The United States government on Tuesday announced that its military’s US Indo-Pacific Command will revert to its original name, the US Pacific Command.
The move restores the name under which the military command operated for over seven decades.
The decision by the Department of War reversed a change introduced in 2018, when the US government, during Donald Trump’s first term as the president, had renamed the command as the Indo-Pacific Command.
Washington had at the time cited the growing strategic importance of the Indian Ocean region and its increasing integration with the security situation in the Pacific Ocean.
On Tuesday, the Department of War said that the restoration of the name was intended to honour the command’s historical identity and legacy. It noted that the command was established by former US President Harry Truman on January 1, 1947.
“The command operated under the USPACOM banner for over 70 years, standing as the oldest and largest of the United States' unified combatant commands,” the department said.
The department said that the command’s areas of responsibility – spanning the waters of the US West Coast to India’s western border – remains the same.
In India, the Congress said that when the military command was renamed in 2018, the Union government had described it as a victory and “beat the drum of [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi becoming the vishwaguru”.
“Now that the United States has changed the name of this region, there’s pin-drop silence,'“ the Opposition party said. “Not a single word is being said by the Modi government.”
The Congress alleged that Modi was “completely compromised, unable to utter a word in front of Trump” and that the “country is paying the price for this”.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor questioned whether the development amounts to “one more nail in the coffin” of the Quad, or the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, that comprises India, the US, Japan and Australia.
In a similar vein, defence analyst Pravin Sawhney described the decision as “extremely significant”, and said it indicated that the US had “no geopolitical use” for India in the Asia-Pacific region. “Moreover, in the so-called India’s backyard [South Asia], China and Pakistan will now have geopolitical, geoeconomic & military sway,” he remarked on social media.
Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Sara Varghese.
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