WASHINGTON: The United States said on Thursday that India's stewardship of the G-20 is off to a very promising start after New Delhi hosted a meeting of the group's foreign ministers that was very successful.
"We are extremely appreciative of our Indian partners' leadership of the G-20 to this point." "India is off to a very promising start with its stewardship of the G-20," State Department Spokesperson Ned Price told reporters at his daily news conference. "And as you alluded to, there is a lot more work to be done over the course of this year."
Price stated that Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his counterpart, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, discussed the India-US partnership in New Delhi. Price referred to the ties the United States has with India as one of the most important relationships.
He explained, "And that's because we work closely with India on just about everything that is a priority for us and everything that is a priority for India, including increasing our mutual prosperity, supporting democracy, addressing the climate crisis, and upholding a rules-based order grounded in international law."
He stated, "It is that point, the rules-based order, that is so important to us all over the world, but especially to the United States and India in the Indo-Pacific context." A vision that we share with our Indian counterparts is that it is contributing to the creation and maintenance of a free and open Indo-Pacific region."
Blinken and Jaishankar talked about how India has hosted the G-20 finance and foreign ministers so far and put together an agenda that lets them talk about the most important issues of global and strategic partnerships.
Price stated, "The G-20 is a significant instrument for India and the United States." We have witnessed the G-20's ability to unite nations for collective action. We believe that what we have witnessed in India over the past few days was not an exception. According to Price, "the United States, for our part, participated in this foreign minister meeting with two imperatives in mind: first, to ensure that the G-20, once more with India at the helm, was a success, which it was evidently,"
"And secondly, to demonstrate how the United States and our partners are working together to build a world that is more prosperous, more sustainable, more inclusive in terms of the global economy, and that meets the needs of people all over the world, whether that's food, energy, health, or helping people face challenges and threats like fentanyl and drugs, climate change, COVID, and everything in between," he said.
The spokesperson for the State Department responded to a question by stating, "There are nations all over the world that have a relationship with Russia that is distinct from the one that the United States has." That category includes India without a doubt. India and Russia have a long history together. He stated, "It is connected in ways in Russia that the United States is not and has not been."
"India also has a lot of leverage in a variety of areas, including moral leverage, diplomatic leverage, economic leverage, and political leverage. We have witnessed from Prime Minister Modi a remarkable capacity for moral clarity in Indian speech. Price stated, "When Prime Minister Modi and his country say something to that effect, it is meaningful to the United States. When Prime Minister Modi said last year that this is not an era of war, the world listened, as they should."
"We have a global strategic partnership, a country that has a relationship with Russia that we don't," he said, referring to India's unique position as the G-20 host.
He also mentioned how the G20 foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi was unable to produce a joint communiqué because of the growing discord over the Ukraine conflict between Russia and the Western powers led by the US and India.
Although the External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar stated that there were disagreements regarding the Ukraine conflict, the meeting was unable to agree on the joint communique, and the Chair's Summary and Outcome Document containing a list of various key priorities was adopted by the meeting.
Price stated, "Of course, this was a chair of summary that, with the exception of two key paragraphs, was subscribed to by all 20 members of the G-20." We as a whole realize those two nations being referred to, Russia and China. The issue at hand, Russia's brutal war of aggression against Ukraine, is well known to everyone, he stated.
"I think it was pretty notable that the key paragraph referenced the essential need to uphold international law and the multilateral system that safeguards peace and stability,” he stated. "But when it comes to the broader set of issues that neither Russia nor China could agree to accept," he added.
Price asserted that it is a paragraph that discusses defending and protecting the UN Charter's principles, ensuring that nations adhere to international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians and infrastructure during armed conflict, and establishing nations' positions on the strongly condemned use of nuclear weapons in any conflict.
He stated that the fact that neither China nor Russia were able to sign on to a paragraph that ought to be as basic, simple, and common sense as that is speaks volumes about the two nations that claim to believe in the UN Charter, have been permanent members of the UN Security Council, and consistently raise international law and the principles of the UN Charter, only to ignore them in situations like this one.