ISLAMABAD (The Thursday Times) — Pakistan is already part of the institutions China and Russia are building across Eurasia, while the United States has come to the region only to trade, Indian defence analyst Pravin Sawhney told the Margalla Dialogue in Islamabad on Tuesday.
“America is not invested in this area,” Sawhney said in a 12-minute address to the conference, organised by the Islamabad Policy Research Institute around the theme of a global order in transition. “This is where the Global South is, and this is where, by the vision of the new world order, we can prosper, by the institutions which have been created by Russia and China.”
A once-in-a-century change
Sawhney described five shifts that together amount to what he called a “once in a century change”. In his assessment, the world became multipolar in 2013. It now has three major powers, the United States, China and Russia, which alone can exercise strategic autonomy and which create institutions. Middle powers, he said, “have to find their national interest within the institutions created by the major powers”.
The third shift, he said, was the vision for a new world order that China and Russia set out in 2013, centred on development and peace and built on sovereign equality, indivisible security and a central role for the United Nations, which he said had drawn in most of the Global South. The fourth is the US-China contest in artificial intelligence, for which President Donald Trump created the Pax Silica grouping, now 25 members strong, to make America self-sufficient in critical technologies. The fifth is that the rise of China has brought global geopolitics to this region.
Who builds, and who trades
Sawhney called the region “central Eurasia”: South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, parts of Russia and China, and the western Indian Ocean with its two prominent chokepoints. All three major powers are engaged there, he said, but only two are creating institutions.
Russia has put the security of its “near abroad” first, he said, building bodies such as the CIS, the CSTO and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and President Vladimir Putin announced a Eurasian security architecture in 2024. China first saw the region as a trade hub, launching the Belt and Road in Kazakhstan in 2013. Sawhney said the SCO summit in Tianjin on September 1, 2025 was “a major breakthrough”, with President Xi Jinping announcing a Global Governance Initiative, a 10-year SCO development plan and an SCO bank.
Washington, by contrast, “is only doing trade here”, he said. He pointed to the White House summit with the five Central Asian republics, which are rich in minerals and rare earths, and to the US-brokered peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia, which he said opened a “middle corridor” from Central Asia across the Caspian to Türkiye and Europe.
The Makkah alliance
Sawhney said the Makkah Defence Alliance of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, announced in Istanbul on August 31, rests on the same ideas of collective security and has “the support of two major powers” behind it. He credited Field Marshal Asim Munir with bringing Türkiye on board during a visit on June 13 and 14, and tied the pact to talks with Moscow and Beijing and to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s state visit to Pakistan in June.
“Pakistan already is invested,” he said, listing its membership of the SCO, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and the Makkah alliance. “It’s a matter of time it will be part of the Eurasian security architecture and the greater Eurasian partnership.”
Sawhney made a similar case in April, when he argued that Pakistan could help shape a new world order.
