In October 2011, Hillary Clinton stood in Islamabad next to Pakistan‘s foreign minister and delivered one of the most quoted warnings in the history of US-Pakistan relations. A country that keeps snakes in its backyard, she said, cannot expect them to bite only the neighbours. Eventually, she warned, those snakes turned on whoever fed them.Fourteen years on, another Republican administration seems to have forgotten that warning entirely. Since 2025, Donald Trump has hosted Pakistan’s army chief at the White House twice, praised him effusively, leaned on him to help end a war with Iran, and watched his own family’s crypto business sign a deal with Islamabad. It is a sharp reversal from his first term, when he accused Pakistan of years of lying and cut off security aid. Yet a new Pew Research Center survey, published in mid-July 2026, paints a very different picture. Just 36% of Pakistanis call the United States a reliable partner. A striking 84% say the same of China. Pakistan is now the most pro-China country in Pew’s 36-country survey. Months of White House meetings, diplomatic outreach and personal flattery have barely moved the needle.So has Trump’s Pakistan reset already failed? Or was Pakistan never really his to win?
A relationship built around one man
On June 18, 2025, Field Marshal Asim Munir became the first Pakistani army chief without a coup behind him to be hosted for a private lunch at the White House, a meeting meant to last an hour that stretched past two.Three months later, on September 25, Trump welcomed him back for a second reception, warmer by most accounts than the one given to Pakistan’s own elected prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, who had travelled with him. Trump has called Munir “my favourite field marshal,” and US Central Command chief General Michael Kurilla has described Pakistan as a “phenomenal partner” against terrorism.
In a fiery New Year’s Day tweet on January 1, 2018, Donald Trump accused Pakistan of giving the US “nothing but lies & deceit”
The warmth is personal rather than institutional. The agenda has stretched to trade, artificial intelligence, mineral exploration and, most tellingly, cryptocurrency. In January 2026, Pakistan’s finance minister signed a deal with a firm linked to World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture majority owned by Trump’s own family, with Sharif and Munir standing behind him at the signing. The agreement, aimed at exploring a Trump-linked stablecoin for cross-border payments, has produced no licence, no pilot scheme and no transaction six months on. What it has produced is rare access to Trump’s inner circle, in exchange for a venture that earned Trump personally more than $500 million from token sales in a single year.
WLFI entered Pakistan in 2025 by partnering with the Pakistan Crypto Council, marking one of its first major international collaborations.
The outreach was further accelerated when the Iran war broke out. With a 900-kilometre border with Iran and working ties with Tehran, Washington and Riyadh, Pakistan positioned itself as a rare intermediary. After the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February 2026, Islamabad publicly declared neutrality while helping broker US-Iran talks that led to a ceasefire. Yet even as it facilitated Washington’s diplomacy, Pakistan sent both its prime minister and army chief to Khamenei’s funeral and maintained close engagement with Tehran. It was a familiar balancing act: helping America without abandoning Iran, keeping one foot in both camps.
How Xi trumped Donald
The Pew findings deserve more than a passing mention, because they say something unusually specific. Pakistan was not simply the country most favourable towards China. It also recorded the highest confidence in Xi Jinping anywhere in the 36-nation survey, at 83%, a figure no other country came close to matching.
Across 36 countries, Pew’s latest survey shows China and Xi Jinping enjoy higher favourability than the US and Donald Trump in many nations
Some of the explanation is straightforward. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor’s $60 billion of infrastructure has rebuilt Pakistan’s ports, roads and power stations largely regardless of which government or general happened to be in charge in Islamabad. Beijing is inducting Pakistan into ever deeper military integration too: a roughly $5 billion submarine programme, dozens of J-10C fighters and a prospective deal that would make Pakistan the first foreign operator of China’s new J-35 stealth jet.But hardware only explains part of the number. China has never lectured Pakistan about democracy, never suspended aid over its nuclear programme, and never conditioned support on human rights, three things Washington has done to Pakistan at different points across the last four decades. Pakistan’s own military, which shapes public messaging on foreign policy far more than its civilian government does, has every institutional incentive to promote the China relationship, since it is Beijing, not Washington, supplying the submarines and jets that sustain the army’s stature at home. Add years of resentment over American drone strikes during the war on terror, and a media environment where Chinese investment is framed as partnership while American involvement remains coloured by memories of occupation and betrayal.That framing, however, papers over a relationship fraying at the edges from Beijing’s side. China’s patience with Pakistan has been wearing thin, and the warmth on display in Islamabad is not fully reciprocated. Over the past five years, at least twenty Chinese nationals have been killed in attacks in Pakistan, including a suicide bombing near Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport in October 2024.
An old lesson, freshly relearned
Pakistanis have good reason for their scepticism about Washington. Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI ran one of the Cold War’s largest covert operations together, arming Afghan fighters against Soviet occupation, and for a decade Pakistan was indispensable to American strategy. Once the Soviets withdrew in 1989, that usefulness evaporated almost overnight; within a year the first Bush administration invoked the Pressler Amendment and cut off aid over a nuclear weapons programme it had quietly tolerated while it needed Pakistan’s cooperation.
During the 1980s, the US supported Pakistan because of its role in helping Afghan resistance forces fight the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War. As a result, US administrations continued certifying Pakistan despite concerns about its nuclear program.
The pattern reversed after September 2001, when Washington needed Pakistan again and poured in billions to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even as elements of Pakistan’s own intelligence services sheltered the Afghan Taliban commanders that money was meant to defeat. That duplicity became impossible to ignore in May 2011, when US Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden a short walk from Pakistan’s premier military academy, without telling Islamabad the raid was happening; it was that same month Clinton delivered her warning about snakes. By 2018, Trump himself was accusing Pakistan of years of deception and cutting off security assistance once again.Each side drew an almost mirror-image lesson from those decades. Pakistan learned that Washington’s friendship expires the moment its usefulness does. Washington learned, or should have, that Pakistan will hedge and pursue its own interests regardless of what it is being paid to do at the time. Trump’s second-term reset shows Washington has not internalised that lesson; it has simply repeated the cycle, with China’s grip on Pakistan now visibly stronger than it was the last time round.
An American house built on Chinese foundations
None of this means Pakistan’s outreach to Washington is irrational, from Islamabad’s point of view. Pakistan is doing what it has always done well: playing multiple patrons off against one another, without ever fully cementing ties with either. China supplies the submarines, the stealth jets and the infrastructure loans that keep Pakistan’s economy afloat, even as its patience with attacks on its own citizens and stalled projects visibly thins. The United States supplies legitimacy, trade access and, for now, a friendly ear in the Oval Office.Washington may have reopened the door to Islamabad, but the house Pakistan has built still rests on Chinese foundations.
Pew’s latest survey shows Xi Jinping is trusted more than Donald Trump on world affairs across much of Asia, Africa and Europe
Pakistan, for its part, continues to accept what each superpower is willing to offer. China provides the submarines, fighter jets and infrastructure loans that its struggling economy still depends on. The United States provides diplomatic access and the occasional moment of strategic relevance when regional crises demand it. Neither relationship is built on trust. Both are built on opportunities.If Trump believed a handful of White House meetings and a family business deal could undo two decades of strategic integration with Beijing, Hillary Clinton’s warning about snakes may yet prove prophetic, not because Pakistan has changed, but because Washington keeps convincing itself that it has.
