Trump’s frequent use of the term “Indo-Pacific” as a replacement for “Asia-Pacific” — the more widely used label in diplomatic and business circles — revealed the level of importance Washington places on New Delhi.
During a speech in Vietnam, the U.S. leader highlighted his desire for a “truly free and open Indo-Pacific,” repeating the term after Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson used it in earlier remarks.
The label’s usage underscores “India’s geographic connection to the Asia-Pacific as a cornerstone of the Trump administration’s strategic thinking,” Alyssa Ayres, senior South Asia fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a note this week.
The “free and open” part of Trump’s statement also adds an ideological aspect to regional security and was widely seen as a reference to Beijing’s behavior in the South China Sea. New Delhi, which isn’t one of America’s treaty allies but nonetheless enjoys a robust bilateral relationship based on shared democratic values, has a significant role to play in that.
“Like it or not, or hide it or not, the term Indo-Pacific now seems to be a means of including India in the military calculations of U.S. strategy in the Pacific,” Manoj Joshi, distinguished fellow at think tank Observer Research Foundation, said in a recent note.
