US, India and Japan to meet, discuss China

In the backdrop of China's increasing assertiveness, Washington will for the first time host a trilateral official-level dialogue with Japanese, Indian and US diplomats on December 19 to build convergence over regional maritime security and non-proliferation in East Asia and Pacific region.

Updated on: Dec 5, 2011, 09:06:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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In the backdrop of China's increasing assertiveness, Washington will for the first time host a trilateral official-level dialogue with Japanese, Indian and US diplomats on December 19 to build convergence over regional maritime security and non-proliferation in East Asia and Pacific region.

US-President-Barack-Obama-and-Indonesian-president-Susilo-Bambang-Yudhoyono-attend-the-gala-dinner-during-the-Association-of-Southeast-Asian-Nations-ASEAN-Summit-and-East-Asia-Summit-in-Nusa-Dua-on-Indonesia-s-resort-island-of-Bali

The dialogue earlier scheduled for October 8 in Tokyo was postponed on a US request.

Government sources said top Indian officials from the disarmament and non-proliferation, East Asia and America divisions of the ministry of external affairs will interact with their US counterparts such as assistant secretary (South Asia) Robert Blake and assistant secretary (East Asia and Pacific Affairs) and their equivalents from Japan's foreign ministry.

The dialogue will ramp up to Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's visit to India on December 28.

While major bilateral initiatives like an agriculture corridor and trans-Asian Buddhist circuit are in the pipeline during Noda's visit, New Delhi and Tokyo will for the first time explore the possibility of joint research in the defence sector.

Driven by Tokyo and finalised during then foreign secretary Nirupama Rao's visit to Japan in April 2010, the dialogue is also part of New Delhi's effort to go beyond the stated Look East policy and engage North Asia as well.

US President Barack Obama and recently secretary of state Hillary Clinton had talked about the need for India to reach out to East Asia.

While Japan is a treaty ally of the US, India is being approached by South-East Asian countries and even Australia for trilateral initiatives in the face of Beijing's claims over the oil-rich South China Sea at the East Asia Summit in Bali last month.

New Delhi on its part plans to calibrate this trilateral initiative in a way that it is not seen as a platform against China.

However, the regional strategic environment and Chinese moves in the area will be part of the discussions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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