The symbolism could not have been more vivid or inescapable as Narendra Modi took Vladimir Putin’s hand as they walked along a red carpet towards Xi Jinping.
For the next few minutes the leaders of India, Russia and China huddled together, smiling and joking as if they were without a care in the world.
Their display of unity at the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin was also a gesture of defiance towards Donald Trump and the West in general. For Xi and Putin, with their “no-limits friendship”, this is nothing new but Modi’s participation was a direct consequence of Trump’s targeting and humiliation of India in recent weeks.
The US has slapped a 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods, accusing New Delhi of sustaining Putin’s war in Ukraine by importing Russian oil. Trump has also antagonised Modi by claiming to have negotiated the end to a brief armed conflict between India and Pakistan in May 2025 and hosting Pakistan’s military leader at the White House.
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Trump’s moves threaten to upend a 25-year effort by Washington and its allies to recruit New Delhi as a strategic counterweight to Beijing through closer security ties and encouraging manufacturers to move operations from China to India. Conflict on their Himalayan border caused a dramatic deterioration in relations between China and India after 2020 but recent months have seen a thaw, and both Xi and Modi now have an interest in accelerating the de-escalation of tensions.
Their bilateral meeting in Tianjin on Sunday produced little of substance beyond an announcement of the resumption of direct flights between their two countries. And the Chinese and Indian official readouts of the meeting included small but important differences, with Beijing talking about jointly promoting a multipolar world while New Delhi spoke of the need to build “a multipolar world and a multipolar Asia”.
When Xi introduced his Global Governance Initiative (GGI) on Monday, calling for a fairer international order, Modi might well have wondered why this should not include a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for India. But China has always refused to endorse such a move and there is no sign that Beijing is ready to embrace India’s rise as a major power or to view it as an equal partner in a “multipolar Asia”.
Such differences do not mean that Monday’s display of unity in Tianjin is not significant because the symbolism itself is important as a gesture of solidarity as well as defiance. And the SCO is, like the Brics, an expression of an emerging alternative to an international order dominated by the western powers.
Xi has proposed that the SCO, which also includes Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, should establish a development bank. Brics has already started to build the financial and institutional plumbing to facilitate more use of currencies other than the US dollar and of alternative payments systems that are not affected by western sanctions.
Another message from Modi’s huddle with Putin and Xi was a rejection of pressure from the US and the European Union to stop trading because of the war in Ukraine. India and China, in common with most of the Global South, regard western sanctions, imposed unilaterally without UN approval, as illegitimate.
Trump’s foreign policy is accelerating the transformation of the global system as the old order imposed after the second World War becomes unsustainable. Tianjin on Monday offered a glimpse of what might be coming in its place.
