You Have no Enemies, you say?

India’s interests lie in a closer strategic partnership with the US, just as any American administration cannot ignore the world’s most populous country that is in a critical geography and has economic and military potential

- Aparna Pande

THE Tianjin Summit may have been the most talked about Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in memory, but it also evoked differing responses in the US and India. In India, rhetoric proclaimed India’s multi alignment amidst tensions with the US. In the US, there was a tendency to dismiss the summit as one of autocrats with little substantive output. In a social media post, US President Donald Trump stated: “Looks like we've lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” The reality as always is somewhere in the middle.

After three and a half decades of a steady evolution of US-India partnership, the recent public fracas has resulted in India reverting to its default mode of multi alignment. India’s ideal world order is a multipolar world order as it is the only one in which India can exert its leverage.

Geopolitical and geo economic chaos resulting from a semi-isolationist and mercurial American presidency has led to talk of a reset in India-China relations and a renewed rhetoric about a ‘Russia-India-China’ trilateral. Despite closer alignment with the US and its Western and Asian allies, the former nonaligned country has maintained ties with Russia and China. In the summer of 2023, India’s top diplomat S. Jaishankar stated in an interview to The Economist that “there are three big Eurasian powers, Russia, China, and India... This is not transactional. This is geopolitical”.

Ever since the 2020 Galwan Valley clashes, relations between the two countries have been fraught on the diplomatic, economic and security fronts. The last high-level summit meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi Jinping took place in 2018. The two have avoided meeting at any multilateral venues—when India hosted the G20 summit in 2023, Xi did not attend.