The Belt and Road Initiative and Pakistan’s Strategic Autonomy in the Indo-Pacific

Abstract

This study examines how the Belt and Road Initiative and, in particular, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), impacts Pakistan's strategic autonomy amid U.S.-China rivalry in the Indo-Pacific. Historically, Pakistan positioned itself at a distance in relations between the U.S. and China. However, Pakistan‘s diplomatic, economic, and security priorities have been reshaped, fundamentally, by the recent tendencies of great imbalance competition. The work is based on qualitative case study and draws on the strategic autonomy and strategic hedging, CPEC theory, and the literature on Pakistan‘s autonomy and CPEC adherence to elaborate how CPEC adherence has both empowered and constrained Pakistan‘s foreign policy. While the Belt and Road Initiatives or BRI offers Pakistan unprecedented opportunities for economic development, it also has, and continues to, with serious consequence, contract Islamabad‘s strategic options. This generates the hybrid middle-range power posture of selective alignment and strategic passivity used as the overt foreign policy. The study explains how Pakistan‘s level of autonomy in the Indo-Pacific is structurally constrained by geopolitical restructuring, economic dependency relations, and domestic factors.