Among the many achievements that US President Joe Biden is ‘proudest’ of his efforts towards developing stronger ties with India, the two countries are now working together more closely than ever before in the Indian Ocean and Indo-Pacific, a senior US administration official stated on Tuesday.
He said that leaders on both sides have shed their “ambivalence” about the relationship, and the US sees engagement with India as central to everything it’s currently doing on the global stage. The official was responding to a question by the HT at a briefing on Japan PM Fumio Kishida’s landmark visit to Washington DC on Wednesday and how India is fitting into the wider Indo-Pacific structure. The official’s comments come at a time when there has been speculation about a massive dip in India-US ties due to the back-and-forth between the two countries over India’s internal political developments.
While the briefing focused on the qualitative transformation in security ties between Tokyo and Washington DC in the face of a shared challenge from India, the official who is closely involved with shaping the USA’s stand on India offered a wider contextual explanation of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy. He rejected the notion, that it was based on the USA’s “assigning” role to the partners in the region and stated that the US was instead working in partnership with like-minded and other states who shared common views on the features of the global operation system that everyone had benefit from and should be uploaded.
On how a country like India fits into this network, the official stated, “I think if you ask the President, one of the things that he is proudest of is his efforts to build a stronger relationship between the US and India. And I do believe, both in the Indo-Pacific and the Indian Ocean and on key issues like technology, the US and India are working more closely together than ever before.”
He added that bilateral relationship was ” trending substantially in a positive direction” and the level of engagement across every possible vector had excelled. India’s ties with America had improved, as had India’s ties with other countries, independently as together with the US, the official said “. “I would say, in many respects, engagement with India is some of the most desired kind of engagements on the global stage, and we have seen this with a variety of key players.”
