News Analysis | Austin visit may allay some concerns about Indo-Pacific and Afghanistan

Much of the action in U.S. foreign relations is happening in Asia this week and almost all of it is Asia focused. U.S. Secretaries of State and Defense, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, are on a trip to Tokyo and Seoul. Mr. Austin is heading towards New Delhi after Seoul and Mr. Blinken will fly to Anchorage, Alaska, where he and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will meet their Chinese counterparts Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi for the first China-U.S. bilateral of the Biden administration.

In India, Mr. Austin is scheduled to meet Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and other “senior national security officials” (presumably National Security Adviser Ajit Doval tops this list). They will discuss a deepening of the Major Defence partnership, the Pentagon had said when announcing the visit. They will also discuss the Indo-Pacific and are expected to discuss operationalising the ‘foundational agreements’ of U.S. defence cooperation, the last of which was signed in October (the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement). “I have no doubt that the discussions will be candid behind closed doors. What’s worth watching, however, is whether the Secretary speaks openly in New Delhi about U.S. or joint efforts to counter Chinese coercion across the Indo-Pacific, or falls back on more opaque references to shared threats,” said Joshua White, a professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and former South Asia Director in the Obama National Security Council.