US to help India raise defence capability for Indo-Pacific stability, but uncertainty persists over Quad

New Delhi: Washington DC, and New Delhi understand the importance of military power to ensure stability in Indo-Pacific, a senior official of President Donald Trump’s administration said on Tuesday, even as uncertainty continued over the fate of Quad, a coalition India, Australia, Japan and the United States had forged to counter China’s dominance in the region.

“Both of our countries benefit from an Indo-Pacific in which no power can dominate the region. Both benefit from open trade and national autonomy.

"These are the concrete, shared interests that form the foundation of our enduring strategic partnership,” Under Secretary for Policy at the US Department of War, Elbridge Colby, said in New Delhi.

“We both recognise the strategic centrality of military power for a stable balance in the region, and thus that defence cooperation should enhance real capability rather than be merely totemic or driven by inertia.”

Colby and his counterpart at the Ministry of Defence in New Delhi, Rajesh Kumar Singh, will co-chair the India-US defence policy dialogue on Wednesday.

The senior Trump Administration official said that the US was committed to working with India to hasten and augment cooperation in areas including but not limited to long-range precision fires, resilient logistics, maritime domain awareness, anti-submarine warfare, and advanced technologies.

“Because we are focused on results and reality, we are concentrated on capabilities that matter in the Indo-Pacific strategic environment,” Colby said, adding: “Our goals should be practical: to ensure that our forces can operate effectively together when our interests align, and, in any case, to see that India possesses the capabilities necessary to defend its sovereignty and contribute to a favourable regional balance of power.”

The sign of a thaw in the relations between Washington, D.C., and Beijing after Trump met with President Xi Jinping in South Korea in October 2025, however, cast a shadow of uncertainty over the Quad – a coalition forged by India, Japan, Australia and the US to counter China’s hegemonic aspirations in the Indo-Pacific region.

Modi was to host the Quad summit in New Delhi last year, but it was postponed. Trump’s next meeting with Xi was scheduled to take place in Beijing later this month or early next month but might be postponed due to the conflict in West Asia.

Colby did not refer to Quad while articulating the US policy for the Indo-Pacific while delivering a policy speech at a think-tank in New Delhi.

“The roots of our partnership are deeper than optics and more durable than superficial comity; they are, rather, thickly embedded in lasting strategic mutual self-interest,” he said, noting that India and the US did not need to agree on everything to cooperate effectively. “What matters is that our interests and objectives increasingly converge on the most fundamental issues. Differences and even disputes are fully compatible with deepening alignment and cooperation on strategic matters.”

During Trump’s first term in White House, New Delhi had resisted the attempts by Washington, D.C., to turn the Quad into a military coalition overtly adversarial to China.

India and China, in October 2024, resolved a four-and-a-half-year-long military stand-off along the Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh.