India, July 27 -- The latest 'Point Blank' conversation between HT Executive Editor Shishir Gupta and anchor Aayesha Varma sketched a world where US-China rivalry, contested seas, and an expanding Middle East war are all converging to redraw the strategic map from Honolulu to Hormuz.

The 21st East Asia Summit on July 22, with 19 participating countries, emerged as a key moment in clarifying how major powers now view the Indo-Pacific theatre. Despite speculation that Washington had quietly dropped the "Indo" from its Indo-Pacific Command, Gupta stresses that this narrative is misleading: the change appears to have come from within the US Department of War bureaucracy, not from a strategic rethink at the political level. US Secretary of St...