A few weeks ago we spoke about the possibility of a Yalta 2.0 taking place in early September in Beijing, for example during the celebration of the victory over Japan in WW2, which will occur on September 3rd.
Ideally speaking, the Yalta 2.0 meeting should see the leaders of the largest and most powerful nations gathering to divide the world intospheres of influence. The leaders around the table should be Donald Trump for the US (the incumbent super-power), Xi Jinping for China (the challenging power, and wannabe new incumbent) and Vladimir Putin for Russia, which just managed to surge back to the rank of global power thanks to the recent visit by Putin in Alaska, where Trump greeted him as a peer.
We also discussed how the recent visit by the EU to China (where its delegation was humiliated like never before) and the aforementioned visit by Putin to the US, which made the prospect of a Yalta 2.0 more likely because re-admitting Russia to the table of global powers, while excluding the Europeans, are two pre-conditions for such an agreement to take place.
This week, just before September 3rd, another crucial set of meetings took place in Beijing. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a security alliance between China, Russia and a number of other Asian countries, which India and Pakistan joined in the mid-2010s and Iran in early 2020s, met to discuss recent developments and future challenges. A number of important bilateral meetings between countries that are not “The West”, but belong to “The Rest” of the world, also took place on the sidelines of the SCO meeting.
One needs to note very carefully the role of India in all this. Let’s recap. India, the leader of the non-allied countries during Cold War 1(even if it was siding more with the Soviet Union than with the US), has been trying to play a similar equilibrium play in Cold War 2. However, during the Biden administration, India’s relationship with the US got much closer. Biden wanted to make sure that India never got on the side of China and Russia: with its 1.4bn people and one of the fastest growing economies in the world, India could tip the balance of Cold War 2 in favour of China. So, a number of tech and military cooperation agreements were signed; Biden even supported India’s ambition of a permanent seat in the UN security council.
With the arrival of Trump, things have changed. Donald Trump’s relationship with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi began with spectacular public displays of friendship—the “Howdy Modi” rally in Houston in 2019 and Trump’s return visit to India in 2020, marked by the “Namaste Trump” extravaganza in Ahmedabad. Both leaders sought to project themselves as global strongmen, with Modi using Trump’s presence to bolster his image at home. Yet, behind the spectacle, tensions simmered. Trump’s transactional approach to diplomacy — slapping a 50% tariffs on Indian goods (to punish the country for importing oil from Russia), and publicly siding with Pakistan instead of India in the recent military exchange between the two countries, left Modi feeling humiliated.
As a result, Modi decided to recalibrate India’s foreign policy. At the SCO summit, Modi signalled this realignment, framing India as a partner to both Moscow and Beijing, while asserting independence from U.S. pressure. Trump’s missteps, therefore, have accelerated India’s drift towards China and Russia. What was once touted as a deepening US–India alliance now risks being replaced by pragmatic, Eurasian partnerships.
The end result is that the recent meetings in Beijing have strengthened Xi’s position as the leader of the “Rest of the World”, which incidentally is much larger, more populous and faster growing than “The West.”
