“US Today Is A Much More Flexible Partner”: Jaishankar On Relationships With Other Countries
The Minister revealed that China has no “credible explanation” for violating agreements of the bilateral ties
Mumbai: Referring to relationships with other countries, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday said that the US is today a much more flexible partner, much more open to ideas, suggestions and working arrangements than in the past.
“I have been dealing with the US for close to 40 years now. US today is a much more flexible partner, much more open to ideas, suggestions, working arrangements, than in the past,” Jaishankar said in response to a query during the panel discussion “Greater Power Competition: The Emerging World Order” at the Bloomberg New Economic Forum in Singapore on Friday.
“There is no question that the US has strategically contracted for some time. Relatively and absolutely, American power and American influence are not what they used to be. It is also clear China has been expanding, but the nature of China, the manner of its growing influence is very different from the US, and we don’t have a situation where China necessarily replaces the others – US,” he added.
Further talking about China, the Minister revealed that China has no “credible explanation” for violating agreements and it is for the Chinese leadership to answer where they want to take the bilateral relationship.
Jaishankar said, “I don’t think the Chinese have any doubt on where we stand on our relationship and what’s not gone right with it. I’ve been meeting my counterpart Wang Yi a number of times. As you would’ve experienced, I speak fairly clear, reasonably understandably there is no lack of clarity so if they want to hear it I am sure they would have heard it.”
“We are going through a particularly bad patch in our relationship because they have taken a set of actions in violation of agreements for which they still don’t have a credible explanation and that indicates some rethink about where they want to take our relationship, but that’s for them to answer,” he further said, in an apparent reference to the eastern Ladakh border clash with China.
Referring to Quad, the grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the US, Jaishankar said, “It is a good example of some countries coming together on a certain set of concerns or issues of interest.”
“This reflects a very different kind of world we are moving into the real transition after 1982 is now occurring” he added.
Answering a question about how the world is changing, he said it is not unipolar and not bipolar either.
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