Trump says he’s determined to weaken China. He’s doing the opposite

When Donald Trump announced his tariff plan, he put a number on just about every country. But he failed to put a value on just about any.

One consequence? For the first time in seven years, India’s prime minister is in China. Narendra Modi reportedly is refusing to accept phone calls from Donald Trump. Instead, he’s lending India’s considerable weight to Xi Jinping’s claim to be leading the creation of a new world order.

“It’s all courtesy of Donald Trump,” says a leading Indian strategic analyst, C. Raja Mohan. The US spent the past 20 years courting India in an attempt to bring it into the Western orbit, away from the embrace of China and Russia.

China helped decisively. By instigating a border conflict with India in 2020. India, said Modi at the time, was “hurt and angry”. Its relations with China ruptured. The West, it seemed, had won India over. Trump lost it in a matter of months. By piling a tariff of 50 per cent onto India, “Trump left no room for Modi”, says Mohan, visiting professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.

The US had promised to negotiate over the tariffs. But when Delhi refused to support Trump’s fetish to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Americans cancelled the negotiations.

“The US has always played hard-knuckle, but for the first time in my lifetime we see the US taking pleasure in humiliating its partners,” Mohan tells me. “While being so nice to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. This is a crazy time.”

Trump took India as “a given”, says Mohan. “The problem is that with 1.4 billion people, our leader is a great leader, too, and can’t be humiliated. Modi put his head down and didn’t make a fuss, but he is resisting” Trump.

India’s population is now greater than China’s; it’s still growing while China’s population is shrinking. India’s economy, the world’s fourth biggest, is on track to outstrip Germany’s to become the third biggest in the next three years.

Xi embraced Modi at their weekend summit by promising to realise “the dance of the dragon and the elephant” as “the right choice for both China and India”, according to China’s readout.

They agreed to attempt to solve their border dispute. The world’s two most populous nations are restoring relations. They announced that direct flights between China and India, which had been reduced to zero, would resume.

Xi is the most powerful of America’s rivals, but he isn’t the only one Modi met during his trip to China this week. The Indian leader also met Vladimir Putin: the man with a warrant issued against him for war crimes.

The Modi-Putin summit happened to occur on Monday, which was Trump’s deadline for Putin to meet Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, supposedly to negotiate an end to the war.

But there’s no sign of any such meeting. And no sign of an end to the war. On the contrary. Putin, flouting Trump’s demands, has spent the past weeks intensifying Russia’s assaults on Ukraine.

Putin looked very comfortable in China on Monday, chortling and guffawing in a three-way confab with Modi and Xi. Modi issued Putin an invitation to visit India. If the Russian leader is feeling any pressure from Trump’s supposed ultimatum, he did a good job of concealing it.

Beyond the leaders of these three powers, Xi assembled a couple of dozen other leaders for the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. This is a Chinese creation. It started in 1996 as the Shanghai Five but keeps growing. Among the leaders in attendance are those of Malaysia, Vietnam, Iran and even a NATO member – Turkey. Although the group does knock back the odd application, as it did when the US applied in 2005 to join as an observer.

The organisation’s aim is to form the nucleus of a bloc to counter the West. Trump has given it new relevance. Modi played along. “SCO members can increase co-operation for reforms in global institutions – we can unanimously call for UN reform,” he said.

“Keeping the aspirations of the Global South confined in outdated frameworks is a grave injustice to future generations.”

But while Modi is there to demonstrate that India has options, he is not going all-in with Xi. He is doing what the Indians like to call preserving “strategic autonomy”.

So, for example, while other countries at the SCO issued an endorsement of China’s signature plan for international infrastructure – the Belt and Road initiative – Modi stayed aloof.

And while some others are staying on to ogle Xi’s big military parade on Wednesday, Modi will not. He’s leaving early so as not to be seen as too fawning. A couple of Australian guests – Bob Carr and Dan Andrews – are not so discerning. They’ve accepted Xi’s invitation to clap admiringly.

“The structural problems in the relationship between China and India will remain,” observes Mohan. “There will still be an undefined, 3600-kilometre border, which we will try to settle bit by bit. India will still have a $US100 billion trade deficit with China. And China will not give up Pakistan”, India’s great enemy.

So India is not entirely lost to the China bloc. “What Trump has done is hasten efforts by both sides to normalise relations,” Mohan says. Modi remains committed to the Quad, for example, an informal group of four democracies, the US, India, Japan and Australia. It was created as a tacit counter to China.

“The problem is not us,” Mohan points out. “It’s Trump – he doesn’t give a shit about the Quad.” So while Trump claims to be determined to defeat China as America’s great rival, he actually does it a favour every time he alienates an American friend or ally, every time he applies the weapon of economic aggression known as a tariff.

It was Oscar Wilde who said that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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