US CongressMan Asks Not To Response To Taiwan On Basis Of Judging Ties

A senior member of the US Congress from Hawaii, the Indo-Pacific Command's (Indopacom) headquarters has stated that it would be a "waste of time" to use the responses to a potential crisis in the Taiwan Straits as the standard by which to evaluate allies and partners. However, Ed Case, a representative of the House Appropriations Committee and its subcommittee on defence, told at his office in the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill that every nation, including India, needed to be concerned about the threat Beijing poses to the "rules-based international order" throughout the entire Indo-Pacific and prepare accordingly.

In the lead-up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's state visit to the US, Case praised India's expanded diplomatic ties with the Pacific Islands and said that India and Hawaii had a natural affinity for one another. He declared that leadership was in India's future. Case welcomed Modi to his state and recommended that in order to lessen the risk to China, India and the US should depend more on one another.

With concerns over what India could or might not do during a US-China conflict in East Asia, Case remarked that “If we are going to judge every move by any country — ally, partner, potential partner or ally, today’s adversary that may be tomorrow’s ally or partner — by what they say they would or won’t do if China tried to invade Taiwan, then we are going to spin our wheels a lot about that," reported Hindustan Times.