---
title: "Pakistan Bet Its Diplomacy on One Man’s Access to Trump. The Midterms Are the Test"
description: "A $5m lobbying push and a field marshal’s phone calls bought Islamabad a White House lunch. The trade numbers lag behind the photo-ops."
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-27T05:47:36Z
modified: 2026-10-27T10:42:15Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/pakistan-bet-its-diplomacy-on-one-man-s-access-to-trump-the--29cf61
language: en
tags: ["trump", "iran", "war", "drones", "politics", "world", "asia"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Pakistan Bet Its Diplomacy on One Man’s Access to Trump. The Midterms Are the Test

*A $5m lobbying push and a field marshal’s phone calls bought Islamabad a White House lunch. The trade numbers lag behind the photo-ops.*

By Luis Goa · October 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/pakistan-bet-its-diplomacy-on-one-man-s-access-to-trump-the--29cf61

## In brief

- Pakistan’s US tariff rate fell from 29% to 19% in July 2025, but total US-Pakistan trade is only about 5% of US-India trade
- Army chief Asim Munir drove the pivot via roughly $5m in Washington lobbying contracts and a June 2025 White House lunch with Trump
- Pakistan brokered a US-Iran ceasefire and a 14-point Islamabad MOU in June 2026, but its 60-day window lapsed in mid-August with no renewal
- India’s own tariff deal cut its rate to 18% in February 2026, undercutting Pakistan’s 19% rate again
- Trump’s approval rating hit 30% in an October 2026 Pew poll, and analysts say a Democratic Congress after Nov 3 could favour India and NATO over Pakistan

Pakistan’s tariff rate on exports to the United States is 19%. That is down from a threatened 29%, the product of a July 2025 deal that Islamabad treats as proof its new closeness to Donald Trump pays off. The harder number is this: Pakistan’s total trade with the US is still only about 5% of India’s, according to the figures cited by Foreign Policy in its account of the relationship. A lower tariff rate on a much smaller base is not the same thing as a bigger trade relationship, and the gap between those two facts is most of this story.

The closeness is real and recent. Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s presidency both treated Islamabad as an afterthought while Washington built up India as its preferred South Asian partner. That changed over roughly 18 months, driven less by any shift in US strategy toward Pakistan than by one man: Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief, who led what Foreign Policy’s sourcing calls a yearlong campaign to convert Pakistan’s geography into Washington access. Munir was promoted to field marshal, courted Trump personally, and by late 2025 had earned the label Trump uses for him in public: his “favourite field marshal.”

**How Pakistan bought access in Washington** The sequence Pakistani and US officials describe, 2025–2026

| From | To | How |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Asim Munir *(army chief, promoted field marshal)* | $5m DC lobbying contracts *(incl. $1m+ for White House access, firm Javelin)* | hires |
| $5m DC lobbying contracts *(incl. $1m+ for White House access, firm Javelin)* | White House access *(Trump-Munir lunch, June 2025)* | secures |
| White House access *(Trump-Munir lunch, June 2025)* | Iran mediation *(April ceasefire, Islamabad MOU)* | leverages into |
| Iran mediation *(April ceasefire, Islamabad MOU)* | Tariffs, minerals, crypto *(19% tariff, $500m minerals, crypto LOI)* | converts to |
| Asim Munir *(army chief, promoted field marshal)* | Nobel nomination for Trump *(lost to Navi Pillay, Oct 9 2026)* | pushes |

Based on [Foreign Policy and Al Jazeera reporting](https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/01/trump-pakistan-iran-peace-munir-crypto-power/)

The lobbying spend behind that access was not disclosed by Islamabad’s government; Foreign Policy’s reporting puts it at roughly $5 million in contracts with Trump-aligned Washington public-relations firms, including a subcontract worth more than $1 million aimed specifically at “leadership level engagements at the White House” and routed through a firm, Javelin, staffed by former Trump Organization figures and Trump’s one-time bodyguard Keith Schiller. That bought Munir a White House lunch in June 2025 — the first for a Pakistani army chief who is not also head of state — and a direct line to a president who had, as recently as his first term, treated Pakistan as a problem rather than a partner.

## The Iran channel

The access converted into a mediating role between Washington and Tehran that is the clearest return on Pakistan’s investment, and the most fragile. After US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February 2026, Pakistan brokered a ceasefire that took effect on April 8 and hosted the highest-level US-Iran talks since 1979, as [Al Jazeera reported](https://aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/27/could-us-midterms-reshape-pakistans-relationship-with-washington). That produced a 14-point Islamabad memorandum of understanding in June, which analyst Qamar Cheema of the Sanober Institute describes as putting the US and Iran “under one roof after 47 years.” The memorandum came with a 60-day negotiating window. It lapsed in mid-August with no renewal.

Munir has kept returning to Tehran regardless: his October 20 visit was his fifth since the war began, by Al Jazeera’s count. Iranian officials, including parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, signalled no new concessions, and no breakthrough followed. Pakistan has a direct stake in the war staying settled that goes beyond diplomatic prestige — roughly 90% of its fuel imports transit the Strait of Hormuz, by Foreign Policy’s figure, and the June 2025 strikes triggered domestic unrest that left 22 dead and more than 120 injured, plus an attempted attack on the US consulate in Karachi. Islamabad also deployed about 8,000 troops, a fighter squadron and air defences to Saudi Arabia during the crisis. Grace Wermenbol of the German Marshall Fund warns that renewed US or Israeli strikes on Iran could follow the midterm elections, which would reopen a channel Pakistan has not been able to keep open on its own.

## What the warmth bought, in numbers

Set the tariff numbers side by side and the picture is less flattering than Islamabad’s framing suggests. Pakistan’s 19% rate briefly looked like a win relative to India, whose punitive tariff for continuing to buy discounted Russian oil had been pushed to 50%. That comparison collapsed on February 2, 2026, when Trump and Narendra Modi announced a deal cutting India’s rate to 18% — a point below Pakistan’s — in exchange for India halting Russian oil purchases and pledging, according to Trump’s own account, $500 billion in US purchases, as [Al Jazeera reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/2/2/trump-to-slash-us-tariffs-on-india-from-50-percent-to-18-percent) at the time. Vietnam and Bangladesh, Pakistan’s competitors in garment manufacturing, sit at 20%. The entire tariff competition between Islamabad and New Delhi is being fought over a one-to-two-point spread.

The rest of the commercial ledger is thinner still: a proposed $500 million mineral-extraction agreement, a letter of intent between Pakistan’s Crypto Council and World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, and a drone-technology agreement with a firm that, as [Al Jazeera separately reported](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/23/pakistans-new-drone-deal-is-with-trump-backed-firm-also-selling-to-india), also sells to India. None of these are figures Islamabad has independently verified with disbursement data, and none approach the scale of the $500 billion purchase commitment Trump attached to the India deal. Pakistan also nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, crediting him with brokering the May 2025 ceasefire after a four-day India-Pakistan conflict — a claim India disputes, saying the resolution came through bilateral talks alone. The [Norwegian Nobel Committee](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2026/press-release/) gave the October 9 prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay instead, for her work prosecuting war crimes and genocide; Trump called the committee’s choice a snub on Truth Social. Imran Khan, a geopolitical analyst and former director of the US Institute of Peace’s Pakistan program, put the net tangible return bluntly to Al Jazeera: Pakistan has gained “diplomatic profile and its geopolitical relevance,” not concrete economic benefit.

## The variable Islamabad cannot control

All of this rests on one man’s standing, and that standing is falling. Trump’s approval rating stood at 30% in a [Pew Research Center poll](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/10/08/with-americans-in-a-sour-mood-democratic-voters-are-more-engaged-in-midterms/) fielded September 28 to October 4, 2026, down from 37% in January and the lowest reading of his second term. The erosion is sharpest among his own 2024 voters: 95% approved in early 2025, 83% a year later, 75% in July, 67% now, with approval among Trump voters aged 19 to 34 down to 49%. Pew’s report ties the decline partly to [the Iran war’s unpopularity](https://rews.cc/a/nearly-70-of-americans-say-the-iran-war-is-not-worth-fightin-4369e2) and to inflation and gas prices the conflict helped push up — the same war Pakistan has staked its relevance on mediating.

Khan’s assessment, given to Al Jazeera, is that a Democratic-controlled Congress after the November 3 midterms would favour traditional alliance structures — NATO, India — over the personalised arrangement Munir has built. Wermenbol frames the midterms as an early signal of a longer shift that could matter more at the 2028-2029 presidential transition than this November. Cheema’s advice to Islamabad is to stop pricing its foreign policy off Trump’s polling and instead argue for Pakistan’s standing security value in the Middle East, which Khan agrees would likely survive Trump’s political decline even if the personal channel does not. That is a bet that Pakistan’s leverage is structural rather than personal. Nothing in the record so far — a lapsed memorandum, a fifth Tehran trip with no concessions, a tariff rate now behind India’s again — has tested that bet yet.

## See also

- [Islamabad Talks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamabad_Talks) — en.wikipedia.org · Background on the June 2026 US-Iran memorandum Pakistan brokered