By Prashanth Parameswaran
The week witnessed the birth of the much-anticipated trilateral ministerial. What does it mean?
On September 29, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hosted the foreign ministers of Japan and India for the first ever trilateral ministerial meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The event was no doubt a significant development. While the United States, Japan, and India have been meeting at the assistant secretary level over the past few years, this meeting between their foreign ministers represents an official elevation of the trilateral dialogue.
For close observers of Asian security affairs, this was a long-anticipated development. Though the idea of elevating the trilateral dialogue has been discussed since 2011, the seventh iteration of the U.S.-Japan-India trilateral dialogue held in Honolulu in June was still at the assistant secretary of state level. But as I reported for The Diplomat in July, Vice President Joe Biden said in a speech at a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that Washington was “looking to schedule a ministerial level trilateral” this fall (See: “US Will Hold Elevated Trilateral Dialogue with India and Japan”).
That this has finally occurred is testament to the growing role that all three democracies – which represent a quarter of the world’s population and economic production power – have played individually in the Indo-Pacific region as well as the convergence between them. As Kerry alluded to in his remarks to reporters before the meeting, the U.S. rebalance to the Asia-Pacific under the Obama administration, India’s new Act East Policy under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Japan’s reinvigorated role as a ‘proactive contributor to peace’ under its premier Shinzo Abe, have all been powerful indicators of the importance these players attach to the region (See for instance: “Modi Unveils India’s ‘Act East Policy’ to ASEAN in Myanmar”). All three legs of the triangle have also been strengthened recently, with positive momentum seen in U.S.-India, U.S.-Japan and India-Japan ties over the past year (See for instance: “Modi in Japan: Great Expectations”).
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