Pakistan came to international relations as a formal academic subject relatively early in its own history. Karachi University introduced it first, in 1958, though for roughly the next decade it survived only as a minor offshoot tucked inside the history department rather than a subject in its own right. It eventually grew into a proper, independent department, and the model spread: Quaid-e-Azam University, Punjab University, Sindh University, Peshawar University, and the University of Balochistan all went on to establish their own departments of international relations.
What those departments actually teach comes down to a fairly consistent set of building blocks – the underlying factors that shape how any given state relates to the rest of the world. Some of these factors are close to permanent and largely outside human control; others bend more readily to human decision-making and shift as circumstances change. Geography doesn’t move. Government systems do. Between those two extremes sits a whole set of forces – population, ethnicity and nationality, science and technology, culture and ideology, religion – that together determine how a state behaves abroad. Of all of them, one tends to come first, both historically and in terms of sheer consequence: natural resources.
Not Every State Gets the Same Hand
Nature hands out resources unevenly. Minerals, mined wealth, uranium, and other underground riches are distributed across the world in wildly different quantities from one country to the next, and what a state can actually do with what it has – or fails to do – shapes its relationships with everyone around it. A state that leaves its own natural wealth underused, or lets its exploitation slip beyond its own control, effectively invites other states to step in and take advantage of the opening. That single dynamic, more than almost anything else, is what built both the older European colonial system and what came to be called Soviet “social imperialism” – different ideologies pursuing the same basic strategy of capturing another country’s resource wealth for themselves.
Two Centuries of Extraction
Over roughly the past two centuries, the major colonial powers – Britain and France chief among them, alongside Belgium, Spain, and eventually the United States – turned resource-rich but militarily weaker countries into dependent colonies and extracted enormous wealth from them in the process. Only in more recent decades have many of these countries begun to see any real benefit from their own resources, after generations in which that benefit flowed almost entirely outward.
Oil is the most vivid version of this pattern. The natural wealth beneath Arab lands turned Britain, France, the United States, and the Netherlands into dependents of a kind – hungry for a resource they didn’t control and had to secure through influence, alliance, or outright installed governments loyal to outside interests. The phrase “oil diplomacy” captures exactly this dynamic: powerful states cultivating pliant rulers in resource-rich but militarily weaker countries to keep the resource flowing on favorable terms. The British had their own blunt phrase for this kind of relationship when it came to India – calling it the “golden bird,” a source of wealth to be plucked rather than a partner to be dealt with as an equal.
That history is why natural resources sit at the root of so much else in international relations. Colonialism, the newer forms colonial influence took after formal empires dissolved, the shape of individual countries’ foreign policies, and the entire practice of diplomacy as it’s actually conducted between resource-rich and resource-hungry states all trace back, in large part, to this same basic fact: nature did not distribute its wealth evenly, and states have spent centuries competing over the difference.
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