External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said that the convergences between India and the United States far outweighed the divergences as both countries looked at their competitors and potential partners, adding that the major areas of cooperation between the two countries were in technology, defense and security and political convergence, particularly in the Global South, the Hindustan Times reported on Wednesday.

Perhaps for the first time for an Indian politician, the US is India’s “optimal choice” as a partner, India’s foreign minister said during a conversation with former US ambassador to India Kenneth Juster at the Council of Foreign Relations.

When asked by Juster what he saw as the limits of the India-US relationship – given concerns in the US over issues of religious freedom or human rights in India and uncertainty in Delhi about American reliability – Jaishankar said instead of ” Boundaries”: He talked about the “possibilities,” took a more optimistic view of how relationships work, and offered an explanation for why the old way of thinking was changing.

The change in mentality in the USA

Jaishankar said: “My feeling is that the US today is actually fundamentally readjusting to the world. Part of it is the long-term consequences of Iraq and Afghanistan, but that is part of it.”

The other part, he said, is that the dominance and relative power of the United States over others has changed over the last decade, and that is logical as the world has become more democratic, opportunities have become more widely available, other centers of production and consumption arose, etc. a “redistribution of power” that has now taken place.

“The US is adapting to a multipolar world, although it may not use that term. In fact, it is actively trying to shape the future poles and their weight to benefit the US, and there is nothing wrong with that. “We are looking at a world, we have probably entered a world where the US will no longer say I basically only work with allies,” the Hindustan Times quoted Jaishankar as saying.

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He gave the example of Quad, where the US had entered into a partnership with India, which was not a treaty partner like the other two countries in the group (Australia and Japan).

“To their credit for this imagination and this forward planning, U.S. policymakers have already begun to move into these much more fluid, dispersed centers of power. Very often much more regional, with sometimes different themes and different theaters producing their different combinations. They are no longer such straightforward black and white or three-axis solutions. In some ways it’s much more chaotic. It’s much more anarchic in a way. And we are all trying to adapt to that and find a way to work together,” Jaishankar added.

The India-US Dynamics: Key Priorities

India’s foreign minister said there was a huge possibility that both countries could help promote each other’s interests.

“If the US looks at the world and says what the competition is and where the partners are, real and potential, and we do the same, you will find that the convergences today far outweigh the divergences. And that’s why I’m no longer willing to think about where the boundaries are. “Where all possibilities are, how much can we accelerate, how much can we push it forward,” Jaishankar reported in the Hindustan Times.

Jaishankar pointed to the changes in security, politics, technology and human connections in the last five years. “We have a lot ahead of us.”

Asked what were the top three priorities for the bilateral relationship, Jaishankar said: “The India-US relationship needs to have a strong focus on technology. In many ways, the balance of power in the world has always been a function of the balance of technology. But today it is even more intense. The impact of technology on everyday life is very far-reaching.” Explaining why this has become a bilateral issue, Jaishankar said as India and the US were looking for technology partners and seeing who could add mutual value, India and the US gravitated towards each other.

“Let me give you a practical example. There’s the CHIPS Act and the IRA. They have in some ways accelerated investment in certain areas of technology. But if we scale this up to a global level, look for other manufacturing hubs and where HR is there to support business expansion, I would tell you that India is a very important partner for the US,” Jaishankar said.

There could be more discussions like this about critical minerals or maritime safety

“In some ways, the United States needs partners today to advance its interests more effectively. There are finite partners out there. These partners, potential or actual, need to come to some sort of understanding. If we look from the Indian perspective and one can say that there is an even more limited list of countries that can be partners, the US is really the optimal choice for me when I have to make decisions. Today, there is an urgent need for India and the US to work together. For me, the main focus is technology,” said Jaishankar.

He added that much of the technology transfers to defense and security. The third point would be politics in the context of the North-South divide. “Today, the global south is very suspicious of the global north and developed countries. It is useful for the United States to have partners who think and speak well about the United States, often behind its own back.”