Mission Creep in the Indo-Pacific: Is America AWOL from its region of priority?

The India-US partnership is undergoing a kind of stress test that introduces unpredictability and uncertainty at the highest level of decision-making.

- MONISH TOURANGBAM

For the US foreign policy and national security departments, the Indo-Pacific had clearly emerged as the region of priority to counteract China's coercive and unilateral activities, and the first Trump administration had, in fact, played a critical role to put Indo-Pacific at the forefront of US grand strategy, renaming the Pacific Command as the Indo-Pacific Command and reviving the Quad after a decade of slumber.

Like many foreign policy continuities, the Indo-Pacific region sustained its priority in the Biden presidency, and the Quad seemed to grow in strength despite many doubters questioning the alignment among the four democracies.

Then, what has transpired in Trump's second term that the Indo-Pacific seems relegated to being a background score in Trump's new orchestra?

Has the Indo-Pacific become a casualty to Trump's second iteration of "America First" policy that, among other things, has gone militant on correcting trade imbalances and puts a premium on throwing allies and strategic partners off balance?

Are allies and partners investing in a "free, open and rules-based" Indo-Pacific while the US is pulling the plug from the region?

The Indo-Pacific region is not a cartographic reality but a geopolitical construct, one that was born out of convergent threat perceptions leading to habits of cooperation among like-minded partners.

The transition from Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific infused a new primacy of the maritime expanse that had become a zone of both cooperation and competition.

While China's assertive rise and its coercive activities became the glue stitching together multilateral, minilateral, and bilateral mechanisms gradually building the Indo-Pacific architecture, major stakeholders projected a cooperative behavior that did not circle just around China.