The US on Tuesday restored the name of the US Indo-Pacific Command to US Pacific Command, reversing an eight-year-old decision of the first Trump administration that was then projected as a sign of the growing importance of the Indian Ocean region and India to Washington.
While the US department of war described the decision to revert to the original name of America’s oldest and largest unified military command as “restoring legacy” and maintained that USPACOM’s “fundamental mission and its unwavering commitment to maintaining a free and open theatre alongside regional allies and partners are unchanged”, at least two former Indian foreign secretaries saw otherwise.
Nirupama Menon Rao, who has also been India’s ambassador to the US, said in a post on X that this is “potentially the downgrading of Indo-Pacific symbolism”. Together with President Donald Trump’s “dead economy” comment about India, the death of Indian seafarers, the sharp exchange between external affairs minister S. Jaishankar and secretary of state Marco Rubio in its wake, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remarks about global shortage of trust at a G7 meeting on Tuesday, it suggests that the “exuberant phase of India-US relations may be ending”, she said.
Kanwal Sibal saw the renaming as another blow to the bilateral relationship delivered by Trump and his team, noting that the decision was announced just before the Modi-Trump meeting at Evian, France, on the sidelines of the G7 summit. This is the first time the two met since the February 2025 session at the White House soon after Trump assumed office for the second time.
The US statement further said that “USPACOM’s vast area of responsibility — spanning from the waters off the West Coast of the United States to the western border of India — remains exactly the same”. However, experts aver that the command’s rebranding suggests that the priorities could change.
In 2018, then US secretary of state James Mattis had sought to explain the symbolism of changing the name of USPACOM to USINDOPACOM as a reflection of American willingness to “adapt the name of the command to reflect more accurately its focus”.
Responding to a question at the 2018 Shangri-La Dialogue, he had said: “As we’ve looked right now at the role of the Indian Ocean with the largest democracy in the world coming into its own with economic progress there in India, we need to recognise that there’s a growing significance to the Indian Ocean, to the Indian subcontinent, and certainly to India itself. So I want to make certain that the title actually reflects the reality. And there’s a changing reality. The world’s always changing, and that’s all this was.”
Reacting to the development, the Congress noted that the Modi government had in 2018 touted the command’s renaming as its victory and projected the Prime Minister as the “Vishwaguru”.
“Now that the United States has changed the name of this region, there’s a pin-drop silence. Not a single word is being said from the Modi government. Narendra Modi is completely compromised, unable to utter a word in front of Trump. The entire country is paying the price for this,” the Congress posted on X.
Congress MP and former minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor wondered whether this was “one more nail in the coffin of the Quad”, which had been relaunched in 2017 just before USPACOM was renamed in keeping with Washington opting to refer to this region as Indo-Pacific in place of the older Asia-Pacific construct that pivoted around China.
Though the US is still engaged with the Quad and the foreign ministers met just last month in New Delhi, there has not been a leaders’ summit since 2024.