It was a sight to behold. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Tianjin on Monday, laughing, trading smiles, and even holding hands.
Washington surely took note. For over two decades, New Delhi’s foreign policy had shifted toward closer ties with the U.S. and the West, and gradually away from Russia. India had opened up economically to the U.S. and overcame its long-running reservations about deeper defense ties, joining The Quad alliance in 2007, and participating in joint military drills with America. But then came a reportedly tense Modi-Trump phone call in June and 50% tariffs last month, among the highest U.S. levy on any nation.
Putin is scheduled to visit India later this year, and the mood in Delhi is filled with an overdose of optimism toward Russia and China. But it would be a mistake to see this as the emergence of a new India-China-Russia geopolitical bloc, rather than a carefully crafted warning to the Trump Administration that bullying will be met with resistance.
Delhi’s three choices
When President Donald Trump first lashed out against India, Delhi had three options to choose from: submit to his pressure, do nothing, or implement a mix of symbolic and substantive measures and wait for the storm to pass. Option one would have required Modi, like his counterparts in Japan and Europe, to visit Washington and appease Trump. In this case, by winding down the purchase of discounted Russian oil, the purported reason for the sweeping tariffs. Had Modi chosen to do that, it would have had significant domestic political implications for his hyper-nationalist party, showing India as a country lacking the stomach to stand its ground. There is a perception in India that it has been unfairly targeted, given that Europe also buys Russian energy, and China even more, but faced no consequences.
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The second option for Delhi was to do nothing. But this approach would have also had domestic political repercussions, with influential political and media figures as well as the opposition accusing the government of weakness—and thereby casting India in a poor light not befitting its desire to be a pole in a multipolar world. Doing nothing would also have run counter to India’s tradition of resisting U.S. pressure on the world stage. In any case, this option would have led to a lose-lose scenario, as inaction would have neither prompted Trump to reverse his measures nor have served Modi well domestically.
So Modi and his advisors chose the third option: taking a mix of symbolic and substantive steps, but essentially playing the waiting game to see if the trade spat blows over.
The pitfalls of a India-China-Russia pact
The scenes from the 2025 Tianjin Shanghai Cooperation Summit had an overdose of bonhomie and brotherhood among three of the world’s four most powerful nations. But the SCO is a China-centric group that reflects the country’s expanding geopolitical influence, including in South Asia. That rather stark reality is not lost on Delhi.
SCO is not a forum that Delhi wants to pin its strategic hopes on. It is a regional organization that India will remain a part of, without making it a major foreign policy focus. And there are still many obstacles to a lasting rapprochement between India and China, including a long-running border dispute that flared up as recently as 2020-2021. While Tianjin hasn’t led to a Sino-Indian rapprochement, the summit underscores the message that the next time the U.S. decides to enlist India’s help in containing China’s rise, Delhi may be harder to convince.
A similar logic applies to Delhi’s approach to Moscow. Although India has reduced its defense dependence on Russia in recent years, Delhi remains the largest importer of Russian arms and U.S. pressure will not quickly change that. The Indian foreign policy elite has only become more convinced of the importance of maintaining the Russia card in their broader relationship with the U.S., given Trump’s unpredictability.
Ultimately, however, a Sino-Russian alliance against the U.S. is not where New Delhi wants to be. As for China, it remains India’s main strategic challenge—one that can only be addressed by balancing China’s rising power or by bandwagoning with it. The former is beyond Delhi’s current capacity, and the latter is not a course India is willing to pursue.
Put differently, India wants to strengthen its presence in the Indo-Pacific and increase engagement with the West and Southeast Asia, and perhaps a post-Trump America. So this is a temporary hiccup—Indians will be unhappy, anti-Americanism will once again grow within the country’s strategic elite, and stories of American betrayals will persist for years.
But none of this will alter India’s grand strategic course. Delhi’s commitment to multialignment—maintaining cordial relations with all major players in the international system—has only been strengthened by Trump’s hardball approach.
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