WASHINGTON: India does not share the vision for an “Asian Nato” called for by Japan’s new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said on Tuesday.

Jaishankar told an event at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that unlike Japan, India had never been a treaty ally of another country.

“We don’t have that kind of strategic architecture in mind,” he said when asked about Ishiba’s call. India and Japan, along with the United States and Australia, are part of the so-called Quad grouping of countries established as a counterbalance to China.

“We have … a different history and different way of approaching…,” said Jaishankar, who spoke at the UN General Assembly in New York last week.

Ishiba said on Tuesday he would seek deeper ties with friendly nations to counter the gravest security threats Japan has faced since World War Two.

He called for the creation of an “Asian Nato”, the stationing of Japanese troops on US soil and even for shared control of Washington’s nuclear weapons as a deterrent against Japan’s nuclear-armed neighbours, China, Russia and North Korea. He argues that the changes would deter China from using military force in Asia. The United States has brushed off the idea.

The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said last year that Washington was not looking to create a “Nato in the Indo-Pacific” and this month Daniel Kritenbrink, the US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, said it was too early for such talk.

Ishiba nevertheless doubled down on his idea on Friday, telling a press conference that “the relative decline of US might” made an Asian treaty organisation necessary.

Published in Dawn, October 2nd, 2024