India among few countries with major global influence, our ties haven't lost momentum: Marco Rubio

US Secretary of State
Marco Rubio said that India continues to remain an “important strategic” partner for the United States as he held delegation-level talks with External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar. Rubio and Jaishankar held the talks in Hyderabad House, where the two diplomats discussed wide-ranging issues.

While speaking on the tensions that ensued following the tariffs row, Rubio made it clear that the United States and India have not “lost any momentum”. “I don’t view our relation with any country in the world as coming at the expense of our strategic alliance with India,” he said.

Rubio noted that since both nations are “the two largest democracies in the world”, their interests align on several issues. The American diplomat is on a four-day visit to India, and he started his trip with a meeting with Prime Minister
Narendra Modi.

“The list of issues that we work together with India on, the breadth and scope of them, is what highlights the fact that India is an important strategic partner of the United States, one of our most important strategic partners in the world,” Rubio told the media on Sunday.

“It begins with the fact of our shared values. We are the two largest democracies in the world. And so obviously that in and of itself begins to align our interests simply because our leaders respond directly to voters and people regularly,” he added.

India can do something big on a global scale

At the presser, Rubio emphasised the influence that India carries on a global stage. “There are very few countries in the world who actually have the ability to do something about the big issues on a global scale,” he said.

“There are a handful of countries who have the economic and diplomatic power to be influential on strategic issues from a global perspective, and India is one of them,” Rubio averred.

During his address to the media, Jaishankar mentioned the recent renewal of the 10-year Major Defence Partnership Framework Agreement. He also noted that a comprehensive underwater domain awareness roadmap was also signed.

“We discussed the importance of taking into account the Make in India approach and the lessons drawn from recent conflicts while going forward, in the defence domain. On the economic front, we spoke about the value of concluding at an early date, the final text of the interim agreement regarding reciprocal and mutually beneficial trade,” Jaishankar averred.

“This will be an important step towards a comprehensive bilateral trade agreement, which was envisaged during Prime Minister Modi’s visit in February 2025. We expect that an American team will be visiting India soon for that purpose,” he said.

Rubio, Jaishankar discuss global conflicts

Jaishankar noted that interms of political understanding, the two sides discussed wide-ranging global and regional issues. “In terms of the political understanding between India and the United States, we have a strategic partnership which emanates from a convergence of national interests in many areas. Yesterday, during the Secretary’s call on the Prime Minister, some global and regional issues were discussed,” he said.

He also maintained that the two sides discussed the ongoing situation in West Asia and the Russia-Ukraine war. “In our subsequent meeting at the embassy, we took up developments about West Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia. I also shared with him some impressions I had of my recent visit to the Caribbean. Our talks today over lunch will focus on the latest developments in the Gulf. A few things have happened or seem to be happening overnight, and also on the Ukraine conflict,” Jaishankar said.

Meanwhile, Rubio emphasised how the United States is dealing with its partners in a turbulent world order. “It’s an honour to be here with all of you in this important visit to one of our most important strategic partners in the world. We obviously have relations, and we work with countries all over the world, and we need to, just as India does, and we have all kinds of alliances and partnerships with countries that we work on sometimes on discrete and individualised issues, other times on broader issues that involve one region of the world or another,” he said.

“A strategic partnership is something very different. It’s something much broader than that. A strategic partnership is when your interests as two nations are aligned, and you work together strategically to solve those problems,” the American diplomat asserted.