“Over many decades, this command has repeatedly adapted to changing circumstance and today carries that legacy forward as America focuses west,” he said, adding that the command is “our primary combatant command, it’s standing watch and intimately engaged with over half of the earth’s surface and its diverse populations, from Hollywood to Bollywood, from polar bears to penguins”.

The move was also seen to signal the increasing focus on a part of the world that is close to China, which has been described by the Trump administration as a “strategic competitor”.

The newly renamed Indo-Pacific Command is one of the six US geographical combatant commands and its area of responsibility spans 38 countries, including India, China, Australia, Japan, and the Asean countries.

Officials from both India and the US described the rechristening as significant but symbolic because nothing is going to change materially. Though an Indo-Pacific strategy is expected to be announced by the US at a later stage, it could put more meat on the bare-bones name-change.

India-US defence ties have grown rapidly in the last few years, especially after President Barack Obama in 2016 declared India a “Major Defence Partner”.

These growing defence ties are never publicly acknowledged to have anything to do with China, but there is no other issue or challenge that drives the world’s two largest democracies closer strategically, other than their shared concern about terrorism.

“Without focused involvement and engagement by the United States, and our allies and partners, China will realise its dream of hegemony in Asia,” Adm Harry Harris, the outgoing chief of the command, said. “We should cooperate with Beijing where we can, but stand ready to confront them when we must.”

And there is Russia, a longtime trusted defence partner of India that has watched the growing India-US ties with some alarm. “American Raj,” said RT.com, a Russian state-funded media outlet, said in a headline on a report on the rechristening of the US command, in an attempt to exploit India’s colonial history.