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(NEW DELHI) — If this week is the Biden administration’s full-court press in Asia, then Secretary of State Antony Blinken is playing point guard with his first trip to India.

President Joe Biden has made it a top foreign policy priority to rally against the rising authoritarianism of China, Russia.

That makes Blinken’s visit to the world’s largest democracy critical, amid global challenges like COVID-19 and climate change that Blinken has stressed require global cooperation and as ties with China harden.

That relationship took another nasty turn this past weekend. Beijing issued a strident warning to Washington as Blinken’s deputy Wendy Sherman met her Chinese counterparts in China on Sunday – again accusing the U.S. of bullying and scapegoating.

In addition to Blinken’s high-profile visit, Biden has deployed his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to Southeast Asia to meet key partners, while Sherman consulted top allies Japan and South Korea before her meetings in China.

India, with a population larger than China’s and an economy third only to the U.S. and China, is seen as critical in Washington to pushing back on Beijing. But after a decadeslong bipartisan push to pull India closer to the United States’ orbit, there is a concern in some circles over India’s democratic backsliding, especially on minorities’ rights, political dissent and freedom of the press.

Those are issues that Blinken has said will be at the forefront of Biden’s foreign policy, but they may take a back seat to pressing geopolitical priorities, like boosting India’s production and export of COVID vaccines or decreasing carbon emissions and seeking other solutions to climate change.

Dean Thompson, the top U.S. diplomat for South and Central Asia, said India’s record on human rights will be addressed during Blinken’s meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.

“We will raise it, and we will continue that conversation because we firmly believe that we have more values in common on those fronts than we don’t,” he said — a collaborative, not critical tone.

Thompson also made clear that the meetings in New Delhi “will focus on expanding our security, defense, cyber, and counterterrorism cooperation” and boosting their “increased convergence on regional and global issues.” In particular, Blinken himself emphasized ending the pandemic as swiftly as possible by unleashing India’s vaccines overseas again after its own horrific outbreak led to restrictions on exports.

“When that production engine gets fully going and can distribute again to the rest of the world, that’s going to make a big difference, too, so I’ll be talking to our Indian friends about that,” he said in an interview with MSNBC Friday.

That pause in India’s distribution of vaccines has delayed efforts to combat the pandemic, although Thompson said that a billion-dose initiative by the U.S., India, Japan, and Australia is still aiming to roll out in 2022. But as cases rise around the world again, including in the U.S., there’s a new urgency to speed up global distribution and stave off any new variants.

Beyond vaccines and climate, it’s clear Biden officials hope to pick up where predecessors left off and boost ties with India to counter what they consider China’s aggressive behavior.

Wendy Sherman, the No. 2 at the State Department, met her Chinese counterparts in the northern port city Tianjin on Sunday, urging open lines of communication and saying the U.S. “do[es] not seek conflict,” according to the State Department.

But she also carried a laundry list of Chinese behaviors that the U.S. opposes, including economic espionage and cyber theft, territorial claims like in the South China Sea, and human rights violations in Hong Kong and against Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province.

The U.S. says many of these issues are evidence of China undermining the world’s rules. But China has dismissed that in increasingly vocal and dramatic tones, including during a very public spat between Blinken and Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and their Chinese counterparts in March.

“U.S. policy seems to be demanding cooperation when it wants something from China; decoupling, cutting off supplies, blockading or sanctioning China when it believes it has an advantage; and resorting to conflict and confrontation at all costs,” Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng said during the meetings, according to China’s Foreign Ministry. All of these issues the U.S. raised are China’s business as a sovereign country, it added, accusing the U.S. of bullying.

Not long ago, India was largely neutral on these issues. But it has also now borne the brunt of Chinese action and waded into its own hostilities with Beijing. Last year high in the Himalayas, security forces from the two countries even sparred in hand-to-hand combat over their disputed border.

In the year since then, Modi’s government has taken steps to penalize China, including banning dozens of Chinese apps like WeChat and TikTok.

That’s helped to push India closer to the so-called “Quad,” with Japan, Australia and the U.S.

Biden held the first leader-level summit of the group as one of his first foreign meetings of his administration, with Blinken’s trip this week expected to help lay the groundwork for another – and the first in-person – in the months to come.

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(NEW YORK) — A rural schoolteacher and son of illiterate campesinos from the Andean highlands is poised to be sworn in as Peru’s president Wednesday, the same day the country will commemorate its 200th anniversary of independence from Spain. His inauguration comes after a fiercely contested presidential runoff last month.

The moonshot candidacy and ultimate victory of leftist Pedro Castillo, whose ascension from political oblivion as a fiery union leader, was announced last week after one of the most protracted political battles in Peru’s history. His far-right challenger, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori, refused to concede for over a month, alleging widespread voter fraud with sparse evidence.

Castillo’s win has rattled Peru’s coastal elites and electrified its marginalized peasant and Indigenous classes hailing from the Andes and Amazon regions, hundreds of whom have descended on the capital, Lima, to serve as ronderos, or peasant patrollers in support of the president-elect.

“Those with power in this country treat us like second-class citizens. We’re here to reclaim what is ours,” said Maruja Inquilla Sucasaca, a Quechua environmentalist from Puno in southeastern Peru.

The final tally hinged on just 44,000 votes. Castillo’s Marxist Leninist party, Peru Libre, clinched 50.1% of votes to Fujimori’s conservative Fuerza Popular party, which took 49.9%.

Backed by a battalion of lawyers, Fujimori delayed certification of Castillo’s victory for over 40 days, seeking to disqualify 200,000 votes in Indigenous and rural enclaves in which he drew overwhelming support.

In a speech last week, Fujimori maintained that thousands of votes were stolen from her. She decried the electoral commission’s results as “illegitimate” and encouraged supporters to continue to mobilize, while also signaling she would honor the results.

International observers, including the Organization of American States, have called the elections free and fair. In a statement last week, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the Biden Administration is “eager to work with President-Elect Castillo’s administration.”

“She undertook a Trump-like effort to delegitimize the election,” said Brian Winter, vice president of policy at Americas Society/Council of the Americas. “But under extreme pressure, the electoral authority managed to appear sober, even-handed and calm.”

Keiko Fujimori is heiress to a political dynasty forged by her father, Alberto Fujimori, a towering and deeply polarizing figure who ruled the Andean nation with an authoritarian grip from 1990-2000.

Despite suspending the constitution and sanctioning death-squads to suppress Maoist guerrilla insurgencies in the 1990s, many credit him for laying the foundation of Peru’s modern economy. Fujimori, 82, is currently serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations.

“It’s almost impossible to separate her identity from the nostalgia a part of Peruvian society feels toward her father,” said Winter. “She has now twice come within a very close distance of the presidency. It’s premature to declare her career over.”

For weeks, Fujimori’s supporters have camped in front of Peru’s supreme court demanding an international audit of votes.

“In this election fraud and the scourge of communism won. We’re here to fight for our democracy,” said one supporter, Fredy Gonzales, 60.

Four blocks away, in front of the national electoral commision headquarters, rural supporters of Castillo said they were camped out to “defend” the electoral authority and safeguard their votes. Some carried traditional Andean whips known as chicotes in case of unrest.

“We’ll stay until his inauguration, but if the president of the people calls on us, we’ll return as many times as he needs us,” said Jaime Diaz, 49, another Quechua supporter.

The cornerstone of 51-year-old Pedro Castillo’s campaign, a slogan as well-worn as his straw hat: “No more poor people in a rich country.” The president-elect, who hails from Cajamarca in Peru’s rugged north, has promised to rewrite the country’s constitution and redistribute mineral wealth. Peru is the world’s second-largest copper producer.

Castillo’s victory comes amid ever-deepening political turmoil. Peru has endured four presidents and two congresses in the past five years.

Castillo’s rise from a cow and chicken-raising provincial school teacher came in 2017 when he gained national recognition as leader of a prolonged teachers strike. His victory has served as a blunt rebuke of Peru’s political and business class in Lima, many of whom fear the proposed economic policies of his Marxist party will plunge the country into a crisis the likes of neighboring Venezuela.

On Wednesday Castillo will take the helm of a nation reeling from economic and public health crises. Over 195,000 Peruvians have died from COVID-19, the highest per capita death rate in the world.

Addressing hundreds of supporters from a balcony in central Lima Friday, Castillo vowed to vaccinate all Peruvians and recharge a stagnant economy. He also sought to allay concern he will transform Peru into a socialist Venezuela or Cuba.

“I categorically reject the notion that we’re going to bring in models from other countries. We are not Chavistas, we are not communists or extremists, much less terrorists.”

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(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden said the U.S. is “not going to be, by the end of the year, in a combat mission” in Iraq.

The president, while meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi Monday afternoon, said the U.S. role there will be focused on training and assisting to combat the Islamic State group.

“Our shared fight against ISIS is critical for the stability of our region and our counterterrorism cooperation will continue, even as we shift to this new phase we’re going to be talking about,” Biden said.

A U.S. official told ABC News Thursday the change in mission is more of a semantic one and the number of U.S. troops in Iraq will not dramatically differ as they shift their emphasis to training and assisting.

As with anywhere around the world, the official added, U.S. troops reserve the right to defend themselves too.

Iraqi Ambassador to the U.S. Fareed Yasseen told ABC News last week that Iraqi forces will continue to request direct U.S. assistance for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and training.

Several U.S. officials have said the 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq are already largely in that kind of advise-and-assist role.

Both sides have repeatedly committed to U.S. troops exiting once the coalition to defeat ISIS completes its work, essentially kicking the can down a long road now to appease political pressure in Iraq, fueled by Iranian-backed factions and militias and U.S. air strikes against them.

During the Trump administration, a tit-for-tat series of attacks between Iraqi militias and U.S. forces in Iraq to fight ISIS precipitated an assault on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in January 2020. While the Shiite militias were able to breach an outer perimeter, no one was injured in the attack.

Days later, President Donald Trump ordered the airstrike that killed Iran’s most powerful general Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force. The strike outside Baghdad International Airport further inflamed anti-American sentiment among Shiite militias and Iraq’s government responded by denouncing it as another U.S. violation of its sovereignty.

With a majority in parliament, Shiite lawmakers voted to expel U.S. troops that month. While the resolution was non-binding, there’s been strong political pressure on the Iraqi government since then to see an end to the U.S. military presence, especially after the two governments and the defeat ISIS coalition declared the end of the terror group’s so-called caliphate.

In a series of “strategic dialogues” since then, they have negotiated ways to strengthen U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on other issues, including trade, energy and diplomacy with Iraq’s Arab neighbors, while repeatedly committing to pulling American forces out one day.

Biden on Monday also noted that the U.S. is sending Iraq 500,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines, which the president said should be arriving “in a couple of weeks.”

With Monday’s announcement, that day could be closer — but it’s still not here yet.

That much was clear to those Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, also known as Popular Mobilization Forces. The spokesperson for one group, the Nujaba Movement, said in a statement that the change in mission was a “cheap trick.”

They “will not differentiate between advisers of the occupation or soldiers of the occupation, for all of them are important targets for the weapons of the resistance, until the last occupying soldier leaves the land of Iraq,” said the spokesperson, Nasser al Shammari.

ABC News’ Libby Cathey contributed to this report.

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