With a series of meetings in the next few days, the US will try again to get India to stop getting its oil and arms from Russia.
Ajit Doval and Jake Sullivan, who are both NSAs, met this week to talk about cutting-edge technologies. In March, NATO and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense also got together. Senior US diplomat Victoria Nuland will also meet with top officials to help “India find alternatives to Russian military equipment.”
Victoria Nuland, the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was in India to meet with foreign office officials. While there, she told the Senate Foreign Relations committee that India needs to end its “60 years of entanglement” with Russia. She basically said the same thing she said last May after she went to India.
Her trip comes after a trip by Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu at the beginning of the month.
Ajit Doval from the NSA and Jake Sullivan from the US will be in Washington for the first “Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies” almost at the same time. When PM Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden met in Tokyo last year for the Quad Leaders’ Summit, they talked about how important it was to get the partnership going on cutting-edge projects. This led to the idea for the new project.
An official statement said that the meeting on Tuesday would “build closer ties between the government, academia, and industry of the two countries in areas like AI, quantum computing, 5G/6G, biotech, space, and semiconductors.” The White House said that it would expand its partnership with China in important and new technologies. On Wednesday, people with a lot of power will talk about space issues. ISRO chief S. Somnath will be there.
In March, senior officials from NATO’s policy planning division will talk with officials from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defense. The talks with NATO don’t happen very often, but the March meeting is important because it will happen after Nuland’s talk and the high-tech talk.
But when China heard about the meeting between India and NATO, they didn’t like what they heard. “If this kind of cooperation goes on, New Delhi will get a lot of backlash from its own people and lose more diplomatic and strategic freedom,” the Global Times wrote.
The effort to bring India closer to the Western military bloc got a boost when the chair of the UK’s defence select committee said that India and Japan should be added to the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the UK, and the US. AUKUS is meant to help Australia get submarines that are powered by nuclear energy. The US, Australia, and Japan are all part of the Quad. India is the fourth part of the Quad.
