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This story is from April 24, 2018

US Senate to confirm Mike Pompeo as 70th Secretary of State; US-India dialogue to resume

US-India ties, on the backburner for several months because of the rapid turnover in the higher echelons of the Trump administration, is expected to regain some momentum following the imminent confirmation of Mike Pompeo as the country’s 70th Secretary of State.
US Senate to confirm Mike Pompeo as 70th Secretary of State; US-India dialogue to resume
Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo. (AP photo)
Key Highlights
  • Mike Pompeo has been nominated by President Trump after he eased out Rex Tillerson.
  • Pompeo won a narrow endorsement by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) on Monday.
  • Senator Rand Paul, who had earlier pledged to oppose Pompeo, backed out after the Trump phone call.
WASHINGTON: US-India ties, on the backburner for several months because of the rapid turnover in the higher echelons of the Trump administration, is expected to regain some momentum following the imminent confirmation of Mike Pompeo as the country’s 70th Secretary of State.
Pompeo, 54, nominated by Trump after he had eased out Rex Tillerson, won a narrow endorsement by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) on Monday after the President intervened personally to convince a Republican holdout to support him.
Senator Rand Paul, who had pledged to oppose Pompeo because of doubts about some of Pompeo’s positions, backed own after the Trump phone call.
With two other Democratic Senators (Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Joe Donelly of Indiana) who are up for difficult re-elections in Republican leaning states also deciding to support Pompeo, the former CIA Director will escape the ignominy of being the only Secretary of State in history to be voted down by the SFRC.
Pompeo would have still made it to Foggy Bottom by virtue of the Republican majority in the full Senate, but the stigma of being rejected by the SFRC where the ruling party has a majority of one could have undercut his credentials as the nation’s top diplomat. Pompeo’s passage came on the day Trump welcome France's Emmanuel President Macron to the White House in what is described in some quarters as a "bromance" that will rekindle US alliance with its European partners.
New Delhi has lately been a distant thought in US foreign policy circles given more pressing concerns and issues. But India could be Pompeo’s first port of call after his confirmation considering Washington and New Delhi have had to repeatedly postpone the bilateral two-plus-two dialogue that has been due for several months now, with Tillerson’s resignation in March nixing the one scheduled for April 18-19.
The two-plus-two dialogue, an annual exercise that puts the top foreign and defense principals of the two sides together, will see two Indian women (External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman) engage with Pompeo and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Although, the Trump administration’s focus on North Korea and its vexations with China have been dominating headlines, the President’s foreign policy and national security team have also been trying to hammer out a settlement in Afghanistan that will substantially free the US from the region, in line with Trump’s view that American power and prestige should not be wasted in troubled regions.
US interlocutors have been traveling to Pakistan frequently in recent weeks to persuade Islamabad to fall in line with Trump’s South Asia/Afghan strategy that boils to the country completely rolling up its terrorism infrastructure and allowing India to engage in institution building in Afghanistan. They have met with little success, and the matter is expected to be bumped up to the new team of Pompeo, Mattis, and NSA John Bolton, all hardliners with little tolerance for defiance.
New Delhi too has a growing set of trade and commercial issues with Washington, including the gradual whittling down of US work visas through administrative instruments such as higher bar for compliance and fees. In the latest move, the Trump administration officials have indicated that they will roll back the Obama era rules that allowed spouses of H1B visa holders to work in the US under certain conditions.
"Our plans include proposing regulatory changes to remove H-4 dependent spouses from the class of aliens eligible for employment authorisation, thereby reversing the 2015 final rule that granted such eligibility," US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Francis Cissna wrote in a letter to Senator Chuck Grassley after weeks of reviewing a rule that allowed nearly 100,000 H1B spouses on a h-4 visas to work legally in the US.
Indians professionals were major beneficiaries of the Obama-era concession.
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