New Delhi: Secretary of State Marco Rubio Sunday asserted that Washington’s engagement with Pakistan would not impact the strategic partnership between New Delhi and the United States, insisting that ties with other countries did not come “at the expense” of India. He did not, though, name Pakistan.
However, he did obliquely indicate that US’ relationship with Pakistan was a tactical one. “As far as our relations with other countries, yeah, we have relations that we work at the tactical level, for example, in many other ways, with countries all over the world,” Rubio said. “So does India. That’s what responsible nation-states do. But I don’t view our relationship with any country in the world as coming at the expense of our strategic alliance with India,” he added.
Speaking at a joint press briefing in New Delhi alongside External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, Rubio responded to questions about concerns in India over Washington’s renewed contacts with Pakistan’s military leadership. “The US-India relationship has not lost momentum,” he said.
The remarks were aimed at addressing unease in New Delhi that the Trump administration’s outreach to Islamabad, alongside broader shifts in US trade and security policy could weaken the momentum in India-US relations built over the past two decades. Rubio rejected that characterisation outright.
“I understand why some people might say that,” he said. “But I don’t see it that way in any shape or form.”
He argued that recent friction between Washington and New Delhi was tied less to geopolitical disagreements than to President Donald Trump’s broader effort to rebalance global trade relationships.
“The president did not say, ‘Let’s figure out a way to create friction with India over trade,’” Rubio said. “The president came in and said, ‘We have a trade situation involving the U.S. economy that doesn’t work moving forward.’”
Rubio described the administration’s approach as part of a worldwide recalibration intended to reverse what he called the “de-industrialisation” of the American economy.
“We pursued trade policies that left us in a place where all the means of production had been outsourced in such a way that left us vulnerable,” he said. “That had to change.”
India, Rubio acknowledged, occupied a unique place in that effort because of the scale of its economy and trade relationship with the United States.
“India’s a massive economy,” he said. “We do a lot of trade with India.”
He then added that both sides were making “tremendous progress” toward a new trade agreement that he predicted would be “enduring, beneficial to both sides, and sustainable”.
“We are on the verge of making that happen,” he said, noting that trade delegations had recently travelled between the two countries.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)