Blinken: U.S. Must Respect India's Right to Self-Defence and Hold Zero Tolerance on Terrorism

On Saturday, November 14, 2026, at a summit in New Delhi, former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat down for a conversation with Jawed Ashraf, chairman of the India Trade Promotion Organisation, and drew a sharp line between two relationships Washington manages in South Asia. India, he said, is a global force, and its shared interests with the United States are global in nature. The American relationship with Pakistan, by contrast, is regional.

Blinken did not write Pakistan out of the picture. There will still be important areas where the U.S. needs to work with Islamabad, he said, counter-terrorism among them. But he called the two relationships fundamentally different. His position on terrorism was blunt: the U.S. must have a zero-tolerance policy, period, and that means respecting India's right to defend itself.

He said American policy should do two things at once. It should support India's efforts to respond to attacks, and it should work diplomatically to keep tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad from escalating. He stressed that the two neighbours are nuclear-armed and that the destructive potential of those weapons makes de-escalation important. Looking back, he suggested that Cold War interests and the war in Afghanistan may have made successive U.S. administrations less critical of Pakistan's civil-military establishment, and said there is certainly an opportunity for the U.S. to do more.

On the India-U.S. relationship itself, Blinken described a shift over past decades from estrangement to what he called a genuine and in some ways unique partnership, built on converging strategic interests and underpinned by people-to-people ties. He named technology as the next step: cooperation in space, quantum technology and artificial intelligence. On Russia, he acknowledged the deep history between India and Russia and said Washington does not want New Delhi to end it, though the two countries will not always share the same perspective.

Blinken, who was the 71st Secretary of State from 2021 to 2025 under President Joe Biden, placed all this against what he called a profound inflection point. He said the speed and profundity of change exceeds anything in his lifetime, and noted that ChatGPT took one month to reach 50 million users, against 75 years for the telephone. Private companies, he said, increasingly drive technology while governments struggle to keep up, and growing inequality has left many younger people feeling left out and left behind.

He warned that the U.S. risks weakening itself by damaging cooperation among government, universities and research institutions, and by becoming less welcoming to skilled people from abroad. The biggest danger, he said, is a huge self-inflicted wound. On domestic politics, he said the results of the November 3 midterms went beyond the usual setback for a sitting president's party, and attributed them partly to frustration over the cost of living and concerns about corruption. Democrats won majorities in both the House and the Senate, taking Congress out of Republican control.

Blinken also addressed the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which President Donald Trump launched in February. He called it a war of choice and said the first Trump administration's 2018 withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA, contributed to the crisis. By his account, that deal required Iran to ship out 97% of its enriched uranium, limited its centrifuges and allowed extensive inspections; after the U.S. exit, Iran accelerated its programme. He said military action will not settle the matter: forcing the regime to capitulate is very hard, while getting it to negotiate is possible, and the two are very different things.

He called for an off-ramp, warning that escalation could bring attacks on regional infrastructure, U.S. bases and partner countries. The Strait of Hormuz, he said, was not a problem before the war but has become a major challenge for global energy supplies; since February, Iran has repeatedly restricted access to the narrow, heavily trafficked oil channel.

On the wider conflict in West Asia, he said a lasting settlement requires a sovereign Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel. He noted that roughly seven million Jews live in Israel and seven million Arabs and Palestinians live across Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza, and that no one is going anywhere, whatever extremists on both sides want. He acknowledged this is not a popular view. Blinken no longer holds office, so his remarks are those of a former official, not U.S. policy.