As actors hedge and balance in an uncertain international system, India must embrace sovereignty by setting its sights on the Eurasian continent’s emerging multipolar architecture and pursuing close partnership with the two powers at the forefront of this architecture—Russia and China, writes Zorawar Daulet Singh, Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies.
Recently, Donald Trump posted what could only be described as a fawning description of his phone call with Xi Jinping. In the Chinese readout, Trump called the US-China relationship “by far the most important in the world.” What preceded this call was equally interesting. A few hours prior, Putin and Xi conducted a long video call where they vowed to strengthen their strategic partnership and continue working towards a multipolar world. They discussed relations with the US and “gave serious consideration to the most pressing international issues, especially given the extremely tense and explosive situations that have developed in several regions around the world." The latter was an obvious reference to Washington’s belligerent gunboat diplomacy in recent months. Xi also apprised Putin about his upcoming conversation with the White House, a sign of the high-level coordination between Moscow and Beijing.
The dynamics in this great power triangle have become the key factor in shaping the changing world order.
A popular Indian argument has been that the stabilisation of US-Russia relations would allow the US to pivot to the Western Pacific and focus on China’s rise. As this rebalancing occurs, India’s ability to develop simultaneous partnerships with Washington and Moscow would grow. The rising pressure on China’s eastern periphery would also lessen the security competition on the India-China border. On the whole, this framework has been India’s desired setting in the great power chessboard.
The problem, however, which was initially encountered in the Cold War and persists in the contemporary world, is that the US and the West have never imagined the great power triangle in such a fashion. For the US, China has always been the swing power to pull to its side—not just to neutralise its involvement in the West-Russia competition but also to reduce Beijing’s incentives to promote a genuine multipolar order.
Has Trump refuted this geopolitical framework? Looking at the events in the past year and the series of published national security documents, it is evident that the basic policy of non-confrontation with China has been strengthened. There is no Pivot to Asia or any impending collision with China. Instead, the containment of a Greater Eurasia is very much part of the core of US and Western geostrategy. The West is merely coming to fresh understandings on their internal burden sharing and “burden shifting,” as it has been called in official pronouncements.
What has changed, of course, is the grudging admission that the proxy war in Ukraine has exhausted the West rather than Russia and therefore needs a settlement. But even with the potential for outbreak of peace and strategic stability, the underlying impulse for unilateralism has not disappeared. It is quite apparent that Trump is pursuing a parallel approach of stabilising ties with Moscow and Beijing and simultaneously exploiting that great power stability to pursue unchallenged action in several regions, including on the Eurasian periphery.
The implications for India are profound too. If the US does not intend to confront China—and lacks the effective capacity to do so—but seeks stability in the Western Pacific and a responsible strategic competition, the fundamental rationale for India’s post-Cold War foreign policy would unravel.
This being said, there are some important trend lines that will ultimately shape the momentum towards multipolarity.
First, the US is materially unequipped to sustain the type of expansive policies that it had become accustomed to in recent decades. All the rhetoric in the US and EU should not distract us from the multitude of unresolved structural problems in their body politic.
Second, we can see the continuing logic of Russia’s pivot to the non-West, the Global South and most crucially, towards investments in the infrastructure necessary for multipolarity to emerge and provide the groundwork for world order. Russia cannot go it alone and needs partners for this order-building process. China and India top that list.
Third, China is recognising that basic public goods, particularly in the geoeconomic realm, must be created and defended from predation in order for any meaningful multipolarity to emerge. It is not enough to have national strength, which China possesses in adequate measure—to resist US coercion, counter-measures must be initiated. The failure of Trump’s trade aggression towards China in 2025 underscored this new reality. Order building also requires the development of a normative and institutional infrastructure beyond securing China. In its absence, vast swathes of the Global South will lack a credible strategic option to disentangle from the coercive unipolar architecture and plug into an inclusive system of interdependence.
Finally, India is approaching the limits of its strategy to integrate with the US. Historically, we have seen a similar pattern play out with other non-Western powers. Russia has seen its own series of shocks in recent decades. China too witnessed a similar phase in the past decade. Both Moscow and Beijing were forced to adapt.
The past year has been sobering for India because it has brought to the surface the tension between a policy of integration and a policy of sovereignty in a very vivid fashion. The dominant view for the past two decades has been that the trade-off between gradually diluting strategic independence in order to join a larger US-led inter-state network on the one hand and preserving the national option on the other could be pushed further down the historical road. During this long interim period of flux, it was claimed that India would develop its material power to such a level that not just sovereignty but great power status was assured.
Indian policymakers have recognised that resisting economic coercion, the only honest way to describe the recent trade stand-off with the US, requires an alternative architecture to enable multi-directional economic and geopolitical interdependence to occur. India will be one of the biggest beneficiaries in this process. This means sustained and meaningful collaboration with Russia and China in the BRICS and newer initiatives on specific issue areas. There can be no real sovereignty without co-creating an alternative architecture for a new world order. Strategic autonomy and genuine multipolar collaboration are two sides of the same coin just as loss of sovereignty and integration with the US network are two sides of another coin.
