India should expect a bipolar world order in hybrid form

India must balance ties with Trump while deepening partnerships with Russia and engaging China

A range of explanations is possible for the rupture in India-United States relations. US President Donald Trump’s antagonistic stance towards India is one of the most bewildering and confusing geopolitical play of his second term.

The bipartisan US policy towards India spawned a myth that in the US calculus, India was an indispensable counterweight to a rising China. But that was never really the case. The nervous excitement that enveloped the myth barely concealed the transactional merchandising, mostly over costly weaponry. The 2020 Galwan Valley skirmish handed the US an opportunity to get closer to India than ever before. The anticipation in New Delhi was that the incoming Trump presidency would lead to even better ties.

However, all that turned out to be a miscalculation. Trump hadn’t forgotten that the agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's trip to the US in September deliberately steered clear of interactions with Trump who had actually commented just the previous week that Modi was coming to meet him, which even sparked speculation as to whether they would appear in New York City or at the diaspora event at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island for a repeat performance of ‘Howdy Modi’ in Houston, Texas.

Trump is deep down an emotional man, and he felt let down, as Modi was not to be found when he needed him most. But as Trump’s complex relationship with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu testifies, he is also a pragmatic politician. Netanyahu goes to any extent to paint himself as Trump’s close friend, but the relationship has rarely been that way. Everyone knows it, including Israelis.

The New York Times got it right that one main reason why Trump trashed the relations with India was Modi denying him the credit for having brokered peace between India and Pakistan. But that is not the whole story. Trump understands that China cannot be defeated, and he never subscribed to the ‘counterweight’ myth, given his poor opinion of India’s ‘dead economy’. 

Anyway, the massive military parade at Tiananmen Square confirmed Trump’s suspicion that in military power, China even exceeds the US, and has the capacity to destroy it. The spectre of China taking the lead in the technology race haunts him. Equally, the US is in a dangerous fiscal position, which has implications for foreign policy. 

According to reports, Trump confronted European leaders of the ‘coalition of the willing’ after their latest summit in Paris on Thursday to read the riot act, peppered with expletives, to drive home that the US would no longer fund programmes that train and equip militaries in eastern European countries that would be on the frontline of any conflict with Russia. And Trump has launched an initiative to take crime and dysfunction-plagued US cities under military and ICE custodianship. 

Trump is prioritising the domestic sphere away from global and international concerns, cutting loose the neocon-led globalist hegemony trajectory. India must try to understand Trump’s China policy. The Indo-Pacific strategy is in retreat; Quad has taken sleeping pills and is comatose. 

A strategic rethink is overdue. But External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar is content with ploughing the decades-old furrow that he is comfortable with — crisscrossing Singapore, Germany, the European Union, et al, when it is abundantly clear they are themselves like headless chickens in the Trump era. 

Can Indian diplomacy afford dilettantism in such revolutionary times? From media leaks of the US' new National Defense Strategy document, the US is set to shift its entire geopolitical strategy away from Eurasia toward its own sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. And Trump seems to concede that China is winning.

Meanwhile, storm clouds are gathering as Russian forces approach the Dnieper River. Asked by a reporter at the White House on Sunday if he was ready to move to “the second phase” of sanctions targeting Russia, Trump responded: “Yeah, I am.” He said, “certain European leaders are coming over to our country on Monday or Tuesday individually”, and he would also speak to Putin soon. Meanwhile, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, disclosed on Sunday that the US and the EU could put “secondary tariffs on the countries that buy Russian oil”. Trump is dithering about imposing sanctions on Russia, as he zigzags his way out of the war in Ukraine.

There is no ambiguity anymore that the Russia-China alliance is an enduring reality. These two superpowers have exploited Joe Biden’s successive blunders in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and West Asia. Gideon Rachman wrote in Financial Times, “The footage (from Tiananmen Square) of Kim, Putin and Xi strolling together, at the head of a group of world leaders, was powerfully symbolic. It was the first time that the three leaders had been filmed together. Whatever their other differences, the three leaders … share a belief that the current global power structure has thwarted their national ambitions. They want to change the world order — and seem increasingly inclined to work together to further that aim.”

India should expect in the short and medium term the return of a bipolar world order in some hybrid form, with global balance weighed against the US. It should walk extremely tactfully and carefully on such novel turf. Do not make the catastrophic error of judgment by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V to align with Kaiser Wilhelm III. Ottomans too had a small, but powerful, war party which saw Germany as a useful friend with money and a large military presence who claimed to be a ‘protector’ of the faith of Islam. 

Indeed, the alacrity with which Modi responded to Trump's nice words last weekend is unnerving. By all means, normalise with Trump — if only to purge his wrath — but on parallel tracks, prioritise the consolidation of India's partnership with Russia as an anchor sheet in the tumultuous world order, while also stepping up strategic communication with Beijing.

M K Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat.