The latest ‘Point Blank’ conversation between HT Executive Editor Shishir Gupta and anchor Aayesha Varma sketched a world where US-China rivalry, contested seas, and an expanding Middle East war are all converging to redraw the strategic map from Honolulu to Hormuz.
East Asia Summit: Indo-Pacific stays at the centre
The 21st East Asia Summit on July 22, with 19 participating countries, emerged as a key moment in clarifying how major powers now view the Indo-Pacific theatre. Despite speculation that Washington had quietly dropped the “Indo” from its Indo-Pacific Command, Gupta stresses that this narrative is misleading: the change appears to have come from within the US Department of War bureaucracy, not from a strategic rethink at the political level. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly referred to the Indo-Pacific Command throughout the summit, signalling continuity in Washington’s framing of the region and its role as a resident power in the wider Indo-Pacific.
Equally important was the messaging around the Quad. Far from being sidelined by President Donald Trump’s talk of a US–China “G2,” the Quad’s foreign ministers have met twice already this year- on 26 May and 22 July- with another meeting planned. Gupta argues that this cadence of engagement underscores that the Quad format remains central to regional security thinking, even as Trump experiments rhetorically with great-power condominium ideas.
The ASEAN and other East Asia participants, barring China, sent a blunt collective signal: they would support the Philippines, Japan, and other Southeast Asian states in the event of Chinese expansionist moves. In Gupta’s reading, this amounted to a political pushback against Beijing’s behaviour in the South China Sea, and it anchored the summit in a shared concern over Chinese maritime coercion.
{{/usCountry}}The ASEAN and other East Asia participants, barring China, sent a blunt collective signal: they would support the Philippines, Japan, and other Southeast Asian states in the event of Chinese expansionist moves. In Gupta’s reading, this amounted to a political pushback against Beijing’s behaviour in the South China Sea, and it anchored the summit in a shared concern over Chinese maritime coercion.
{{/usCountry}}South China Sea: Towards a “Hormuz scenario”?
Gupta frames the South China Sea as moving steadily towards a chokepoint dynamic analogous to the Strait of Hormuz - where freedom of navigation can be held hostage by a single power’s military posture. He points out that China is not only asserting claims but actively militarising the South China Sea and pressing hard against Japan under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, the Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries through an expansionist PLA Navy. If left unchecked, he warns, Chinese dominance would make routine commercial and naval transit “a very difficult issue” for other states, much as Iran’s ability to threaten shipping has done in Hormuz and the Red Sea.
The East Asia Summit, in his view, therefore served two functions. First, it clarified that regional states understand and oppose what China is doing in the maritime domain. Second, it linked maritime risk in East Asia to the broader pattern of global instability - Ukraine, the Iran - US confrontation, unresolved crises in Gaza and Lebanon, and even turbulence in South America - creating a single frame of “global uncertainty” within which the South China Sea is only one, but a critical, front.
India–China: Dialogue under the shadow of the boundary
On the sidelines of the summit, External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar’s meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi highlighted how little room there is to separate India–China economics from the boundary question.
Gupta notes that Jaishankar was explicit: for New Delhi, everything flows from a “peace and tranquil border,” and India has undertaken no geographical expansion against China. Yet, Chinese forces continue to occupy Indian territories - a situation India dates back not to the present crisis alone but to patterns established over the past five decades.
Beijing, Gupta explains, pushed the line that economic ties should be improved, but “does not want to yield even a millimeter” on the boundary issue. This asymmetry - economic engagement without territorial compromise - remains the core Indian concern. The Narendra Modi government’s position, as Gupta recounts, is that good ties are impossible without border stability and that China must refrain from projects with third countries in disputed territories, such as occupied Kashmir.
The meeting did not resolve these contradictions, but Gupta stresses that it was still important: in an era of global instability, neither side wants to open another front, and high-level dialogue allows each capital to gauge the other’s thinking and calibrate responses.
India–US: Tough but positive partnership
Turning to India-US ties, Gupta describes the relationship as “tough” but unequivocally positive in its fundamentals. Trade frictions exist, but he reads them as manageable rather than structural. The recent US tariff on Indian goods stands at 10 per cent, down from 12.5 per cent after India addressed specific American concerns; notably, Japan - Washington’s closest ally - still faces a 12.5 per cent tariff, suggesting that India’s position is competitive in the regional trade landscape that includes Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.
More broadly, Gupta points out that a constant, constructive dialogue is underway as US agencies probe further trade issues and India responds. As long as that channel remains open, he believes, the relationship will be able to absorb disagreements. On major geopolitical questions, he sees convergence rather than divergence: India and the US both aim to stop the war in Ukraine while addressing the core concerns of both Kyiv and Moscow, and they share a common interest in ending the Iran conflict and protecting freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.
This alignment is reinforced by a deepening defence dialogue and multiple layers of political engagement, with the top leaderships in constant contact. Gupta characterises it as “two big powers” playing, negotiating, and managing differences, but moving overall in a positive direction.
Middle East: US leverage, Gulf pushback, and Iran’s long war
In the final segment, Gupta and Varma pivot from East Asia to the Middle East, asking how US behaviour towards Iran and the Gulf compares with its backing of Taiwan and the Philippines against China. Gupta’s assessment is blunt: the US is not visibly perturbed by the expansion of the Iran war because its own economy is performing well and it is successfully selling oil, defence equipment, and energy to the rest of the world. As long as that economic engine holds, Washington can sustain the war effort rather than seek rapid de-escalation.
He notes that operational challenges do exist - shortages of air defence interceptors and missiles - which may explain the recent pause in fighting since Friday. Yet he highlights more structural moves: Washington has offered Saudi Arabia a civilian nuclear deal, conditional on Riyadh signing the Abraham Accords, effectively tying nuclear cooperation to normalisation with Israel. This is, in his words, a “double whammy,” complicated by Saudi Arabia’s defence alliance with Pakistan, a state with a chequered nuclear record and a reputation for “rogue” behaviour on proliferation. Pakistan thus becomes central to the risk calculus, and the US is acutely aware of the red flags.
Gupta also flags discussions around an “Islamic Quad” of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt - a potential Sunni alignment with some perceived validity in Washington, though far from easy to operationalise. In parallel, the US has offered Turkey F‑35 fifth-generation jets, but only if Ankara relinquishes its Russian S‑400 systems and other Russian defence equipment, to prevent Moscow from extracting the signatures of US platforms.
On the ground, Gulf states are no longer absorbing Iranian pressure passively. Saudi Arabia has retaliated against the Houthis after tanker attacks in the Red Sea; Kuwait and Bahrain have also struck back at Iran following provocations. Iran, for its part, continues to fire medium-range ballistic missiles and rely on proxies, deploying weapons like the Kheibar Shekan - described as a “Jew destroyer” missile with a variable terminal trajectory that makes interception difficult - against Jordan and other regional targets. The cumulative impact is a war that Gupta does not see ending soon, accompanied by oil prices spiking towards 100 dollars a barrel and making life “very difficult for the entire world.”
Across Indo-Pacific waters and Middle Eastern deserts, the picture that emerges from Point Blank is one of an international system under sustained strain: great powers probing for advantage, regional actors resisting coercion, and chokepoints - from South China Sea lanes to Hormuz and the Red Sea - becoming the decisive theatres where economic interdependence meets hard military power.