As US President Donald Trump took a victory lap in front of world leaders following the Gaza ceasefire on Monday, he gave a shout-out to Pakistan’s top soldier, calling him his “favorite field marshal.”
He then relinquished the podium to allow Pakistan’s civilian leader, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, to deliver to the cameras his own praise of Trump’s ceasefire efforts. Sharif announced that same day he intended to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize – again.
A year ago, such scenes would have been unthinkable.Washington had long kept Pakistan at arm’s length, over its chronic political instability and alleged ties to US-sanctioned Islamist terror groups. The fact it’s one of China’s closest allies didn’t help either.
Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden never even called either of the two Pakistani prime ministers who served during his term. After the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, he enraged neighboring Pakistan by calling it “one of the most dangerous nations in the world.”
But Trump 2.0 has shaken the mixer of US diplomacy, upending friendships and bringing foes into the fold of his presidency – if they have something to offer.
And so far, Pakistan has delivered a masterclass in how to respond.
Its leaders have been regular guests at the White House and have escaped the tongue-lashings dished out to other heads of state; its military is awaiting a new shipment of US-made Raytheon missiles; and its diplomats have negotiated tariffs a good deal smaller than those imposed on neighbor and arch-rival India.
It seems to have accomplished this through a promise of preferential access to critical rare earths not controlled by China and judicious flattery of Trump.
So far Pakistan’s diplomatic game is raising cheers back home. It’s also enraging India, which has been left out in the cold and hit with huge tariffs for its continued purchases of cheap Russian oil.
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The field marshal
In the thick of warming ties, analysts say, is Field Marshal Asim Munir, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful military, which has long played an outsize role in the country’s often tumultuous politics.
The 57-year-old son of a schoolteacher, Munir ran Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency before becoming top general in 2022. Insiders say he is a man of deliberate mystery, a dark horse who meticulously controls his public persona.But in May he was thrust into the limelight when Pakistan fought a four-day conflict with India, in which dozens of soldiers and civilians were killed, and international alarm grew that the conflagration could spill into a fully fledged war between the nuclear-armed neighbors.It wasn’t long before Trump got involved, calling on both sides to stop fighting. When they did, he claimed the credit. That was a claim quickly and publicly endorsed by Pakistan, which later nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize – the first country to do so during his second term.
India, meanwhile, repeated furious denials that the US president had played any role in silencing the guns, insisting the matter was between it and Pakistan only.
Pakistan has maintained that it downed seven Indian Air Force jets during the conflict in May, a number repeated multiple times in public by Trump. India has never confirmed the number and had initially vociferously denied any of its jets were downed.
Days later, Munir – recently promoted to field marshal over his helming of the crisis – traveled to Washington. There, he met Trump for lunch, in the first visit by a Pakistani army chief to the US president at the White House unaccompanied by Pakistani civilian officials.
Trump “likes winners,” Shuja Nawaz, a DC-based author and political and strategic analyst, told CNN.
“He’s always said that… he doesn’t like losers. And so he obviously saw in Field Marshal Asim Munir a winner who is willing to make quick decisions… they must have been on the same page when Trump talked to him about a ceasefire.”
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