Via Foreign Policy, an article on Pakistan’s geoeconomic dreams/delusions:

In recent weeks, senior Pakistani officials, including the country’s powerful army chief, have signaled or outright said that, from now on, their country’s foreign policy will emphasize geoeconomics. This is a welcome rhetorical shift. Decades of bartering Pakistan’s geostrategic value—including as a “front-line state” in the Cold War and war on terror—has contributed to the loss of countless lives, stifled human development, and turned Pakistan into a heavily indebted security state.

Geoeconomics would flip that script. Definitions of the term vary, but Pakistani officialdom uses it to connote something akin to an end to war. In a public address last month, Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa offered a “geo-economic vision” that centers regional integration and the collective pursuit of sustainable development in an environment of peace and stability. The upside for one of the world’s poorest and least integrated regions would undoubtedly be tremendous.

But good intentions aside, Pakistan’s pivot toward geoeconomics is likely to hit a brick wall of reality—and fast.

For starters, the country cannot easily escape geopolitics. And the regional outlook portends conflict, not connectivity. Neighboring Afghanistan could see civil war as the United States departs. And despite the restoration of a cease-fire with India along the Line of Control, there are no signs that either side will make the kinds of concessions on the Kashmir dispute that would be essential for lasting normalization.

Then there’s the U.S.-Chinese cold war, which shows no sign of abating in the Biden er—as the war of words between U.S. and Chinese delegations at last month’s bilateral talks in Alaska shows. Pakistani officials say they want no part in it, but they may get dragged in. Islamabad depends on Beijing for essential military hardware to deter New Delhi as Washington arms New Delhi to counterbalance Beijing. Although the United States has provided Pakistan with more than $3 billion in arms since 9/11, those transfers have dropped significantly since 2016, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Meanwhile, Washington seems to have not only lost interest in Pakistan but also sees the country as firmly in China’s sway. A U.S. Institute of Peace study group report released last year, for example, argued that the “China-Pakistan axis is strengthening.” Among its policy options, it included “demanding suspension of Chinese arms transfers to Pakistan” and “matching Chinese diplomatic support for Pakistan with a U.S. tilt toward India.”

Balancing all this would be complicated enough, but also enacting the tough policy reforms key to making geoeconomics work in its favor seems beyond Pakistan’s grasp. The case of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) illustrates why.

In 2015, Beijing and Islamabad launched the Belt and Road-linked CPEC, billed as a connectivity initiative linking China’s western landlocked region of Xinjiang with Pakistan’s Arabian Sea ports. It was, in other words, a grand geoeconomic project.

Through the CPEC, Pakistan was able to fast-track $19 billion in electric power, road, and other infrastructure projects. But Pakistan bled foreign exchange as imports of machinery and material surged and exports lagged. Ultimately, poor planning by the then-Nawaz Sharif-led government (motivated in part by electoral pressures) drove Pakistan back into the arms of the International Monetary Fund.

Six years since its launch, CPEC is nowhere close to a functional economic corridor.

It may never become one. Today, the Gwadar port sits idle. And overland Sino-Pakistan trade remains very modest despite an increase before the pandemic. An economist with the previous Pakistan Muslim League (N) government in Islamabad projected that Pakistan would earn $6 to 8 billion in tolls and other revenue annually through CPEC by 2020. Those numbers were and remain fantasy.