Revive the South Asia Strategy

The Problem

The policy landscape President-elect Trump will inherit in South Asia has changed dramatically since his first term, even as U.S. objectives in the wider Indo-Pacific have endured. A key question for the incoming administration is how it plans to prioritize, deconflict, and balance U.S. interests within South Asia alongside broader policy goals in the Indo-Pacific, where competition with China is paramount. The first Trump administration developed both South Asia and Indo-Pacific strategies, with the former framing the region through the lens of the war in Afghanistan and the latter focused on India as a counterbalance to China. The Biden administration, in contrast, opted against a public-facing South Asia strategy and instead relied on an updated Indo-Pacific policy to guide its approach toward the region.

As the Trump administration returns to Washington, the President-elect’s team would do well to revive its original approach, developing a standalone strategy for South Asia alongside its broader Indo-Pacific goals. Doing so would bring several benefits. First, a South Asia strategy would provide a space for the administration to fully define its policy toward India beyond its role in the China context. India has grown into a global player with influence and equities far beyond the Indo-Pacific, and one that merits a more comprehensive approach. Second, it would provide top-level policy guidance on all the countries in the region, including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Both are excluded from the Indo-Pacific strategy but remain countries in which U.S. interests are at stake. Especially given Pakistan’s enduring rivalry with India, its partnership with China, and its significant nuclear arsenal, this would fill a critical gap. Third, a separate regional policy would allow the administration to define U.S. goals in the region beyond those driven by competition with China. South Asia represents a key area of opportunity for the U.S. given its economic potential, global diaspora, and technology ecosystem, and region-specific policy guidance could best leverage those strengths.

Crucially, through developing a standalone South Asia strategy alongside an updated Indo-Pacific policy, the incoming administration could identify new synergies between the two as well as ease emerging points of friction. Washington’s focus on strategic competition with Beijing suggests Indo-Pacific priorities will likely win out over South Asia-specific interests. But the process of developing both policies in tandem would allow the administration to ensure optimal alignment between the two while managing competing priorities.

Essential Context

Regional policy approaches

The first Trump administration’s South Asia strategy, unveiled in a speech early in Trump’s tenure, defined U.S. policy in the region primarily through the lens of the war in Afghanistan. It called for a conditions-based approach to the war effort while criticizing Pakistan for sheltering militants and calling on India to provide more economic assistance to Afghanistan. The strategy briefly noted the risk of nuclear escalation between India and Pakistan, as well as the threat of a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland, including one involving nuclear materials. At no point in the speech was China mentioned. Instead, the strategy’s focus was on shaping the future of a war that has since ended on terms far different than those that Trump set out in his policy speech.

The Trump administration also developed a strategy for the broader Indo-Pacific region. Just before departing the White House, Trump’s team released a declassified version of the U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific, which prioritized maintaining U.S. “diplomatic, economic, and military preeminence in the fastest-growing region of the world” and countering China’s efforts to prevent the U.S. from “achiev[ing] its national interests in the Indo-Pacific.” The strategy framed India as a partner in “counter[ing] Chinese influence in South and Southeast Asia and other regions of mutual concern.” It sought an India that “remains preeminent in South Asia” by “accelerat[ing] India’s rise and capacity to serve as a net provider of security.” Goals within broader South Asia were limited to strengthening the capacity of emerging partners, including Maldives, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, “to contribute to a free and open order.” Notably, Pakistan and Afghanistan were not mentioned.

Four years later, the Biden administration leaves office having maintained many of the same policy goals in the Indo-Pacific but without having outlined a public-facing, standalone South Asia strategy. Biden’s 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy offered support to “a strong India” as a “net security provider” and did not include Pakistan or Afghanistan. It framed India as a “like-minded partner and leader in South Asia and the Indian Ocean” and pledged to “support India’s continued rise” while “working together … to promote stability in South Aisa.” Within the wider region, the strategy focused on “humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief needs, maritime security, water scarcity, and pandemic response.” Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy hit on similar themes, not mentioning Pakistan and expressing confidence in the U.S.’s over-the-horizon counterterrorism capacity in Afghanistan while pledging to “ensure Afghanistan never again serves as a safe haven for terrorist attacks on the United States or our allies.”

Evolving regional landscape

The past four years have seen significant developments in South Asia with implications for U.S. policy in the region. The most notable change from Trump’s previous term is in Afghanistan, where the 2020 Doha agreement with the Taliban paved the way for the Biden administration’s August 2021 withdrawal and the Taliban takeover. Post-withdrawal, the U.S. no longer has a military presence in the region, even as terrorism remains a significant challenge both within Afghanistan and beyond. Human rights concerns are acute in Afghanistan, as is humanitarian need. Elsewhere in the region, countries including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Maldives have seen political transitions since Trump’s first term that pose both risks and opportunities for Washington. Pakistan, while again led by the same party as when Trump first came to office, has endured a political power struggle alongside economic and security challenges over the past four years and continues building out its nuclear capabilities.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains at the helm in India, albeit within a coalition government and amid ongoing bilateral friction over alleged targeting of dissidents on U.S. soil and a bribery scheme. More broadly, India’s stature on the global stage has grown, buoyed by its economic growth, deft diplomacy, and geopolitical tailwinds. New Delhi has managed to both deepen ties with the U.S. and grow its trade relationship with Russia over the course of the Ukraine war. India has burnished its reputation as a leader of the Global South and positioned itself to play a potential role in conflict mediation well beyond South Asia. While New Delhi and Beijing recently reached an agreement to disengage after a four-year border standoff, their protracted tensions ensured that India now sees China as its primary adversary and the U.S. as a critical partner. For its part, China has continued its efforts to cultivate influence across South Asia with varying degrees of success, driven both by its own overreach and regional domestic factors.

Friction points and missed opportunities

The primacy of the Indo-Pacific strategy in the Biden administration’s approach reflected U.S. prioritization of competition with China, but the strategy did not sufficiently address areas not covered by Indo-Pacific policy goals or where they clashed with other key U.S. policy objectives. These include:

Nuclear risk

Managing nuclear risk is a vital U.S. interest in a region home to nuclear-armed rival states China, India, and Pakistan. Beijing’s ongoing nuclear modernization is driving a regional arms race, with India and Pakistan, in turn, developing more and more capable weapons and delivery systems to keep pace. While nuclear signaling has not featured prominently in past India-China crises, the same cannot be said for India and Pakistan, which have fought four wars over the past seven decades and endured several nuclear-tinged crises. India’s nuclear arsenal now outnumbers Pakistan’s, and its growing capabilities in the maritime and space domains and in missile defense and emerging technologies drive Pakistani anxieties. Likewise contributing to Pakistan’s threat perceptions are foreign military sales and technology transfers to India, including from the United States. New Delhi frames these capabilities as critical to deterring Chinese aggression, but Islamabad instead views them as destabilizing assets that could be leveraged in a future crisis scenario with Pakistan. Pakistan, meanwhile, continues to increase its military dependency on China across all three services, contributing to Indian perceptions of a two-front threat.

Another element of nuclear risk in the region is the role the U.S. has traditionally played to encourage de-escalation between the two sides as an external crisis manager. Washington had historically been seen as a relatively neutral third party, but it sided more clearly with India in the most recent India-Pakistan crisis in line with the deepening strategic partnership between New Delhi and Washington. In a future crisis, U.S. policymakers could be forced to grapple with how to balance the immediate interest of crisis de-escalation with the long-term goal of deepening cooperation with New Delhi in the Indo-Pacific. Especially given China’s support to Pakistan in the most recent crisis and its likely role going forward, the U.S. policy goal of reducing nuclear risk in South Asia increasingly intersects with Indo-Pacific strategy objectives.

Counterterrorism

Militant groups are ascendent in parts of South Asia, including along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and Baloch Liberation Army are carrying out attacks with alarming frequency. The March 2024 attack in Moscow by Islamic State-Khorasan Province demonstrated the Afghanistan-based group’s continued will and capacity to strike targets well beyond the region. Indian-administered Kashmir has likewise seen a rise in attacks of late, and some analysts warn of a growing threat of extremism in Bangladesh following the fall of the Awami League government and instability in India’s northeast along its restive border with Myanmar. These threats are not addressed under the Indo-Pacific strategy, with some former officials arguing that they constitute a distraction from the more urgent imperative of strategic competition with China. Nonetheless, they remain real threats in South Asia that could impact vital U.S. interests through the risk of an attack on the homeland or key partner or ally, as well as through potential instability in a region with nuclear capabilities. What’s more, states that are distracted by internal challenges are less effective partners for Indo-Pacific strategic objectives.

Regional priorities

U.S. interests in South Asia are broad and varied given the region’s significant potential and its diverse challenges. By prioritizing strategic competition, the existing Indo-Pacific strategy fails to capture these diverse interests and by default privileges those most in line with U.S. objectives in the region vis-à-vis China. One example is India’s growing profile outside the region as both a leader of the Global South and an emerging player beyond the Indo-Pacific. New Delhi’s increasing weight on the world stage – including as a potential conflict mediator between Ukraine and Russia and key node in Middle East connectivity – highlights the aspects of its role that extend well beyond the ambit of the Indo-Pacific and that are thus are not fully captured in the strategy. Primarily defining relations with South Asian states through an Indo-Pacific framework also complicates ties with the many regional states which seek to avoid choosing sides between Washington and Beijing (as well as India). While competition with China is undoubtedly a defining aspect of U.S. policy in the region, this narrow frame could limit regional receptivity to U.S. engagement perceived as adversarial to China. 

More broadly, the Indo-Pacific strategy’s focus on India as both the regional leader and net-security provider does not account for instances in which the U.S. and India do not see eye-to-eye on regional priorities or where India’s own history in the region brings unhelpful baggage. Bangladesh is one such example, where U.S. concerns over human rights and governance conflicted with India’s strong support for the Awami League government before its fall. Baseless allegations by Indian analysts that the U.S. was behind the change in government speak to the lingering distrust on this issue, which impacts bilateral cooperation more broadly. Relations with Pakistan are another instance of imperfect alignment, as India has minimized its engagement with Pakistan while the U.S. has sought to chart a new, albeit limited, path for ties given its enduring interests. Regarding India itself, the U.S. has expressed concerns over New Delhi’s treatment of minorities and deep ties to Russia as well as the alleged targeting of dissidents abroad. These issues are not captured in the Indo-Pacific strategy and have complicated its implementation.

Policy Recommendations

Even as the Trump administration looks to calibrate its own regional policy objectives, the process of developing a standalone South Asia strategy would allow for that prioritization to occur while taking into account the full region and range of U.S. interests in South Asia. Accordingly, the incoming administration should take the following steps to unlock the full potential for strategic engagement in the region:

Develop a comprehensive South Asia strategy. The incoming administration should direct its national security team and relevant agencies to invest attention and resources into the development of an updated South Asia strategy that clearly articulates U.S. interests in the region, allowing Washington to manage challenges and leverage opportunities. It should also recognize the potential for regional states to play key roles beyond South Asia and identify U.S. policy objectives in line with this extra-regional engagement.

This strategy should cover all South Asian states – including Pakistan and Afghanistan – to establish clear priorities among the U.S. interests in the region. These include nonproliferation and nuclear risk, counterterrorism, economic growth and debt sustainability, trade and investment, energy security and environmental concerns, and technology cooperation. While the incoming Trump administration is unlikely to focus on issues including governance, climate, and India’s Russia relationship to the same extent as did the Biden administration, other issues including India’s economic protectionism and trade balance could rise in importance. Regardless of the outcome, this standalone strategy would allow the administration to define and deconflict its full range of regional priorities.

Develop a targeted Indo-Pacific strategy. In tandem, the Trump administration should develop a revised version of the Indo-Pacific strategy that clearly delineates the Chinese activities most concerning for U.S. interests, including issues like economic coercion beyond the hard security domain. While China’s reach across the region and beyond ensures that nearly every issue has a China nexus, an Indo-Pacific strategy that seeks to cover them all risks overreach and dilution of impact. Instead, a policy that is more narrowly focused on those areas that are critical from a strategic competition perspective – and on the ability of cross-regional groupings like the Quad, AUKUS, and other minilaterals to address them – will be most effective.

This targeted strategy will both allow the United States to more effectively choose its battles and to focus its efforts in countering the most immediate threats. It will also provide reassurance to regional partners reluctant to take sides that the U.S. is not attempting to force a hard break with China across the board. Buttressed by standalone regional strategies for South Asia and potentially also Southeast and East Asia, the Indo-Pacific strategy can better direct efforts and coordinate cross-regional responses.

Leverage opportunities and manage fiction between both strategies. Having developed both South Asia and Indo-Pacific strategies, the administration should identify areas in which U.S. interests in the region intersect with or diverge from those tied to strategic competition. While India is likely to remain the key pillar of U.S. economic and security engagement in the region as well as a critical partner in global priorities, Washington should be mindful of the impact of New Delhi’s growing capabilities on regional threat perceptions and strategic stability. Similarly, the United States should ensure that it maintains a level of engagement with Pakistan sufficient to provide a viable alternative to China in cases when it is in U.S. interests to do so, and to maintain open lines of communication on critical issues including strategic stability and counterterrorism.

Region-wide, a shared goal of both the South Asia and Indo-Pacific strategies should be to deepen regional connectivity and economic integration, both of which serve to maximize the region’s growth potential while building internal resilience against economic coercion. Another area of overlap is a focus on supply chain diversification in order to both build out regional capacity and reduce dependencies on China. Finally, developing both strategies in tandem could help to drive additional focus on the Indian Ocean within the Indo-Pacific framework, an important corrective in response to criticism that Pacific issues too often dominate Indo-Pacific policy implementation.

Taken together, distinct yet complementary South Asia and Indo-Pacific strategies offer the incoming administration an opportunity to better align U.S. objectives with the evolving realities of the region. A comprehensive policy approach for all of South Asia can address challenges and harness opportunities specific to the region, while a streamlined Indo-Pacific strategy ensures clarity in countering China’s influence. Combined, these policies can be more than the sum of their parts, providing the Trump administration with a coherent framework for navigating complex regional dynamics and advancing U.S. interests.