Shehbaz and Munir Meet Trump at the White House as Pakistan Signs Drone MoU With Trump-Linked Firm

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir met President Donald Trump at the White House on September 25, a meeting that came days after Pakistan's Ministry of Defence signed a memorandum of understanding with Powerus, a US drone startup whose investors include two of Trump's sons.

The White House meeting

Shehbaz and Munir's meeting with Trump ran over an hour, with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio also in the room. The Pakistani side framed the discussion around regional security and counterterrorism cooperation: Shehbaz thanked Trump for publicly endorsing Pakistan's counterterrorism role and for the tariff agreement the two countries had recently signed, and pressed for deeper security and intelligence cooperation. The delegation travelled to Washington from New York, where Shehbaz had been attending the UN General Assembly session, and the meeting was the latest marker in a relationship that began warming when Trump hosted Munir for lunch at the White House in June.

The Powerus deal

The diplomatic meeting followed a defence-sector deal struck earlier in September. A delegation from Powerus, a year-old US drone company, was received by Munir at military headquarters, and the company then announced it had secured a "limited procurement order" from Pakistan's Ministry of Defence for unmanned aerial systems, along with a memorandum of understanding signed with senior Pakistani defence officials. Powerus is backed by Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump and is in the process of merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings; the company has said its longer-term goal is a joint technology partnership with manufacturing operations inside Pakistan. Neither the value of the order nor the specific drone systems involved has been disclosed, and Powerus has stressed that the memorandum "is not a definitive agreement," creates no purchase obligation, and remains subject to US law and government approval.

The India complication

What makes the deal unusual is that Powerus is not exclusive to Pakistan. The company has also struck an agreement with Mumbai-based Paras Defense and Space Technologies to produce and sell its Guardian-1 interceptor technology in India — meaning a firm whose investors include the sitting US president's sons is simultaneously doing defence business with Pakistan and India, two states with an active history of cross-border strikes this year. That dual positioning has drawn scrutiny in both countries' press over what a company tied to a president's family stands to gain from supplying both sides of a regional rivalry, even as Powerus insists its Pakistan dealings remain preliminary and non-binding.

Part of a broader pattern

The White House meeting and the Powerus MoU both sit inside a wider realignment this year. Pakistan formally nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize and welcomed his praise at the UN General Assembly even while declining to fall in line with US sanctions pressure over Iran, and Islamabad has separately leaned on its own defence diplomacy elsewhere in the region, including Defence Minister Khawaja Asif's pledge that Pakistan would defend Saudi Arabia by "whatever means" under the Makkah pact. The Powerus episode adds a new thread to that pattern: a defence procurement relationship with a company whose ownership structure ties it directly to the US president's family, arranged in the same stretch of weeks as the highest-level meeting between the two countries' leaderships this year.

What to watch next

Whether the Powerus memorandum converts into an actual purchase order, and at what value, remains unconfirmed — the company itself has cautioned it is not a done deal. The more durable story is the diplomatic one: a US president hosting Pakistan's prime minister and army chief together at the White House, a sequence of engagement unmatched in recent years, with a defence contractor tied to his own sons now in the room as well.

Build Better Pakistan's Security Desk is tracking US-Pakistan defence and diplomatic engagement and will update this piece if the Powerus order is confirmed.