Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Seychelles underscores the growing centrality of the Indian Ocean to India’s strategic calculus. It also provides an opportunity to examine a broader transformation unfolding across the wider Indo-Pacific. India’s expanding outreach across the Indian Ocean and Australia’s growing security engagement in the Pacific reflect the increasing strategic importance of the two maritime theatres that the Indo-Pacific framework sought to connect. At the same time, Washington appears to be rethinking the strategic logic that has underpinned its engagement across this wider region. The result is not a single coordinated shift, but an evolving regional order in which the organising principles themselves may be changing.

If India and Australia illustrate how regional powers are adapting to an evolving Indo-Pacific, Washington’s own strategic thinking suggests that the organising logic of the region may also be changing. The Pentagon’s decision to rename the US Indo-Pacific Command as the US Pacific Command (PACOM) is one manifestation of that shift. The change may appear symbolic, yet it raises a larger question: Is Washington moving away from the Indo-Pacific as the organising principle of its regional strategy towards a more selective approach centred on strategic utility, burden-sharing and balance-of-power politics?

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The Indo-Pacific was never merely a geographical construct. It was a strategic idea. As China’s power expanded, Washington sought to build a wider coalition of States........

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