United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday said that Washington’s ties with Pakistan were not at the expense of the US’ deep relations with India.

Asked if New Delhi had expressed concerns about the Donald Trump administration’s strengthening ties with Islamabad, Rubio told reporters that “they really haven’t”.

“…we know they’re concerned for obvious reasons because of the tensions that have existed between Pakistan and India historically”, he added.

“But, I think they have to understand we have to have relations with a lot of different countries,” Rubio said. “We see an opportunity to expand our strategic relationship with Pakistan, and I think we’ve made – that’s our job, is to try to figure out how many countries we can find how we can work with on things of common interest.”

New Delhi is “very mature when it comes to diplomacy and things of that nature”, the secretary of state said.

“Look, they have some relationships with countries that we don’t have relationships with,” he added. “So, it’s part of a mature, pragmatic foreign policy. I don’t think anything we’re doing with Pakistan comes at the expense of our relationship or friendship with India, which is deep, historic and important.”

On Saturday, when asked if the US’ relations with Pakistan had strengthened based on Islamabad’s recognition of President Donald Trump’s claims of having mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan in May, Rubio said that he had reached out to Pakistan before the conflict started.

Rubio said he had told Pakistan that “we are interested in rebuilding an alliance, a strategic partnership with you”.

The secretary of state said that the US was looking to expand its “long history of partnering with Pakistan on counterterror and things of that nature”.

Rubio added that there will be “some difficulties and some challenges”.

The comments came two days before Rubio met Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Monday on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and East Asia summits in Malaysia.

After their meeting on Monday, Jaishankar said on social media that he “appreciated the discussion on our bilateral ties as well as regional and global issues”.

Trump has repeatedly claimed credit for brokering the ceasefire between India and Pakistan following the four-day conflict in May.

Rubio had on May 10 claimed that New Delhi and Islamabad had agreed to “start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site”.

New Delhi has rejected the claims and maintained that the ceasefire was not the result of mediation.

Diplomatic tensions have also erupted between New Delhi and Washington mainly because the US president imposed so-called reciprocal tariffs on Indian goods and punitive levies for purchasing Russian oil amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

The two countries are negotiating a trade deal.

Also read: India hyphen Pakistan: US rhetoric revives New Delhi’s nightmare

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