David Wurmser, a former senior US foreign policy adviser, in an exclusive interview with Times Now Digital, emphasised that India should be prioritized as a crucial ally, similar to Japan, Israel, and the UK.
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David Wurmser, a former senior US foreign policy adviser who served under Vice-President Dick Cheney and at the State Department under John R. Bolton, has called Washington’s decades-long neutrality between India and Pakistan “one of the great mistakes” of American policy, arguing, in an exclusive interview with Times Now Digital, that it is New Delhi, not Islamabad, that must become one of America’s “key foundational allies.”
The intervention lands at a pointed moment. US President Donald Trump has spent recent weeks publicly courting Pakistan, hosting its army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and praising Islamabad’s role in mediating with Iran, while repeatedly claiming credit for an India-Pakistan ceasefire that New Delhi has flatly rejected.
Wurmser, who was also a long-time foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, told Times Now Digital that India should be treated as a strategic partner on a par with Japan, Israel and the UK.
“I believe it is one of the great mistakes of American policy to remain neutral between Pakistan and India. On virtually every major strategic question, India must become one of America’s key foundational allies in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as in the areas that connect to it,” Wurmser said.
Wurmser argued that India’s strategic importance to the United States should be recognised more explicitly.
“I believe India will have to play a major role, along with other key allies such as Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Greece, in securing a stable environment stretching from the Pacific to the Mediterranean. There are forces at work there that are destabilising and dangerous — both in terms of the regional politics of Asia and the Middle East, and in terms of the global challenge to the stability of the world,” he said.
Calling India “an indispensable nation”, Wurmser said he expected bilateral ties to deepen further. “India is an indispensable nation in helping maintain that stability, and I believe Indian-American relations will improve to the level we see with some other countries, such as Japan, Israel or the UK, because they simply must.”