Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is heading towards New Delhi after Seoul and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will fly to Anchorage, Alaska, for a meeting with Chinese officials.
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.
There are a couple of sales in the works as well, including a $ 3 billion plus deal for 30 armed drones from General Atomics which is the final stages of being cleared by the Defence Ministry.
The Defense Secretary visiting New Delhi as part his maiden visit abroad may also help shift perceptions about his résumé.
“A visit to New Delhi on his first trip abroad might also be designed to allay concerns that the Secretary, a former commander of U.S. Central Command with deep experience in the Middle East, was not going to give the Indo-Pacific its due,” Mr. White said.
We can also expect discussions around Afghanistan. The U.S. is trying to facilitate a peace deal via an inter-Afghan dialogue, as it re-assesses a May 1 deadline for troop withdrawal that Mr. Trump had committed to as part of a deal with the Taliban.
U.S. President Joe Biden said that getting American troops out by the deadline “could happen” but is “tough” in an ABC interview that aired on Wednesday. The President also said that the deadline, if extended, would not be pushed back much longer.
“The fact is that was not a very solidly negotiated deal that the former President worked out” he said. “And so we’re in consultation with our allies as well as the [Afghan] government and that decision is in process now.”
While India is not invited to Thursday’s talks in Moscow on an intra-Afghan settlement, it is part of a proposed U.S. plan for a United Nations conference on a settlement. Indian concerns about Afghanistan and the U.S. withdrawal are therefore likely to feature in Mr. Austin’s discussions in New Delhi.
A possible Afghanistan visit?
Neither would it be unprecedented for the Secretary of Defense to make an unannounced visit to Afghanistan. Jim Mattis, former Defense Secretary, dropped in on U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan in September 2018 when the Trump administration was trying to push a peace deal in the country. The Pentagon however had nothing to announce on Afghanistan, when The Hindu asked if Mr. Austin would be visiting the country.
