Contemporary discourse about global security imperatives has, over the previous two decades, increasingly focused on a unique geographic and securitized concept: the Indo-Pacific. In foreign capitals around the world, there has been significant discussion about the Indo-Pacific as a region undergoing significant competition, and these discussions have proffered various theoretical and practical policy solutions. However, the Indo-Pacific is polysemic. There is no precisely defined, broadly accepted ideological, geographical, or historical interpretation. Ill-defined as it may be, it is a driving force behind some of the most wide-ranging shifts in global state behavior since the end of the Cold War. This leads to a natural question: What is the Indo-Pacific to India and the United States and what processes have led to its construction? Much of existing literature explaining the behavior of the United States and India, written by practitioners as well as theorists, pivots around two theoretical axes: a realist argument focused on the distribution of power across Asia, and a constructivist argument emphasizing the histories of political culture in both countries. Neither of these approaches is necessarily wrong, but each is insufficient on its own in fully explaining why both countries interact with each other as they do, and why their foreign policy differs greatly depending on the region. This research uses critical geopolitics to explore the ways in which both countries craft strategic space in the Indo-Pacific region, a process influenced by their strategic and political cultures as much as by the balance of power in Asia. The research embraces qualitative analysis given its inherent sensitivity to questions of bias and context in the position of the researcher as also the subject of the research, but also its sensitivity to power relationships and social context. India and the United States and their collective focus to craft the geographic idea of the Indo-Pacific since the beginning of the 21st century fit the ideal definition of a case study, which Merriam (1989, 9) defines as “an examination of a specific phenomenon such as a program, an event, a person, a process, an institution, or a social group.” This research will further focus on disciplined configurative case studies by “highlighting the ‘need for new theory in neglected areas’” (George & Bennett 2005, 75). It insists that continuities and regularities are identifiable in state behavior, and is supported by Foucault’s (2010, 3) assertion that “Beneath the rapidly changing history of governments, wars, and famines, there emerge other, apparently unmoving histories: the history of sea routes, the history of corn or of gold-mining, the history of drought and of irrigation…” This research holds powerful implications for scrutinizing the foreign policy construction of other states through a lens that is more sensitive to the individualized processes of state construction.