‘Nations are born in the hearts of poets but they prosper and die at the hands of politicians’ said the most influential philosopher of Pakistan Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, as if to caution the young nation about the many challenges of statesmanship in an almost prophetic manner. A country is only as good as its statesmen, decision makers, thinkers, strategists, Generals, Spy masters and political leaders who are collectively known as the ‘intelligentsia’. The decisions made by the ‘intelligentsia’ have far reaching consequences for a country’s fate, especially if the state in question is an infant country with scarce resources, limited national power and is dearly wanted by its powerful neighbors due to its valuable geography. Pakistan was an example of such a country in the 1950s. It was a country surrounded by powerful neighbors like India, Iran, China and the Soviet Union, which they say could be seen from the Pakistani territory with a naked eye from across the Wakhan corridor.

The rule of the thumb says that while drafting your foreign policy you must start with your neighbors, but that’s not what happened in Pakistan in the 1950s. The statesmen in the newly born country were presented with a stark choice by the dynamics of the Cold War as they either had to choose between their neighboring superpower, the USSR or the United States, a superpower across the oceans which had no cultural links to Pakistan. For better or worse the decision was made in the favor of Washington over Moscow and that became the cornerstone of Pakistan’s foreign policy. The coming decades would witness events defined by the SEATO, CENTO, the U-2 Saga, the East Pakistan civil war, the Soviet-Afghan war, demise of the Soviet Union, emergence of Russia, Pakistan’s acquisition of a nuclear deterrence and the Western invasion of Afghanistan and the Middle East.

These events which unfolded over 5 decades slowly reversed the geopolitical dynamics which once held Moscow and Islamabad at an arm’s length until the early 2000s when the ‘intelligentsia’ in Islamabad decided to start a formal rapprochement with Moscow. The process was slow in the beginning as the intelligentsia in both capitals not only had to come to a mutual understanding over the events and understandable distrust of the past 5 decades but also to find shared interests for the future. The engagement remained low key and moved at a snail’s pace due to numerous conflicting interests both sides had which needed to be studied and rationalized in order to find room for cooperation. So here we are almost 17 years later, and the relationship which was cultivated in the early 2000s has started to materialize with tangible results. This evolving relationship between two important regional capitals can be traced down to five driving forces which are responsible for propelling the mutual relationship into the future.

This article is meant to explore them one by one.