India does not share Japanese PM Shigeru Ishiba’s view of ‘Asian NATO’

File photo of External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.
| Photo Credit: ANI

 External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said India does not share Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s view of the Quad and other alliances involving Japan eventually forming an ‘Asian NATO’ like structure to deter China from using military force. Mr Ishiba, who assumed the office of Prime Minister today,  had expressed his views in a Hudson Institute paper released last week.

“He’s Japanese. This is a country which has a treaty relationship with the United States,” Mr Jaishankar said, adding that countries which had that history and that strategic culture would have a lexicon to match. The minister was speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) , a thinktank headquartered in Washington DC, where the minister is on an official visit.

 “ We have never been a treaty ally of any country. We don’t have that kind of strategic architecture in mind,” Mr Jaishankar said when asked about Mr Ishiba’s remarks.

The minister said he could see a certain evolution of this thinking where Mr Ishiba was concerned but that “would not be ours [ India’s thinking ] ”, and that India had a different history and a different way.

‘No Quad if Non-Aligned’ : Jaishankar

In a different segment of the discussion Mr Jaishankar had said that India was pursuing a policy of multi-alignment, a result of global rebalancing, accelerated by globalisation.  Asked to describe how that differed from non-alignment, India’s stated foreign policy doctrine for decades after its independence, Mr Jaishankar said it different in a few ways. For instance, he said, a non-aligned policy would not have been compatible with the Quad or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a grouping of India, the U.S., Australia and Japan.

India is now more willing to make choices, he said, adding that one of the characteristics of the non-aligned era was a reticence about an issue-based joining together with other countries.

I think that reticence is less where our stakes are involved,” he said, adding, “You would not have a Quad in the non-aligned era, you will have a Quad in [ the era of ] multi-alignment.”

The earlier era was also more defensive and less capability driven, he said, citing the example of Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea. Forty years ago India may have said something about it but now , it can also send ships and contribute to an international effort to secure sea lanes.

India is also willing to take more risks since it wanted certain outcomes, in the multi-aligned policy era, Mr Jaishankar said.