No. of Recommendations: 25
BRICS has been around for 25 years, almost. You seem to be u see the illusion that India is either run by children (and the Bad Orange Man did a meanie) or that they’re hopelessly naive (let’s suddenly cozy up to China, great idea!) when it reality neither is the case.
I am under neither illusion. Trump made a substantial, significant change to U.S. policy towards India, and India is responding to that change in policy. A 50% tariff on imports is not at all trivial. Not just for its direct impact, which is enormous - the 50% total tariff is one of the largest he imposed globally (if not the largest), and it will decimate Indian exports to the U.S. But because it reflects a fundamentally adversarial position towards India and its current government. That is not "doing a meanie" - it is a fundamental, dead serious change in U.S. policy towards the country.
With the U.S. now clearly adopting an adversarial posture towards India, they are changing their posture towards other global powers. That's a completely rational response. It's not naive - they know exactly who China and Russia are. But with the U.S. switching from cooperative partner into adversary, they have to re-evaluate their posture towards China and Russia. They can no longer afford to be as confrontational towards China as they have been since the Galwan Valley incident. They were taking a very hard posture towards China before Trump was elected - but now that they can no longer count on U.S. support for anything, they can't maintain that position.
India is "searching" for allies among their existing relationships - and they are finding them in China and Russia. Not as a binary matter - they are not flicking a switch from "Not Ally" to "Ally." They're just moving significantly closer to Russia and China, and significantly further from the U.S., than they used to be. By waging a trade war against all three countries simultaneously, he has given them a common adversary and a common interest in opposing U.S. economic and trade policy together.
This is a really, really bad outcome for the U.S. - and for folks in the U.S. who believed that containing China was one of our most important foreign policy issues. Do you really think that the tri-lateral summit that Xi was able to assemble between the three countries was a good outcome?
