How to co-operate effectively with both India and China without seeming to favour the relationship with one at the cost of the relationship with the other?
That will be one of the main strategic objectives of President Barack Obama’s forthcoming Asian tour during which he will be visiting India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. His observations during his visit to China in November last year had given rise to an impression in India that his administration had downgraded the importance attached to the USA’s relations with India by his predecessor George Bush and had started viewing India as a sub-regional power not on par with China.
Correcting this impression without adding to Chinese fears of an attempt by the US to use India against China will be one of the objectives of his forthcoming visit to India and his subsequent meeting on November 11 with President Hu Jintao of China in the margins of the G-20 summit in South Korea. The policies of the Bush administration had given rise to fears in the Chinese mind that it was seeking to use India and Japan to encircle China. Obama’s attempts to play down these fears had created suspicions in India’s mind that he did not accord the same importance to the USA’s relations with India as Bush had done.
Obama is keen to remove the impression in India that its importance vis-à-vis China had been downgraded by him while at the same time reassuring China that it has nothing to fear from closer Indo-American relations. A preview of how he intended doing this has been available from the remarks of Mrs Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, during her current tour of East and South-East Asia.
She has been quoted as saying as follows in a speech during her first halt at Honolulu on October 28, 2010: