A Turning Point
The post-American world is being created in front of our eyes, in real time, rapidly
Whilst many people in the West spent the weekend wondering if Donald Trump had in fact died (who can resist the speculation?) a far bigger story was unfolding on the other side of the world. In Beijing there was a meeting of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a sort of Asian-BRICS that brings together Russia, China and India, but excludes Western allies such as Japan and South Korea. At this summit, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi were pictured enjoying a warm, three-way handshake.
To some extent, such moments aren’t new: in October last, Modi and Xi were hosted by Putin at a BRICS summit and were photographed chatting warmly. At the time, there was talk of a China-India ‘thaw’ after the 2020 clashes high on the Himalayan frontier between the two countries that had left troops on both sides dead. As an authoritarian nationalist, albeit one operating within a democratic system, Modi has more in common with Xi than most previous Indian prime ministers.
In October 2024, Modi’s friend Donald Trump was running for re-election. The two men had appeared at each other’s rallies in earlier years, both in the US and India, and Trump sought to bask the in the reflected glories of India’s most successful politician saying, “Modi… India, he's a friend of mine, he's great.” Trump’s re-election would have been welcome news for Modi, in spite of Kamala Harris’s part-Indian heritage. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump welcomed Modi to the White House where the president hailed Modi’s commitment to buy both American weapons and its oil and gas. With the Trump regime focusing its global security priorities on China, India found itself a key player in America’s geo-strategy.
But the context this week is profoundly different: India finds itself subjected to some of America’s highest tariffs at 50 per cent, supposedly in retaliation for its buying discounted Russian oil. Modi traveled to Beijing not as Trump’s friend and Xi’s foe, but as one of a range of global powers that seeks closer relations with both China and Russia. We should not overestimate the shift: no doubt, India still regards China as a threat and one of the main focuses of its security and defence policies (second only to Pakistan). But India sees its ongoing priority as one involving increased trade and diplomatic relations with China - a strategic competitor but one that it can do business with. For his part, Trump has upended three decades of US diplomacy towards India in which Washington had sought to reposition an over-reliance on unreliable Pakistan with a deepening relationship with the South Asian democratic superpower.
If Trump’s reasoning was to disincentivise India’s ties to Russia, we might conclude that the policy, whilst risky, had some merit. But this excuse is clearly not real: for all the tariffs imposed on India, there are plenty of other countries buying Russian oil in vast quantities without facing any punitive tariffs (including Pakistan). And there is one major global power that has avoided the Trump tariffs altogether: Russia. Indeed, the reporting on why Trump has soured on India points to a different reason altogether: it is Trump’s increasingly needy, vainglorious quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. As the New York Times has reported, Trump has repeatedly claimed publicly to have “solved” the India - Pakistan conflict. Students of South Asian geopolitics might beg to differ: whilst the recent round of hostilities has certainly ended, the fundamental issues over territory, the status of Kashmir, and each country’s treatment of religious minorities, are not in any way solved. As the reporting tells us, Modi became increasingly tetchy after being told by Trump that he deserved the Nobel Prize in return for having negotiated a ceasefire. This happened in June and the two leaders have not spoken since. In the same timeframe, Pakistan has publicly nominated Trump for the Prize.
Separate to the New York Times reporting, I had heard that Trump had enraged both sides by announcing ‘ceasefires’ without any reference to either Islamabad or New Delhi, in keeping with Trump’s desire to be seen as a peacemaker without any interest in understanding the complicated underlying elements of some of these seemingly intractable conflicts. For almost any Indian politician, being seen to have accepted a ceasefire, effectively on instruction from the United States, would be a political non-starter. For Modi, a Hindu nationalist strongman, it is completely inimical to his political platform and to his hundreds of millions of supporters.
So, Trump’s tariffs on India and Modi’s ever-closer relations with Xi Jinping are happening for one of the stupidest reasons imaginable: the wounded pride of Donald Trump. As
, a professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of diplomacy put it in , “I have said it before and I will say it again: U.S. foreign policy is currently being managed by the dumbest motherfuckers alive.” But these dumb policies are not confined to the realm of foreign policy. This is an administration that is committed to dismantling wind and solar power, now far cheaper than fossil fuels, and has decided to pretend that climate change is not real, even as it immiserates people in places that vote for Trump, such as Florida and Texas. It is an administration that wants to make it easier for people to access powerful weapons, whilst claiming that “mental health” is the cause of mass shootings (but at the same time it doesn’t believe in mental health assessments for gun owners and reduces funding for, er, mental health). It is committed to reducing availability of vaccines whilst cutting surveillance of infectious diseases at home and abroad. It is committed to undermining global trade even as it has been its major beneficiary and may even end up destroying the role of the US dollar as a global reserve currency. And in the realm of foreign affairs it has been committed to making life easier for Russia and China whilst undermining its allies in Europe and (as we now see) in Asia. It could not try to assemble a more self-destructive set of policies, at home and abroad, if it tried.To a large degree, the collapse of American power is driven by the stupidity of its leaders. Trump’s India policy is one of many examples.