Has Trump's Pakistan reset failed? Why Islamabad still leans towards China
Despite personal diplomatic efforts by Donald Trump to reset relations with Pakistan, the country remains heavily aligned with China. Recent polling shows that Pakistanis view China as a far more reliable partner than the United States.
Why it matters
This highlights the limitations of personal diplomacy in shifting long-standing geopolitical alliances and the enduring influence of China in South Asia.
In October 2011, Hillary Clinton stood in Islamabad next to Pakistan's foreign minister and delivered one of the most quoted warnings in the history of US-Pakistan relations. A country that keeps snakes in its backyard, she said, cannot expect them to bite only the neighbours. Eventually, she warned, those snakes turned on whoever fed them.Fourteen years on, another Republican administration seems to have forgotten that warning entirely. Since 2025, Donald Trump has hosted Pakistan's army chief at the White House twice, praised him effusively, leaned on him to help end a war with Iran, and watched his own family's crypto business sign a deal with Islamabad. It is a sharp reversal from his first term, when he accused Pakistan of years of lying and cut off security aid. Yet a new Pew Research Center survey, published in mid-July 2026, paints a very different picture.
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