Washington, Sep 30 (IANS) John Huntsman, a leading Republican presidential aspirant says the US needed to focus on ties with India as the US-Pakistan relationship was ‘a merely transactional relationship, straight up, nothing more’.
‘Shoring up the relationship with India needs to happen yesterday, and I don’t see movements in that regard. The region is a very volatile one,’ said the former Utah governor, who quit his last job as US ambassador to China to take on President Barack Obama in the 2012 poll.
‘We have a good partner in India. We share common values. We share a democratic heritage. And we ought to shore up our intelligence-gathering capability and our military-to-military links with India and prepare for what could be a very rocky region,’ he told MSNBC in an interview.
America’s bilateral relationship with Pakistan is a carry-over from the Cold War, he said. ‘It had the potential to, I think, be a good bilateral relationship. Today it’s transactional, and that puts us in a bad position.’
‘There is a very young demographic with 180 million people…They have nuclear weapons. They’re in a very unstable neighbourhood,’ he said.
‘It means that we have a very important opportunity to shore up our relationship with India. It means we can shore up our dialogue with people within the region.
‘This is probably the one relationship in the world that should keep any American leader up at night because you do not have leadership in that country (Pakistan) right now, and you have elements within the Pakistani government that practically have gone rogue,’ Huntsman said.
Touting his foreign policy credentials, Huntsman said that his experience in diplomacy would distinguish him from previous Republican presidents who had ‘very little exposure to the world’.
‘I’ve lived overseas four times. I’ve been an ambassador three times for my country. I know a little bit about foreign policy,’ he said. ‘And I think I stand on that stage as a unique candidate having been a practitioner of foreign policy.’
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
