Russia, China, and the world Pakistan keeps misreading

The world in 2024, read from Tomsk

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Dr. Muhammad Ali Ehsan from Russia — a Pakistani academic doing his post-doctorate at Tomsk State University, having previously been at the University of Kazan, whose PhD examined the institutionalisation of civilian control of the military. Muzamil’s framing question is simple and large: how does the guest see the world right now?

Dr. Ehsan’s answer sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. The world, he says, is “more divided than being connected in a way that they could take all the challenges that it is facing as common challenges.” The reason is the rise of new poles. China has bided its time and used the slack to build — including, crucially, a military buildup he expects to be largely complete by 2030, aircraft carriers included. Russia, written off after the Soviet collapse, has been turned around across two decades of Putin’s tenure and now once again insists on having a say. America, accustomed to the unipolar moment, is unused to being told no, and the resulting friction is what the rest of the conversation lives inside.

Why Russia did not stay down

Muzamil pushes Dr. Ehsan on the Russian resurgence. Why now, and why this way? Dr. Ehsan’s account is structural rather than personal. Russia always had the oil and gas; what it lacked was management. Foreign reserves rose, debt fell, and the proof of the turnaround came not in a speech but in Syria, where Russia intervened to sustain a client regime that the United States was on the verge of toppling.

What sealed the Russian posture was NATO expansion. “West has come forward and just come on their doorsteps,” Dr. Ehsan says, “and that is why they agree with Putin in what he is doing and how he is doing.” Western sanctions, he argues, have not produced the unemployment the West expected; they have produced employment inside an enlarged Russian military industry, leaning on Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean support.

His read on Ukraine is unsentimental. “I don’t think Russia has any plans of moving out or threatening Europe as Europe feels and keeps saying. That is something I don’t agree with.” Russia, in his telling, achieved a limited objective and is now in a strong position to dictate the shape of any settlement.

A first American president who did not start a war

Later in the discussion, Muzamil and Dr. Ehsan turn to the American election. Dr. Ehsan offers a line about Trump that is worth quoting in full: “President Trump — his qualities, we know. But as a one-term president, the world recognises this — he is the first American president since the end of the eighties who did not start a new war.”

The observation is not a defence of Trump’s broader politics; Dr. Ehsan is clear-eyed about Trump’s alignment with Israel and the contradictions that carries. The point is narrower and load-bearing for the rest of the analysis: if a second Trump term continues the instinct to internalise rather than externalise, the global system gets a window of breathing space. That window matters more to Pakistan than the personality of the man who creates it.

Imran Khan, the Moscow visit, and the policy flip

Muzamil presses on a Pakistani sore point: the Imran Khan visit to Moscow that coincided with the start of the Ukraine war, and the apparent policy flip that followed. Was the Russia opening a personal initiative or an institutional one? Dr. Ehsan refuses both extremes. “A prime minister does not visit a great power on his own. He has to be on board with the establishment. That conversation had a background. It was more institutional, more national.”

Where Dr. Ehsan does agree with Muzamil is on the diagnosis of Pakistan’s current posture. The country’s binding constraint is energy — electricity and gas — and the obvious supply lines run through Iran and through Russia. The Iran pipeline sits stranded at the border under the shadow of secondary sanctions. The Russian opening, where a deputy prime minister was visiting Pakistan around the time of recording, is alive but moving at a pace that does not match the size of the problem.

Muzamil’s frustration is direct. Pakistan, he says, has managed to alienate Russia, alienate China, antagonise Afghanistan, point a finger at Iran, and still expect the Americans to come in and solve its problems. “How does that make a lot of sense?”

Afghanistan, the Russo-Japanese parallel, and a friendly neighbour misplayed

Dr. Ehsan answers with history. He recounts the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05, in which a rising Russia, having built the Trans-Siberian railway and reached the Pacific at Vladivostok, was checked by a British-backed Japan that took advantage of Russia’s eastern flank. The analogy he draws is uncomfortable for Islamabad. Pakistan, he says, has its own friendly neighbour with a shared border — Afghanistan under the Taliban — and is repeating the mistake of letting an external power weaponise that neighbour against it.

In the Russo-Japanese case, an American president — Theodore Roosevelt — eventually intervened to end the war. In Pakistan’s case with Afghanistan, Dr. Ehsan is more bleak. “Instead of America intervening to manage this as a problem that is there, I think it wants us to be embroiled in it.” His broader read: the great powers have an interest in Pakistan staying mired in low-grade conflict rather than reaching the stage where it becomes a self-sustaining, self-respecting economy.

Muzamil sharpens the question further. Why are Chinese firms inside Afghanistan negotiating mining and infrastructure contracts while Pakistani businessmen are nowhere to be seen, despite the cultural, religious, and linguistic adjacency? Dr. Ehsan’s answer is that Pakistan keeps reading Afghanistan through a paranoid security lens, with the result that the political engagement that should have followed the Taliban return has been crowded out by the daily news cycle of border incidents and casualties.

BRICS, India, and the cost of one step forward

Muzamil moves the conversation to BRICS, anchored by the summit underway in Kazan as they record, and Pakistan’s reported interest in joining. Dr. Ehsan’s response is the bluntest moment in the conversation. Pakistan, he points out, already shares a platform with India at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the experience has not been a happy one. “The animosity is quite evident — in the images we see, the statements that come out, and the lack of progress that should be there when you have joined a big organisation.”

BRICS, he argues, would be worse, not better. India is a dominant member and a close defence and strategic partner of Russia. Pakistan, by contrast, is still trying to get close to Russia. “If Pakistan takes one step forward in BRICS, when India starts flexing its diplomatic muscle, we have to take two steps back, because issues are created.” His prescription is not to abandon the ambition but to sequence it: internal political stability first, repaired relationships with neighbours second, and only then meaningful externalisation.

The Central Asia opportunity Pakistanis cannot see

Muzamil makes a case that anchors much of the second half of the conversation. The historical and cultural centre of gravity for the territory now called Pakistan, he argues, is not to its east but to its north and northwest — Afghanistan, Central Asia, and beyond. The economies there are commodity-rich and landlocked. Pakistan, with two coasts and warm-water ports, is the obvious gateway.

Dr. Ehsan, drawing on his time in Kazan and Tomsk meeting students from the former Soviet republics, agrees with the prize but is sober about the obstacles. Language is the first one — Russian is non-negotiable for serious engagement, and Pakistan’s academic system is not producing it at any scale. The second is the same security knot that sits in Afghanistan: connectivity through Afghan territory is a precondition for the rest.

And the third is the structural objection. “Imagine if all this connectivity happens — pipelines from there, four-lane roads going through, railway lines all the way up to Russia. Would we be looking towards the US? Would we be looking towards Europe?” The powers that benefit from Pakistan facing west have an interest in ensuring that the eastern and northern routes do not open. That is not a conspiracy theory; it is, in his telling, how great-power competition works.

The American decline, measured in credibility

Muzamil lays out a long thesis on American stress — $35 trillion of debt, rising inequality, an over-extended military, an industrial base hollowed out by financialisation, and an uncomfortable resemblance to the late-Soviet over-militarised economy. Dr. Ehsan agrees with the trajectory while being careful about the timeline.

His framing is grounded in the history of great powers. “Great powers have always had their good times and then they have declined and perished. Americans — me and you — we cannot put a mark, in the next ten years, twenty years. I cannot do that. But I will surely say it is on its way.” He notes the unsustainability of fighting multiple theatres at once: Ukraine, Gaza, and a potential Taiwan crisis would together exceed what even American resources can absorb. The $300 million per day figure he cites for one war during the Afghanistan campaign sharpens the point.

But the deeper argument is moral, not fiscal. “The most necessary thing as a global hegemon is credibility. Moral credibility has been very eroded for the US.” In the information age, with every image of Gaza available to every African and Latin American audience in real time, the United States has lost the standing of a great power that promotes justice and fairness. Once that standing slips, alliances slip, and the snowball begins.

Russia and China: partners of convenience, not eternity

Muzamil asks the hardest strategic question of the conversation. Russia and China have declared their partnership “unlimited,” but how durable is the alignment, and could a Trump opening to Russia drive a wedge?

Dr. Ehsan’s analysis pulls from the Cold War. He calls Henry Kissinger “the greatest diplomat that the twentieth century produced,” crediting him with three moves: détente with the Soviet Union, the opening to China that pulled it back into the international order, and the Middle East order that held for roughly three decades. The current Russia–China relationship, he argues, is held together by a common adversary. “The biggest common interest is the enmity towards the US.”

He is unwilling to call it permanent. “I would be honest — I don’t think you can say it is a permanent relationship that is binding them together as two powers which will stay like this.” A Trump-led opening to Moscow could, in principle, create space between them. But not anytime soon, and not while Taiwan and Ukraine remain unresolved. Both of those flashpoints sit inside the respective spheres of influence the two powers want America out of.

Trump’s second term as a window, not a fix

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil offers his own reading of Trump as a manifestation of internal American economic stress — a figure backed by industrial capital against finance capital, instinctively hostile to forever wars, willing to threaten NATO funding in a way previous presidents would not. He asks Dr. Ehsan whether a second Trump term would mean enough of an American retreat to give the rest of the world a moment to rearrange itself.

Dr. Ehsan largely agrees. Trump’s first-term doctrine of “America first” played well domestically precisely because it resonated with a public tired of building schools in Afghanistan. He expects the instinct to repeat. He notes the constraint — the American establishment of Pentagon, CIA, Senate, and Congress will push back regardless of who occupies the White House — but he expects Trump to walk back from global commitments more than he expands them.

The implication for Pakistan, left implicit but unmistakable in the way Muzamil and Dr. Ehsan close the conversation, is that the window will not stay open forever. The right move is to use it: to settle the neighbourhood, to open the Russian and Central Asian front, to stop reading every decision through the lens of what Washington will tolerate, and to accept that in an anarchic system the powers that mature are the ones that protect their flanks first and externalise second.