US President Donald Trump is continuously saying that the US has great relations with both India and Pakistan. The US is strengthening its strategic and economic partnership with India in 2025. Amid the changing strategic landscape, an old video of an ex-US Envoy has resurfaced on the Internet. Former US Ambassador Nicholas Burns made these comments at a Brookings Institution event in 2016.
His assessment of the US approach to South Asia underscored the persistent differences in Washington’s relationships with India and Pakistan, a distinction that is becoming increasingly relevant amid current geopolitical developments.
Burns cautioned against equating US ties with the two countries, and said, “It would be a great mistake if we attempted to frame our relations with these two countries as some kind of, you know, we have to have equal treatment and equal levels of interest, because we have an entirely different relationship with India— much more positive, much more engaged, much more integrated than we do with Pakistan.”
BREAKING: U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns drops a bombshell: “Treating India and Pakistan the same would be a mistake. Our ties with India are growing stronger — but we don't trust Pakistan.” pic.twitter.com/uWt29JoljK
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He made these remarks during a discussion on regional stability and historical US diplomacy in South Asia, noting that the situation has undergone significant changes since the 1999 Kargil conflict. “I was thinking back to the strategic situation that Strobe [Talbott] dealt with as Deputy Secretary. It was entirely different. We had a closer relationship with Pakistan… President Clinton and Strobe were able to play a role in diffusing a crisis, the Kargil crisis, because of the influence we had in Islamabad,” he said.
US Relations With India And Pakistan
Burns compared that influence to the reduced leverage the US held by 2016. He said, “I don’t think President Obama has that degree of influence now. The US-Pakistan relationship has clearly suffered because of our lack of confidence in Pakistan over its inability to fight terrorist groups on its own soil that have led to the deaths of Americans in Afghanistan.”
Burns cited former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to reinforce the strategic reasoning behind the shift, saying, “Condi Rice was absolutely right in March 2005 when she first went to India… She said, it does not make strategic sense for the United States to have some kind of equal strategic interest in these two countries when clearly our relationship with India is rising. And I would never want to see us go back.”
As the US focuses on its long-term Indo-Pacific vision, Burns’ 2016 comments highlight the significant progress in the Washington-Delhi relations and why the US no longer pursues a balance between India and Pakistan.
