has become the shorthand for Iran, it is actually Pakistan who adopted the title in 1956 – two decades before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

“The label, in other words, does not explain Washington’s choices. It only exposes its inconsistency,” said Chellaney. 

He argued that Washington treated Tehran’s nuclear ambitions as an existential threat for decades but has largely ignored Pakistan’s ongoing nuclear and missile buildup. Trump has asked Iran to not only agree to not develop nuclear weapons but also to abandon uranium enrichment. 

“Now contrast this with Pakistan, the only country to have developed nuclear weapons while cultivating terrorist proxies as instruments of state policy,” said Chellaney. But the US intelligence community has, for the first time, placed Pakistan alongside China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran as a missile and nuclear threat to the American homeland. 

In other words, Washington officially recognizes Pakistan as a strategic nuclear risk while continuing to treat it as one of its 19 “major non-NATO allies”, he said, adding that while Iran and Pakistan are both undemocratic, Washington treats their internal politics very differently. 

Chellaney said despite Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir’s constitutional coup last year, Trump has repeatedly praised him. And in the four months since Munir’s power grab, Trump attacked Iran on February 28.