“The threats we face are real, but building our collective capabilities, increasing our sharing of information and improving maritime domain awareness and interoperability, for example, will ensure India continues to be a provider of net security across the Indo-Pacific region and beyond,” Verma said.”And the US will continue to be a Pacific power for the decades ahead,” he said, adding that Washington’s work on protecting, preserving and strengthening democracy will continue.The fight is even more important in view of the rise of autocratic and authoritarian leaders and movements that seek to undermine the rules-based order, he said in comments seen as an oblique reference to leadership of China and Russia.”This includes continuing to strengthen a global rules-based order, architecture, ensuring we bridge divides on income inequality and battling misinformation and disinformation. Democracy must continue to deliver for our people,” he said.On US-China rivalry, Verma said, “We are engaged intensively in strategic competition with China; cooperating where we can, but competing aggressively to protect the rules-based (global) order.”He also noted that former US presidents Harry S Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy were all committed to seeing a strong US-India relationship.The senior American official said before Kennedy became President in 1961, as a Senator said, the fate of Asia rests with India.Following the Chinese attack on India in 1962, President Kennedy committed thousands of tonnes of ammunition, and even provided significant logistics and intelligence support to New Delhi.”He was committed to India’s success and its defence. And then yes, somewhat rapidly and for reasons that I think are too complex to cover today in the short amount of time we have, India and the United States went their separate ways for nearly 25 years,” he said.Verma said, “We lost a generation of cooperation and the important lessons are to be learned from that period so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.”He said President Bill Clinton’s visit to India in 2000 marked the launch of “full-scale partnership” between the two countries.”And in these 24 years, we have grown dramatically in every facet of our cooperation. We went from USD 0 in defence sales to now being major defence partners, co production partners and conducting the most complex exercises in every facet of defence,” he said.On Sri Lanka, Verma said both India and the US have very “long and important” relationships with the island nation.
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