Nuclear-armed Pakistan is developing long-range ballistic missile capabilities that could enable it to strike targets far beyond South Asia, making it an “emerging threat” to the United States. Thus, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer drops a veritable diplomatic bombshell that explodes in the political and military corridors of Islamabad. Finer declares that Pakistan is developing “increasingly sophisticated missile technology, from long-range ballistic missile systems to equipment that would enable the testing of significantly more powerful rocket engines.” He adds that, if it continues as it is, Islamabad before long “will have the capability to strike targets far beyond South Asia, including the United States” joining that select club of fulgurally democratic states that are already capable: Russia, China and North Korea. Which, again according to Finer, “Makes it difficult not to view Pakistan's actions as something other than an emerging threat to the United States.” Which for its part has no intention of “sitting quietly by” while Islamabad enacts a potential threat against the U.S. and “against our allies.” A potential threat that raises “well-founded doubts about what Pakistan's true intentions are.” Finer's speech, clearly artfully calculated to stir up the de facto hornet's nest, followed by a scant twenty-four hours the sanctions imposed by the U.S. State Department “pursuant to Executive Order (E.O. ) 13382, which targets proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery,” on as many as four Pakistani legal entities: three private ballistic missile procurement and equipment companies and, for the first time, also the National Development Complex (NDC), which is the Islamabad-based state agency in charge of developing and implementing Pakistan's missile program. A program that, according to the Bulletin of the American Scientists, has to its credit an arsenal of some one hundred and seventy nuclear warheads capable, like those mounted on the Shaheen missile, of striking not only arch-enemy India but also much of the Middle East. Pakistan's reactions, which, as is usually the case in the land of the pure when it comes to America give a blow to the circle and a blow to the barrel, were not long in coming. And while the Foreign Ministry was vocal in denouncing the U.S. sanctions as “double standards and discriminatory practices,” accusing the United States of using “double standards” against countries in the area and reiterating that “Pakistan's strategic capabilities are intended to defend its sovereignty and preserve peace and stability in South Asia.” Maleha Lodi, Pakistan's former ambassador to the U.S., went on television to throw water on the fire by pointing out how the U.S. has repeatedly imposed sanctions in past years and how the aforementioned sanctions have had no impact whatsoever on Pakistan's nuclear and missile program, which will go ahead anyway. According to some analysts, Washington's move was somehow dictated by New Delhi, which seeks to alter the strategic-military balance in the region. In recent years, they argue, the United States has facilitated the transfer of high-end defense technologies to India and has also collaborated on missile development, including co-production of systems under the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative and, more recently, under the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies. According to those best informed, however, the story would be a different one. And the deterioration of relations between Washington and Islamabad, which has (at least apparently) accelerated sharply since the withdrawal from Afghanistan, should be sought not in India but in China. Above all, in the increasingly persistent rumors of an agreement between Islamabad and Beijing that would allow the Chinese to use the commercial port of Gwadar in Balochistan as a military base. Rumors that have been decisively denied, curiously the last time last January 3 for no apparent reason, by the Pakistani government: which, however, they claim in and around Gwadar, is even contracting with the Chinese for the supply of a nuclear submarine and various other ammunition capable of expanding the scope of Pakistan's 'strategic program'. On the other hand, before directly imposing sanctions on Pakistan, the U.S. State Department had sanctioned, in 2023 and then last October, a Beijing research institute and several Chinese companies “for knowingly transferring restricted equipment on missile technology” to Pakistan. Given that, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Beijing has now become Islamabad's main supplier of conventional weapons, strategic platforms and sophisticated weapons with strike capabilities, as well as a partner in the joint development of next-generation military aircraft. In a nutshell, a Pakistan with ultra-long-range weapons and military bases controlled directly or indirectly by China is for several reasons of paramount geo-strategic importance to Beijing. And it is a geopolitical disaster, yet another, in the region, for the Americans would like at all costs to avoid it without, however, completely breaking off relations (however schizophrenic) with Pakistan: a longtime comrade-in-arms and itself an instrument of strategies remotely piloted by Washington that are more or less gallivanting and hardly justifiable for a Western democracy. Hence, they say, yet another schizophrenic strategy: the sanctions imposed on Pakistan and heightened by Finer's speech, balanced, however, by the curious reluctance of the Pentagon and even Pakistani generals to comment on the matter.