Is the US pushing countries towards China?

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• 00:10

  NPR. This is The Indicator from Planet Money.

• 00:13

  I'm Darian Woods.

• 00:14

  And I'm Adrian Ma.

• 00:16

  Have you ever had two friends who fell out with each other and then you're left kind of asked to pick sides?

• 00:22

  Well, this is the position a lot of countries find themselves in with the U.S. and China right now.

• 00:29

  Pakistan happens to be one of these countries stuck in the middle.

• 00:31

  It's got China to its north, but historically it's also had close ties with the U.S.

• 00:36

  And to make this situation even trickier for Pakistan, it's got other relationships to manage.

• 00:42

  It's got Iran and Afghanistan to its west,

• 00:45

  India to its east, and that one's looking particularly dicey right now.

• 00:52

  But on today's show, we're focusing on Pakistan's ties with the US and China.

• 00:57

  How is it juggling these two important economic relationships?

• 01:01

  We ask Pakistan's Minister of Finance whether US aid cuts and tariffs could push America's friends into the arms of China.

• 01:24

  To learn more about how bystanders are being affected by the financial tug-of-war between the U.S. and China,

• 01:31

  we spoke to Pakistan's Minister of Finance, Mohammad Aurangzeb.

• 01:35

  Mohammad's actually pretty new to politics.

• 01:38

  He was a bank executive working all over the world and took the plunge into politics last year.

• 01:44

  I was running the largest bank in the country, which is a systemically important bank.

• 01:49

  So in some sense, you're already intertwined with the fortunes of the country.

• 01:54

  And the fortunes of the country were not looking great a year ago.

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