Head-on | Xi, Trump and India’s strategic equidistance in a world of declining Great Powers

The meeting between United States President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing achieved none of the key objectives Trump had set out: trade, technology, Iran, Hormuz, and bilateral investment.

Trump resembled a travelling salesman eager to make a sale to a wealthy but fastidious buyer. The claim by Trump that Xi had agreed to buy 200 Boeing passenger planes was politely contradicted by Chinese authorities, who declined to confirm the order.

What caught everyone’s attention was Xi’s reference to the “Thucydides Trap”, a historical Greek term that highlights the inevitable conflict when a rising power replaces a declining power.

The Xi-Trump summit was, in fact, a meeting between two declining Great Powers. For all its technological prowess, China’s economy is beset with excess supply drowning weak demand. Recovery will be slow and painful. China’s depopulation will accelerate in the 2030s. By 2050, China’s population is estimated by the United Nations to fall to 1.31 billion. By 2100, the UN estimates, China’s population will halve to around 730 million while India’s population remains steady at 1.5 billion.

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While trade and technology were on Trump’s agenda, Taiwan was on Xi’s mind. For China, no issue is as important as assuming sovereign control over Taiwan, by force if necessary. As Xi told Trump bluntly, China is prepared in the future to go to war with the US if it defends Taiwan militarily: “The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-US relations. If mishandled, the two nations could collide or even come into conflict, pushing the entire China-US relationship into a highly perilous situation.”

The Indian Angle

The debate over India’s geopolitical strategy in its evolving relationship with two Great Powers, China and the US, often lacks analytical clarity. For example, Happymon Jacob, editor of the magazine India’s World, wrote in The Hindustan Times just before the Xi-Trump meeting in Beijing: “US-China friendship is bad for India. Their fighting too is bad for the country. What is good for India is a managed rivalry between the US and China.”

That is restating the obvious: India’s foreign policy has long been structured on the need for strategic equidistance between China and the US.

It was precisely to maintain equidistance between China and America that Prime Minister Narendra Modi met President Xi Jinping for three informal summits in Ahmedabad, Wuhan and Mahabalipuram between 2014 and 2019.

It was again to maintain equidistance between China and the US that Modi built close ties with President Trump in both his first term (“Howdy Modi”, in 2019) and second term (“Namaste Trump”, in 2020).

Covid-19 struck immediately after Trump’s departure from Delhi in February 2020. Galwan followed four months later. Xi had made his choice. Modi sought equidistance. Xi sought hegemony.

It is important to place India’s geopolitical priorities in relation not only with China and the US but also with middle powers Japan and South Korea and former imperial powers Britain and France.

India has withstood five Black Swan events in the past six years: Covid, Russia-Ukraine sanctions, Israel-Palestine disruptions in Gaza, punitive US trade tariffs, and the Hormuz Strait blockade. India’s unfolding era cannot be divorced from these extraordinary events over a short period. The geopolitical evolution of mature nations is measured in years and decades, not weeks and months.

President Xi Jinping knows this. That is why China follows a policy of tactical ambiguity with India. Maps renaming Arunachal Pradesh are meant to keep India constantly off-balance. But Beijing also knows that India’s rise as a future Great Power, economically and militarily, is inevitable. Xi is prepared for a world in 2050 dominated by China but faced with an inevitably deepening alliance between two democracies – India and the US.

China recognises that unlike its own rise, India’s ascent will be achieved without a brutal communist dictatorship. The US too knows that India’s rise will be unique: the first country to become a Great Power without invading other countries or massacring indigenous peoples. It is not a claim the US, Britain, France or Russia can make.

What of America’s future in 2050 and beyond? In my recently published book, I make this inescapable point: “President Trump’s ‘America First’ policy has created an illusion of a revival of US hegemony, with Europe cast adrift and China resurgent in a new world order under a White supremacist America. But America’s crumbling infrastructure, ballooning national debt, rising inner-city poverty, gun violence, dysfunctional single-parent families, ideological fracture and its transformation by 2050 into a White-minority country for the first time since Europeans arrived over 400 years ago belie the illusion.”

Before he left Beijing for Washington on Friday afternoon, Trump posted on social media: “When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of the Biden administration, and on that score, he was 100 per cent correct.”

In that one post Trump revealed more than he wanted to about his private conversation with Xi.

After Trump returned to the US with his entourage of CEOs, the smart money said Xi had got the better of the American president: China is ascendant; America has peaked. Both could be wrong. China is indeed ascendant, but in the judgement of history, the ascendance will be short-lived despite artificial intelligence and humanoids.

America, meanwhile, has not just peaked. It has begun declining. Its stable economy and soaring stock market may lead to a misleading conclusion. Just as for India it is darkest before dawn, for America it could be brightest before dusk.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)