The US administration’s decision to rename its oldest and largest military command from the Indo-Pacific Command to the earlier Pacific Command amid a rebalancing of ties with China has raised questions in New Delhi about Washington’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific concept and the Quad grouping that includes India.
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The US defence department announced on Wednesday that the Indo-Pacific Command will “officially restore its name to the US Pacific Command” to honour the formation’s historical roots, though its area of responsibility – from the waters off the US’s west coast to India’s western border – will remain the same.
The move came hours before a planned meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump on the margins of the G7 Summit in France, and about a week after the death of three Indian seafarers in a US Navy attack on a merchant vessel off the coast of Oman cast a shadow over India-US relations.
The change in nomenclature also came a little more than a fortnight after US defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where he said the US was making a “return to realism” in the Pacific and “charting a new course for our alliances and partnerships” in the region “grounded in the realities of power and interests”.
Former Indian Navy chief Admiral Arun Prakash said the US move only reflected how “unreliable and poorly thought through” Washington’s policies are, and “borders on deceit and deception”. He said, “At the time when [the command’s name was changed in 2018], it was set up as a major step. Now their interests have changed and they’ve changed their policy.”
Prakash, who has been critical of US attacks on three merchant vessels with dozens of Indian crew members last week, noted that the Indo-Pacific Command nomenclature was a US creation aimed at “drawing India into the net of whatever they were planning”. Indian diplomats, he pointed out, were reluctant to accept the name as it was “too broad”, though the navy had gone along as it reflected a conjoining of the Indian and Pacific oceans and “overlapping interests”.
The change in the name of the US military formation, established by president Harry S Truman in 1947, came exactly eight years after the designation was altered to the Indo-Pacific Command – a move which then US defence secretary James Mattis had said reflected the “increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific oceans”.
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Experts had noted at the time the move was part of US efforts to counter China’s growing influence across the Asia-Pacific, and Pentagon officials said the Indo-Pacific name was a recognition of India’s growing role in providing regional security and would prompt military thinkers to consider the broader region.
Former ambassador Rajiv Bhatia, a distinguished fellow for foreign policy studies at Gateway House, said there were three key takeaways from the US move. “First, the concept of the Indo-Pacific has lost some salience since the Covid-19 pandemic. It has become even less important between the war in Ukraine and the West Asia conflict.
“Two, everything is connected to US policy on China, and there appears to be clarity after Trump’s recent visit to Beijing, and Hegseth’s speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, where he spoke about a pathway for constructive ties with China based on strategic stability,” Bhatia said. “Third, Trump has remained disengaged with Quad, which is another indication of where the US stands on the Indo-Pacific and China.”
Bhatia argued the change of name of the US military command was “not too much of a surprise and India should draw the appropriate conclusions from it”.
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Former foreign secretary Nirupama Menon Rao said the “China factor” brought India and the US closer but wasn’t enough to sustain the relationship. “The Indo-Pacific concept was an over-sold stock, though I see it more as an incomplete prospectus,” she said.
While acknowledging the limits of using the Indo-Pacific concept as an organising framework for India-US relations, Rao described the change in the US military command’s name as a “healthy correction because it forces us to make a more realistic assessment of where our interests converge with the US and where they do not”.
She pointed to Trump’s remarks about India being a “dead economy”, US deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau’s comments in March about the US not allowing India to become an economic rival like China, the deaths of the Indian sailors and the potential downgrading of “Indo-Pacific symbolism”, and said while none of these “individually proves a strategic rupture”, they collectively suggest the “exuberant phase of India-US relations may be ending”.
