How Pakistan thinks

What Munir has achieved with Trump is a return to normal, ironing out the post-Abbottabad crease. The White House picture gives us insight into how Pakistan survives, occasionally thrives, and thinks

- NATIONAL INTEREST SHEKHAR GUPTA

Donald Trump in the middle, flanked by Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to his right and Field Marshal Asim Munir to his left, is the most defining geopolitical image for us in India. As one who often sees the world through the prism of old Indian film music, this might make me instinctively start humming "duniya badal gayi, meri duniya badal gayi ... " (the world has changed, see how my world has changed) from the 1950 Dilip Kumar-Nargis-Munawar Sultana classic Babul.

The reason I won't do so, or even commend it to you, isn't just because Shakeel Badayuni's poetry then took you into a world of self-pitying melancholy and heartbreak. Geopolitics, particularly when it comes to powers as consequential as India and the United States, are more complex than the usual Bollywood love triangle. There are many factors at play. One, the US relationship with Pakistan is older and formally tighter than with India. While the US might have cooled off on Pakistan after finding and killing Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, the organic relationship remained.

The US never dropped Pakistan from the list of Major Non-Nato allies. India never got on to it, nor would it ever be an applicant for it.

While the US under any President will value India for its size, stature, growth, stability and rising comprehensive national power (CNP), it knows India will never be what the sole superpower always needs: A client state. Pakistan has been one since 1954, when it signed on to US-led Seato (Southeast Asia Treaty Organization). To that extent, what Munir has achieved with Mr Trump is a return to that normal, ironing out the post-Abbottabad crease. That's why that "duniya badal gayi ... " metaphor doesn't apply.