US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be in Beijing three days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi makes the visit to the US as an Indian leader in order to repair his nation’s deteriorating relations with China.

Big powers conduct their negotiations in this manner, openly reiterating the adage “Hold your friends close, but your enemies closer.” It’s a lesson Modi should keep in mind as he crosses the Atlantic in a few days and travels to Paris for the Bastille Day festivities the following month. You cannot hold countries and their citizens to ransom by imposing conditions on discussion if you want India to be a regional force and push its position in the globe.

It’s what makes America special. Everything, or most things, are front and centre, warts and all. Along with its strength and ambition, the US has never hesitated to articulate its challenges and dilemmas. It helped China shed its reluctance to join the real world in the 1980s and helped modernise the country by investing in it. Today, the US openly admits it will do everything in its power to cut down China because the latter is daring to become world number one.

Enter India. The Americans understand that India is already staring down the dragon on its icy frontiers in Ladakh – nothing like 100,000 Indian and Chinese troops eyeball-to-eyeball to concentrate the mind. It won’t take long to convince New Delhi to come on board because both have the Chinese threat in common.

Jake Sullivan is an interesting man to watch

Certainly, the Americans are laying it thick. US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti called National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval “an international treasure” at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) event Tuesday, held in honour of visiting US NSA Jake Sullivan. “Indians love Americans, and Americans love Indians,” Garcetti added.

The 46-year-old Sullivan’s presence in town makes another fact crystal clear. Sullivan wasn’t even born when the US sent the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier into the Bay of Bengal in the winter of 1971, warning India from attacking Pakistan. That fact, of the US coming on the side of Pakistan and not India, is so deeply embedded in New Delhi’s subconscious that it has largely defined what people generally think about the US and the Soviet Union’s successor State, Russia.

Sullivan’s looming presence in the India-US relationship is a stark reminder that 50 years on, the game has totally changed. That India is fast catching up to becoming a fast friend of the Americans, keenly aware that the economics is heavily stacked in favour of that relationship.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that Sullivan, not Blinken, is the linchpin of the India-US relationship.

For example, Sullivan and Doval signed the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET) in January, which is expected to lay the foundation of the countries’ future relationship based on artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and science research. According to the Hindustan Times, the US National Security Council is “working closely with the Association of American Universities and National Science Foundation to leverage Indian talent in the STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] space.”

Only the really old-timers will remember how the Americans refused to share super-computing information with India during the Rajiv Gandhi years. The Soviet Union was still around then, and the Americans, presumably, felt that India could leak this further to Moscow. This refusal pushed Indian scientists to up their own game. What a far cry today, just over 50 years later, as India and the US veer toward each other, hoping to consolidate each other’s strengths.

Sullivan is clearly an interesting man to watch. He was Hillary Clinton’s key foreign policy advisor, part of her inner sanctum when she stood for president. He was also Joe Biden’s NSA when he was vice-president. The US President has called him a “once-in-a-generation intellect.” As Biden’s eyes and ears, he knows he can gently push top people in the administration – like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief Willian Burns, commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and defence minister Lloyd Austin – to get the work done.

Sullivan is a crucial asset for Biden, much like Doval, who has been as Modi’s go-to foreign policy advisor for a number of years and is in charge of all the nations that border India except for Russia and China. Doval was addressing Sullivan by his first name at the CII event, revealing a closeness that must have been established when the two signed the iCET deal in January. Doval, who was then 78, said to Sullivan at the time: “Jake, we have to deliver on this soon.”

(This story has not been edited by Bharat Express staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)