The recent decision by the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to rechristen the Indo-Pacific as just Pacific command has caused justified concern regarding India-US ties. Unfortunately, such concerns also miss the larger point and evolving geopolitical realities that are far more important than a name change. Beyond the perceived slight, the divergence within the Indo and the Pacific has become stronger in recent years. So has the divide between India and the US and its strategic partners.
The US didn’t rename Indo-Pacific in 2018 to improve relations with India—and New Delhi should not worry about what it means in terms of US favourability. Both are fallacies, which emerge from conveniently overlooking the raison detre of the Indo-Pacific – China’s rise and the need to counterbalance its rising power. The Indo-Pacific, after all, has always been a means to an end. Much of the discourse in New Delhi tends to lose sight of this and ends up treating the framing as an end in its own right.
The US pivoted toward the ‘Indo-Pacific’ policy framing with China in mind (end) and the belief that India will increasingly be a contributory factor to the maritime balance of power in Asia (means). Washington did not invent the Indo-Pacific to improve ties with India – which was already on a remarkable upswing. It is easy to conflate the two, but the difference remains. The ability to maintain a viable link between the two (the China challenge and the India prospect) was the secret sauce to ascendent India-US strategic ties in the 2010s.
This is a point highlighted well by Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar. “The most impressive [Asian] growth stories of the last 150 years have all been with the participation of the West…India has to maintain a narrative in the United States of its value, whether it is in terms of geopolitics, shared challenges, market attractions, technology strengths or burden-sharing,” he wrote in 2019.
The core rationale of the Indo-Pacific and its slow withering: counter-balancing China
The US mainland’s distance from the region helped build the idea that, as a more proximate rising power (proximate to China), India is bound to gravitate toward security competition with its giant rival to the north. Hence, if there is any weariness in the US toward Indo-Pacific (outside of the latest name change) in recent years, it is because of America’s newer assessments about the India-China strategic competition and India’s approach to the same. As highlighted earlier, there is growing pessimism in the US (and other States) about the prospect of India contributing to a balance of power in Asia. This is a trend that had started before Trump 2.0. More than the shift in the name (as insensitive as it may be), India needs to pay greater attention to this larger underlying story, as it is still an ongoing trend and has not reached full culmination yet.
By the same token, one strong rationale (not the only one) behind India’s own embrace of Indo-Pacific as well as the Quad was its ongoing security competition with China as well as the broader concern over the balance of power in wider Asia. This competition had a military component (border infrastructure, refurbishing airfields, stronger patrolling along the LAC and innovations toward mountain warfare divisions to establish deterrence) as well as a wider regional and maritime component (Hambantota, Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles, growing PLAN presence in the Indian Ocean, growing Indian security-economic linkages with Southeast Asia).
Within India’s broader politico-military approach, India also pursued improving ties with the US and like-minded partners to signal warning messages to Beijing i.e., the threat that India could more firmly join up with the US and allies if pushed to a corner. This was meant to incentivise better behaviour – especially at the LAC.
Different responses to the China military challenge
What has changed in recent years is that there has been a gradual growing divide between India’s China policy and that of its strategic partners East of Malacca. Subsequent to the brutal skirmish in June 2020, many observers expected India to pursue a more hardline approach towards Beijing – including by forging qualitatively deeper strategic ties with Indo-Pacific partners.
Since at least winter 2023 (and more firmly since October 2024), and contrary to some western expectations, India has chosen to emphasise conflict management and trust-rebuilding with China over more overt means of balancing or signalling. This was a choice that was rational and justifiable. However, the trajectory that it had set also dimmed the prospect of India contributing to regional deterrence efforts in Southeast Asia, in the Taiwan Straits and increasingly even in the Eastern Indian Ocean.
As India chose to define the Indo-Pacific in benign terms and emphasise public goods and economic cooperation, the US has pivoted toward a more security-centred approach (for good or bad). Naturally, this has only deepened the dissonance. India’s preference of a particular form of multialignment had convinced many, after all, that India never intended real alignment vis-à-vis the Indo-Pacific as well as the Quad in the first place.
As a prominent India-watcher, Kate Sullivan de Estrada assessed in 2023, “the contemporary value of the Quad for India is as a steppingstone to greater power and status and the realization of a multipolar order”. Echoing a similar sentiment but in a harsher tone, the Japanese strategic analyst Ken Moriyasu noted this week, “India is not aligned, and Washington is no longer hoping that one day it will be.”
Pacific Ocean: crises, flashpoints and strategic cooperation
Despite US President Donald Trump’s flexible approach toward Beijing and fulsome rhetorical support for the concept of a G2, broader counter-balancing trends in the Pacific are strengthening rather than weakening. The US-Philippines relations have strengthened under Trump 2.0. During a tense week last month, the US Coast Guard undertook its first-ever joint maritime presence operation with the Philippines in the Scarborough Shoal, and in response to reports of China attempting to place a permanent structure in the contested area.
The US is leaning increasingly on Japan and Australia for power projection, force dispersal as well as burden sharing. Aiming at a cluster of future contingencies, both Japan and Australia are increasing their defence spending in a targeted manner. They are also strengthening defence ties with each other as well as partner countries such as the Philippines, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and South Korea in the region. The U.S, Japan and Australia appear to be on their way towards building a networked air and missile defence architecture based on sharing sensor and tracking data.
Japan itself is undergoing a remarkable transition towards overt balancing. With the latest overhaul of its defence export rules, Tokyo is set to become a sizable politico-military power in the region, with defence sales to Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia already in motion.
Despite the once-in-a-century discursive effort toward expounding, formulating, reinforcing, and fine-tuning the concept of the Indo-Pacific, the key faultlines and flashpoints vis-à-vis China remain in the Pacific rather than the Indian Ocean. China’s presence in the Indian Ocean Region will, after all, become more formidable and threatening to India only after it resolves lingering (and still daunting) security disputes in the Pacific first.
In this context, the latest Exercise Balikatan, the annual military drill between the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the US military, involved Australia, Canada, France, Japan and New Zealand. It was a more realistic exercise aimed at mounting a collective defence (full-spectrum operations) of the Philippines. It also marked Japan’s first active combat participation in the exercises with 1,400 personnel and multiple warships. One of its destroyers conducted a 14-hour-long transit through the Taiwan Strait on the anniversary of the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. It was under this treaty that China had ceded Taiwan to Japan. Notably, and perhaps understandably, India remains an observer rather than a participant in such exercises.
In more concrete terms, and perhaps underappreciated by observers, India is being written out of core contingencies – Taiwan and the South China Sea. China itself appears anxious about concrete growing threats such as Japan’s evolving posture, allied assistance toward the defence of Taiwan and the Philippines (such as the U.S. Typhon missile deployment). Beijing is also investing strongly in the competition for influence against Australia among the Pacific island nations.
In contrast, China’s worries about the Indo-Pacific (as well as the Quad) have greatly subsided in recent years – in contrast to earlier when both showed greater promise. In many ways, India’s core strategic partners in the region are going their own way when it comes to China. India’s distinct China challenge is only becoming more distinct. Greater cooperation on critical minerals, semiconductors, space, and emerging technology is necessary and worthwhile in its own right, but it cannot bridge the divide. Arguably, the divide has the potential to limit cooperation in these areas as well.
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The split within the Indo-Pacific could grow further
This contrast between trends in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific is important to note, and it is important to do so without value judgment. It barely needs reiterating that India faces a unique and more daunting challenge vis-à-vis China. There’s the 4000 km-long disputed border and China’s growing militarisation of it since 2017. India’s worsened ties with Pakistan since last year, as well as China’s growing economic coercion, add newer constraints.
However, the contrast in pathways still needs to be acknowledged – especially in any discussion of the future and fate of the Indo-Pacific and India’s role in it. By accepting underlying geopolitical realities, India will stand cognitively better prepared to either limit such a divide or manage its fallout better.
After all, shifts in U.S. conception of India’s role vis-à-vis China have contributed to shifts in U.S. approach towards India-Pakistan relations, as well as its approach towards defence, economic and tech ties with India.
Being a realist power, India should not be ‘surprised’ or feel ‘slighted’ if its primary strategic partners reconsider their approach based on self-interest—or if those shifts become even more embedded over time and perhaps irreversibly.
When the Indo-Pacific and the Quad emerged in the mid 2010s, world politics and assumptions toward geopolitical trends were remarkably different. China’s rise was still both more limited as well as underestimated and the bet on India was broadly unquestioned. The seeming link between the Indian and Pacific ocean was taken for granted, and the US approach to China appeared stable, linear, sustainable and based on preponderance. These conditions have changed dramatically now. The cumulative effects of ‘secondary’ conflicts in Europe and West Asia have only added great uncertainty in the short term.
Any attempt at improving ties with the U.S and like-minded partners (if it is desired) will have to factor in the above-mentioned shifts as well as the divide within the Indo-Pacific. Failure to do so would result in India attempting to tackle entirely new challenges only tactically and using dated methods.
Sidharth Raimedhi is a Fellow at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research (CSDR), a New Delhi-based think tank. He tweets @SRaimedhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
What a relief. India – with a per capita income of $ 3,000 – was getting drawn into very deep, shark infested waters. USA is the natural leader of Quad, but it was Japan, notably PM Abe, who took the initiative in India partnering with three countries that had been formal military allies for a long time. In an oceanic domain, thousands of miles away from its core security challenges along land borders with China and Pakistan. 2. The economic asymmetry between India and China, who were almost on par forty to fifty years ago, has widened to 5 : 1. In manufacturing it is a stunning 10 : 1 ( hence the failure of the China plus one strategy. In foreign trade too, China is the world’s top trading nation, ahead of even USA. With an economy whose full potential has still not been unleashed through reforms, Indian diplomats who still yearn for China treating India as an equal are living in the past. 3. India has long standing issues with China, the boundary dispute the most intractable. China and Pakistan have forged an indissoluble bond when it comes to India. These are the issues Indian planners have to deal with. Quad was a false dawn whose demise should not be mourned. 4. USA remains an important economic partner. Enlarge that relationship. Trade, investment, technology.