U.S. Institute of Peace

10/28/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/28/2024 10:21

Connecting West and East: Indian Ocean Security and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that the U.S. does not care about the Indian Ocean. Even after a U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific emerged in 2017, only a single substantive mention of the Indian Ocean appears in each of the three high-level U.S. strategy documents released in 2022: National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, and Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS). Instead, most of the attention to the Indian Ocean segment of the Indo-Pacific is focused on India, which has become a key U.S. partner and has arguably been the driving factor in the shift in U.S. strategy from the "Asia-Pacific" toward the Indo-Pacific.