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

The Indian Express | C. Raja Mohan

United States President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to hold a high-stakes bilateral meeting in Washington, shifting global geopolitical focus from the multipolar aspirations of the New Delhi BRICS summit toward a starkly bipolar dynamic. This critical diplomatic exchange precedes a potential trilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the upcoming APEC summit in Shenzhen.

These high-level interactions occur amidst a profound churn in great-power politics triggered by Washington's disruption of traditional alliances and its revised approach to the burdens of international order. While routine multilateral forums like BRICS, APEC, and the G20 rarely yield significant collective progress, they serve as vital backdrops for decisive bilateral diplomacy. Great-power politics still dictate the global order. Consequently, the attempted India-China bilateral reset between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Xi in Delhi highlights how regional powers must navigate this shifting G2 or potential G3 landscape, which culminates in Trump hosting the G20 summit in Miami in December.

Comment

The shift from multilateral consensus-building to transactional bilateralism reveals the structural limits of the BRICS grouping in resolving systemic security competition. While New Delhi invests diplomatic capital in drafting expansive BRICS declarations, the actual Indo-Pacific security architecture remains hostage to direct Washington-Beijing negotiations. This doctrinal reality is demonstrated by the reliance on the margins of the APEC summit in Shenzhen to negotiate the core parameters of US-China strategic competition.

The mechanism of this bilateral dominance operates through the bypass of formal APEC or G20 agendas in favour of ad-hoc, leader-level summits. In these settings, the APEC secretariat is relegated to an administrative host while critical trade and security trade-offs are negotiated directly by the White House and the Zhongnanhai. This dynamic mirrors how the 1972 Shanghai Communique bypassed regional Asian security frameworks to fundamentally reorder the Cold War balance of power.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the upcoming meetings in Shenzhen replicate the bilateral bypass of the 1972 Shanghai Communique, how does the institutional utility of BRICS shift for middle powers seeking to hedge against bipolarity?

The pattern suggests that middle powers will increasingly view BRICS not as a mechanism for collective security, but as a diplomatic hedging instrument to extract bilateral concessions from major powers. My assessment is that the Shenzhen summit will reinforce this trend, leaving formal declarations as rhetorical cover while concrete strategic alignments are forged in private bilateral corridors. This trajectory indicates that institutional utility will be measured by access to great-power leaders rather than collective policy implementation.

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