A recent video of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a huddle, smiling and joking with the Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin set off alarms in the United States and other western capitals. Once the images went viral, politicians and media pundits concluded that the US President Donald Trump’s punitive tariff drove India, which was nurtured by America for the past three decades as a counterweight to China’s aggressive rise in the Indo-Pacific, into the arms of its Enemy No. 1. Trump agreed, “Looks like we have lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest China,” he posted on
Truth Social.
This is only half the story. While Trump’s unreasonable tariff of 50 per cent on Indian exports did help build an anti-US sentiment in India, Modi’s outreach to Beijing was in the works since last year. That was when policy-makers and economic advisors felt that reengaging with China was critical to woo large foreign investments, and help India to plug into the dragon’s supply chains to give a boost to the local manufacturing base. China too had the sense to make overtures towards India, given its ongoing trade war with the US.
Modi’s decision to re-engage with China falls within a global trend where several nations of the Global South are reaching out to China to counter the US, especially since Trump began his second term as the president. He has imposed varying degrees of tariffs on 90 countries. Several emerging economies and middle powers, like Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia are among those that seek to take advantage of their existing economic ties with China, and maintain strong security partnerships with the US. Most wish to enhance their bargaining power and strategic options.
“We do not need a ‘big boss’ or a ‘world policeman,’ we need an equal partnership,” said the Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a visit to China in May. China dominates global trade, it is the largest exporter of goods, and a top player in the value of trade, driven by its extensive manufacturing, logistics, and supply chains for products like electronics and machinery. The United States is a major trading nation, but ranks behind China in trade volumes. Most nations, therefore, want to get the best from both these worlds.
What is being witnessed now is the emergence of active nonalignment (ANA), says Jorge Heine, research professor at Boston University and a former Chilean ambassador. He says it is a foreign policy approach in which nations put their interests first, and refuse to take sides in the great superpower rivalry, this time between the US and China. Heine and two of his colleagues expanded this idea in a recently-published book, The Non-Aligned World. Heine argues that ANA takes its cue from the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of the 1950s and 1960s, but updates it to cope with the new realities.
Heine said in an interview that today’s rising Global South is different from the “Third World” that made up NAM. India, Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia now have greater economic heft. They have more options than in the past, and can pick and choose policies in accordance with their national interests. Since there is competition between Washington and Beijing to win them over, the so-called Third World has greater leverage. It does not need to take sides in the ongoing war of influence between the US and China. Nations can hedge their bets or equivocate by playing one power off the other. On some issues side with the US, and on others side with China.
The bare truth is that both the US and China are important for the emerging nations. They cannot afford to completely antagonise one or the other. American strategists have issued warnings about how formidable a rival China is. Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi caution that dealing with China is different from the other rivals the US faced in the last century. The latter include Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, they wrote that China has an economy that is 30 per_cent larger than the US in terms of purchasing power parity, it has twice the manufacturing capacity than the US, and it controls more than 70 per cent of the world’s batteries, electric vehicles, and critical minerals.
China registers more active patents, and produces more papers published in top-cited publications compared to the US, the two writers add. Militarily, China has the world’s largest naval fleet, a ship-building capacity estimated to be 230 times larger than America’s, and is fast becoming a leader in hypersonic weapons, drones and quantum communications.
China’s mega project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is another way to woo nations. The overland Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), and the sea-based 21st century Maritime Silk Road (MSR), which comes under the BRI, is “a project of unprecedented geographical and financial scope,” say scholars Benjamin Habib and Viktor Faulknor of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. The $1.3-trillion project proposes to create a web of infrastructure, including roads, railways, telecom, energy pipelines and ports. It aims at economic interconnectivity to facilitate development across Eurasia, East Africa, and over 60 partner-nations.
The grand strategy of ANA is to ‘play the field,’ and look for the best available opportunities to strengthen national interests. BRICS has turned out to be the forum where eleven major emerging economies, which represent 49.5 per cent of the global population, around 40 per cent of the GDP, and 26 per cent of global trade, are attracting more nations from Asia, Africa and Latin America. It may become the ‘voice of the global south,’ as Modi defined it. Trump sees it as a threat. But as more countries use the China option, it is doubtful how effective Trump’s policy to weaponise tariff will work.
As former Indian foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal says, India will not choose China over the US, but it will do all it can do to preserve and strengthen its strategic and economic autonomy.