Over the weekend, Chinese President Xi Jinping played host to a leader-level meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)—a confab of leading autocrats and those they seek to draw close to them.
Since its establishment in 2001, the SCO has not been a particularly impactful enterprise. Much like the BRICS, its convenings often strike me as grand salons for the axis of the aggrieved to make symbolic progress towards undermining various pillars of what has been the U.S.-led international system. This year was different: it appeared to mark a major step forward in Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s courtship of India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi—a symbolic if not a meaningful win, made all the more striking because they had the United States to thank for doing the heavy lifting.
The trouble began in June, when President Donald Trump claimed publicly and in a direct phone call with Modi that he personally brokered a ceasefire between New Delhi and Islamabad. India has long rejected any notion of external mediation with its neighbor, and Modi has yet to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike his Pakistani counterpart. Then, Trump imposed 50 percent punitive secondary tariffs on India (and only India) as a punishment for the country’s continued import of Russian oil—despite China, Turkey, and other nations purchasing substantial quantities of the very same oil from Russian firms. Evidently, the president was particularly disturbed that, while China increased Russian oil imports for its own use, India was reselling refined Russian oil products to Europe and elsewhere for a healthy profit.
These actions sent the U.S.-India relationship into a diplomatic free fall. It culminated last weekend on a red carpet in Tianjin, where Xi, Modi, and Putin strode together, awkwardly holding hands, beaming for the cameras. In an aside at the summit, Xi went so far as to proclaim that it is, “time for the dragon and elephant to dance together.”
Modi’s nascent embrace of Xi and warmer relations with China fly in the face of a multi-decade effort, spanning five American presidencies, to court India as a long-term partner with whom the United States could work to offset China’s immense industrial capacity, technological prowess, and increasing military capabilities.
Strong U.S.-India relations have been one of the few, enduring bipartisan foreign policy designs of the past three decades. I remember the shockwaves in 2008 when President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement, which marked the separation of India’s civil and military nuclear facilities, compliance with the rules of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and most importantly, civil nuclear cooperation between the two powers. More recently, the United States has developed strong defense and technology partnerships, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) and aerospace, including the U.S.-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (i-CET) and the India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem (INDUS-X). And at the center of this strategic alignment stands the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as The Quad, a coalition of the Australia, India, Japan, and the United States that has moved from quiet consultation to joint naval exercises, intelligence sharing, and coordination on emerging technologies—all to counterbalance China’s growing threat to a free and open Indo-Pacific. As former Deputy Secretary of State Kurt M. Campbell and former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan wrote in a new piece for Foreign Affairs, the U.S.-India relationship “has been one of the brightest spots of bipartisan support in a divided Washington where concerted international purpose has been in short supply.”
These initiatives are now likely to lose momentum and the costs to trust in the relationship may be quite steep. India is a proud country, and Trump is a proud president. Not an ideal combination. As Trump posted this morning, “Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” But while it is definitely a setback, it might not represent a tectonic and permanent geopolitical shift. The underlying national interests of each country remain the same.
First of all, we should not overstate the breadth and depth of the existing U.S.-India strategic relationship. At risk is more the potential, the progress, and the direction of travel. It was never a military alliance. And some of us were surprised and skeptical when Trump administration officials talked publicly a couple months ago about how close we were to a major trade agreement, given India’s historic protectionism and trade obstructionism.
On the other hand, Modi’s China pivot is hardly a like-for-like replacement for the potential of the U.S.-India strategic relationship. India-China ties are plagued by a number of historically intractable problems that transcend handholding on the sidelines of the SCO Summit: the two countries’ intergenerational dispute over the Dalai Lama, ill will from deadly border clashes in the Galwan Valley, and lingering resentment from the 1962 border war. There are currently no direct flights between India and China (though they may resume soon); the most popular Chinese apps, including TikTok, have been banned by the Modi government, as were China’s leading state-backed telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE. The country that most closely rivals the United States’ neuralgia about Chinese imports is India; it fears the impact of Chinese dumping on its still nascent manufacturing capabilities. Beyond territorial skirmishes, economic tensions, and historical perfidy, New Delhi knows that Beijing’s economic grand strategy of export-led growth, cozy relationship with Islamabad, and drive for military primacy in the Indo-Pacific do not bode well for the security and prosperity of over 1.4 billion Indians.
So where do we go from here?
India is no stranger to being cajoled—or courted—by rival superpowers. During the Cold War it staked its claim as the vanguard of the non-aligned movement, not just for the sake of neutrality but as means of leverage. As former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru once declared, “We propose, as far as possible, to keep away from the power politics of groups aligned against one another, which have led in the past to world wars and which may again lead to disasters on an even vaster scale.” With those words, India declared its commitment to geopolitical polyamory and carefully guarded its freedom of maneuver, even as Moscow and Washington circled for advantage. For the most part, Nehru’s doctrine worked. India broke free of the non-proliferation regime, avoided costly entanglements, and balanced deftly between the former Soviet Union, China, and United States for almost fifty years. Non-alignment sentiments are still alive and well as a policy construct in New Delhi, and Trump may well cement its return. We must remember that the past three decades of warming U.S.-India ties represented a unique departure from India’s more standoffish strategy for much of the post-war period.
As Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar quipped to the Financial Times earlier this year, “I think the virtues of the old order are somewhat exaggerated…India wants something more than evolutionary but which is comfortable and steady. But it has to reflect the world as it is now and not as it was post-1945 when the rules were weighted in favour of the West.” Yet mechanisms like the SCO and BRICS lack the teeth and broad-based incentive alignment to bring about a truly multipolar order or materially disrupt the existing system. The cordiality on display in Tianjin rarely extends to the type of functional cooperation that defines the most effective international organizations, such as NATO.
As the unipolar moment fades into the rearview, India’s navigation between China, Russia, and the United States offers an interesting window in the dynamics of the order to come. The bipolar and multipolar concepts that are so often forecast to take hold fail to capture the complexity and volatility of the current geopolitical landscape. Rising and middle powers, including India and the major Gulf states, have the capacity and strategic incentives to resist having to choose between one partner and another. India is truly the archetype of the geopolitically polyamorous.
This new era is less likely to be defined by traditional notions of bipolarity or multipolarity than by fragmentation and plurilateralism: overlapping groups of like-minded countries working together on certain sets of issues—whether that is on trade, technology or security—outside the structure of existing multilateral fora. What remains to be seen is whether these coalitions of the ambitious will form with, around, or despite the United States.
Let me know what you think about the shifting U.S.-India relationship and what this column should cover next by replying to president@cfr.org.
What I’m reading this week:
Michelle Gavin published her latest book, The Age of Change: How Urban Youth are Transforming African Politics. She also appeared in the fourth iteration of CFR’s new series, “How I Got My Start in Foreign Policy.”
WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala opined in the Financial Times on necessary reforms to the multilateral trade system.
The New York Times’ Dave Phillips and Matthew Cole published a gripping scoop on a 2019 U.S. special operations mission to plant a listening device along the North Korean coastline.
Rebecca Patterson and Ishaan Thakker spelled out the potential impact of AI on U.S. economic growth.
Brad Setser analyzed how the latest legal setback is likely to impact the president’s trade agenda.
