Tanvi Madan
In August, five years after a fatal military clash between China and India, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Tianjin to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. The visit marked Modi’s first trip to China since relations between the Asian neighbors soured in 2020. Western analysts were struck by images of Modi holding hands and laughing with Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Several observers feared that U.S. President Donald Trump’s tirades and tariffs—he imposed a 50 percent tariff rate on India over the summer—had pushed New Delhi into Beijing’s arms.
That assertion gets both cause and effect wrong. Modi’s meeting with Xi was neither a sudden response to Trump’s bullying nor a hurried reset of India’s relationship with China. And New Delhi is certainly not in Beijing’s arms, nor is it striving alongside Beijing and Moscow to establish a new anti-Western order. India has indeed been working with China for nearly a year to return some measure of stability to bilateral relations. Those efforts, however, don’t obviate the fact that the rivalry between the two Asian giants persists.
But Trump’s pressure on India and his seeming desire to arrive at some kind of grand bargain with China will invariably affect the calculus of Indian policymakers. With concern, they will see Washington’s coercive approach toward New Delhi and the contrasting gentler posture toward Beijing as a break from recent U.S. policy, which stressed the imperative of deterring China and helped drive the United States and India closer. Indian officials will not want to be left at such a disadvantage, and that alarm could increase the extent of India’s reengagement with China. That, in turn, will have implications for American interests in the region. If Trump continues to target India, it could lead to a situation in which India opts to cooperate less with and buy less from the United States and to potentially do more with China and others—the opposite of the Trump administration’s stated desire to strengthen ties with New Delhi.
COURTING A RIVAL
The thaw in what had been an icy Chinese-Indian relationship was first evident in October 2024 at the convening of the non-Western grouping known as BRICS, when Modi and Xi had a bilateral meeting for the first time since 2019. The two sides announced that they had completed troop disengagement at the border, a key step on the path to normalizing relations. Both Beijing and New Delhi were ready to change the temperature. China had been facing strategic and economic headwinds, including flagging growth, pressure from the United States, and concern in Europe about Chinese support for Russia. India, for its part, did not want to fret about the prospect of further clashes along the border and instead wanted to focus on boosting its economic growth and bolstering Indian capabilities for the larger competition with China. And at the time, neither side knew who would next occupy the White House and how it might affect U.S. policy toward China.
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