U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis described India as the "fulcrum" of security in the Indo-Pacific region as he traveled this week to an annual security conference in Singapore, attended for the first time by an Indian leader.
But if Mattis was hoping that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would use the platform to join the U.S., Japan and Australia — a grouping known as the Quad — in a more muscular challenge to China's regional expansion, he was disappointed. Instead, India's strongest leader in decades navigated carefully between the two regional military powers.
Modi studiously avoided any mention of the Quad in his speech, and he hammered the kind of protectionism currently practiced by the U.S., both of which were sure to satisfy Chinese delegates.