C Raja Mohan: The multipolar world India wants may be a distant reality

The Indian Express | C. Raja Mohan

The upcoming bilateral meeting in Washington between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping highlights a shifting global order dominated by bipolarity rather than multipolarity. This high-stakes exchange, occurring amid Trump's disruption of American foreign policy and traditional alliances, precedes potential trilateral engagements with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the APEC summit in Shenzhen.

These great-power interactions will culminate in December when Trump hosts the annual G20 summit in Miami. While multilateral forums like BRICS, APEC, and the G20 remain routine annual affairs with limited collective progress, they serve as critical venues for essential bilateral diplomacy. Great-power politics still set the global parameters. This reality was demonstrated at the New Delhi BRICS summit, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi attempted a crucial reset of India-China relations to manage their bilateral competition within a rapidly changing international order shaped by Washington and Beijing.

Comment

India's pursuit of a multipolar world order through forums like the New Delhi BRICS summit faces structural constraints from the emerging US-China bipolar dynamic. While New Delhi leverages these multilateral platforms to conduct critical bilateral diplomacy, such as the Modi-Xi meeting, the overarching systemic architecture remains dictated by G2 or G3 great-power alignments. This divergence forces India to balance its rhetorical commitment to multipolarity against the practical necessity of managing its immediate security competition with China.

Consequently, New Delhi's diplomatic capital is increasingly diverted toward bilateral stabilisation measures rather than shaping global governance norms. This shift reduces the operational utility of the G20 summit in Miami for Indian strategic objectives, forcing a heavier reliance on minilateral arrangements like the Quad to counter Chinese maritime expansion in the Indian Ocean.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the G20 summit in Miami fails to yield collective multilateral progress, how will India balance its engagement in the Quad against its bilateral stabilisation efforts with China?

The pattern suggests that India will increasingly treat large multilateral forums like the G20 as venues for transactional bilateral diplomacy rather than platforms for norm-building. My assessment is that New Delhi will rely on the Quad to build hard security deterrence in the Indo-Pacific while using direct bilateral channels to manage border tensions with Beijing. This dual-track approach reflects a pragmatic recognition that multipolar rhetoric cannot substitute for concrete balance-of-power mechanics.

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