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Is the consensus around Indo-Pacific changing? The divergence has been long time coming

India is being written out of core contingencies – Taiwan and the South China Sea.

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........

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