Reset or reuse: Is Munir just a strategic pawn for Trump to get PM Modi's attention?

When Pakistan Army chief Asim Munir smiled for cameras alongside senior American generals in Florida, it symbolised to many Pakistanis renewed warmth in the US-Pakistan ties. It was the second time in two months that Munir was welcomed deep into the US establishment. But experts are still wondering if it is a reset of the bilateral ties or just another reuse for some other strategic purpose.

Is US President Donald Trump using a willing Pakistani general, Munir, as a pawn to get Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attention?

The question gains significance against the backdrop of, what watchers of India-US ties call, a “personal” decision of Trump to derail the Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) that was almost agreed upon in five rounds of talks between the negotiators of the two countries.

Munir’s earlier two-hour private lunch with Donald Trump in Washington, held just weeks after India and Pakistan engaged in their most violent military clash in decades, was hailed in Islamabad as a diplomatic coup. Yet, the real beneficiary of this warmth might not be Pakistan at all, but Trump himself, who appeared to be using Munir as a tool to exert pressure on India.

‘Pakistan card’ in Trump’s South Asia strategy

Trump’s sudden warmth toward Pakistan contrasted sharply with his earlier accusations that the country had offered the United States “nothing but lies and deceit”. Yet by mid-2025, his administration’s ties with Islamabad were flourishing, while India — once a personal favourite under PM Modi’s leadership — was bristling at punitive tariffs and public snubs.

Husain Haqqani at the Hudson Institute argued that this was no accident. Rather, it reflected a tactical decision to “play the Pakistan card to try and gain more advantage with India, annoy the Indians, and see if this will make them talk to him and accept his term”, the Financial Times reported.

The logic was simple: bolster Pakistan’s profile just enough to make India feel the need to re-engage with Washington on Trump’s terms. Pakistan, eager to mend fences with the unpredictable president, poured on the flattery and delivered quick wins — from counterterrorism cooperation to business deals involving oil, minerals and even cryptocurrency.

However, the strategic logic behind Trump’s embrace was transactional as it was less about rewarding Pakistan than about using it as a lever to irritate India and to pressure Modi to re-engage with him on Trump’s terms.

An ideological hardliner in a transactional game

The timing of Munir’s US outreach was striking given his recent rhetoric at home. Just days before the Pahalgam attack, he had called Kashmir Pakistan’s “jugular vein” in a speech to overseas Pakistanis — a phrase deeply embedded in Pakistan’s nationalist lexicon and widely seen in India as inflammatory.

His speeches also revived the “two-nation theory” underpinning Pakistan’s founding, casting the India–Pakistan conflict as a religious struggle between Hindus and Muslims. One of the consequences, as India has officially put out, was the massacre of tourists in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam by terrorists, who chose their targets after ascertaining their religious identities.

Munir’s offer to act as a back channel between Washington and adversaries like Iran and China echoed Pakistan’s role in the 1970s, when it helped Richard Nixon open diplomatic relations with Beijing. This willingness to play multiple sides — keeping ties with China, Iran, Gulf states, Russia and now the US — was praised by Marvin Weinbaum of the Middle East Institute as a form of strategic flexibility.

However, in Trump’s hands, such flexibility could be turned into a bargaining chip aimed squarely at India. The idea was not necessarily to deepen ties with Pakistan for their own sake, but to show New Delhi that Washington had other avenues for influence in the region.

Economic promises and uncertain realities

Trump’s promises to help develop Pakistan’s “massive oil reserves” and encourage investment in its minerals and crypto sector were greeted with enthusiasm in Islamabad, which is grappling with a $7bn IMF bailout and heavy dependence on debt rollovers from China and Gulf allies.

Yet much of Pakistan’s resource wealth remains unproven or located in insurgency-hit areas. However, these promises could easily be rescinded if Pakistan failed to deliver results, leaving the country exposed to the whims of Washington’s political cycle.

Volatility of the game

The Financial Times report argues that Trump needs success stories he can tout on the world stage, and Pakistan is happy to supply them. The capture of a high-value ISIS-K operative in March was presented as proof of Islamabad’s reliability.

In the aftermath of the May conflict with India, Pakistan credited Trump for brokering the ceasefire — even nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Munir personally praised Trump’s “strategic leadership” as having prevented “many wars in the world.

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi cautioned that Islamabad needed to protect both its interests and its dignity, citing Trump’s unpredictability and readiness to publicly rebuke even former allies like Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Abbasi told Financial Times that there is a danger that if Trump decided to patch things up with Prime Minister Modi, he might turn on Pakistan to curry favour with India. This dynamic made Pakistan’s current position precarious which is basking in temporary US favour, but vulnerable to the same transactional calculus that brought it there in the first place.

A pawn in a larger chessboard

The cumulative picture painted by these developments is that Munir’s Washington charm offensive may have more to do with Trump’s strategic theatre than with any long-term realignment. Trump appears to be using Pakistan to signal displeasure with India, extract concessions and reassert his centrality in South Asian diplomacy.

In this framing, Munir’s visible smiles, plaques and ceremonial handshakes are not the markers of an equal partnership but the optics of a role assigned to him in a much larger negotiation — one in which the final audience may be sitting in New Delhi, not Islamabad.

Smiles in the service of strategy

To outside observers, Munir’s confident demeanour during his US visits might suggest that Pakistan had secured a major diplomatic victory. Yet the pattern of Trump’s engagement — heavy on symbolic gestures, transactional in substance and openly framed by experts as a tactic to pressure India — suggests a different interpretation.

In the eyes of critics, Munir risks becoming what, as the Financial Times report suggests, indirectly implies: a smiling but ultimately naive pawn in Trump’s geopolitical chess game, useful not for his own sake but for the leverage he provides in regaining India’s attention.

If Trump’s objective is truly to bring PM Modi back to the table on his terms, then Pakistan’s moment in the spotlight may prove fleeting. And when that moment passes, the same volatile forces that propelled Munir into Washington’s embrace could just as easily cast him aside.

The intertwined narratives of Trump’s transactional diplomacy and Munir’s ideological posturing point toward a highly unstable fuse. A Trump-Modi rapprochement is bound to cause a short-circuit on Pakistan’s current status as a favoured power partner.