Some of the steps being taken by Beijing along the India-China border has been “provocative”, a top White House official has said while reaffirming that the United States is “destined” to work more closely with India.Kurt Campbell, the Deputy Assistant to the US President and Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, told a Washington-based think-tank on Thursday that India is not an ally of the United States and will never be so.
“But it does not mean that we will not be close partners and share many things.
That’s how we need to understand the role that India will play as a great nation on the global stage.“We want to encourage that and support that and deepen this relationship, which is already very strong, probably the strongest people-to-people relationship of any country that the United States has on the global stage,” he said. Campbell said that the India-US relationship “is the most important bilateral relationship for the United States in the 21st century”.
“I believe we are destined to work more closely together. I believe that our people-to-people ties are strong, animate in a relationship that is becoming deeper, richer and more strategically important,” he said.The think tank — Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) — in a report said that the India-China border intrusions and clashes have become more frequent and threaten to lead to all-out conflict.
The increased prospect of India-China border hostility has implications for the United States and its Indo-Pacific strategy between the two Asian giants, it said.