Trump’s rate reprimand, Xi handshake and Putin oil are the last foreign policy test of India

“It is a moment for us to hire America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, put Japan at stake, attract neighbors, extend the neighborhood and extend the traditional districts of support,” wrote Jaishankar, Indian Minister for Foreign Affairs.

For more than a decade, India has styled like a key knot in a new multipolar order: a foot in Washington, another in Moscow and a suspicious eye on Beijing.

But the scaffolding is a buckling. Donald Trump’s America has gone from the cheerleader, accusing India to finance the Moscow War Box with purchases at reduced oil prices. Delhi is now faced with Trump’s public reprimand’s bite and the higher rates.

With the fraying of multipolarity, many say that the planned meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Xi Jinping in Beijing on Sunday looks less like triumphant diplomacy and more as a pragmatic rapprochement.

However, Delhi’s foreign policy is at a difficult crossroads.

India is in two camps at the same time: a pillar of the Indo-Pacific quad from Washington with Japan, the United States and Australia, and a member of the Shanghai cooperation organization (SCO), the block of China and Russia which often goes contrary to American interests. Delhi buys Russian oil at reduced prices even if she courts American investments and technology and prepares to sit at the SCO table in Tianjin next week.

There is also I2U2 – a group of India, Israel, water and the United States which focuses on technology, food security and infrastructure – and a trilateral initiative with France and water.

Analysts say that this balance is not an accident. India Price Strategic autonomy and maintains that engaging with competing camps gives it a lever effect rather than an exhibition.

“Coverage is a bad choice. But the alternating alternative with anyone is worse. The best choice of India is the wrong choice, which is the coverage,” Jitra Misra, former Indian Ambassador and currently a professor at OP Jindal Global University, told BBC.

“India may not be fully confident to hold its own by lining up on a great power. As a civilizational state, India seeks to follow the course of other great powers in history that have obtained this status by themselves.”

Admittedly, India’s global ambitions are still exceeding its capacities.

Its 4 TN economy makes it the fifth largest, but it is a fraction of the 18 TN of China or the 30 TN in America. The military-industrial base is even thinner: India is the second largest importer of weapons in the world and not among the five best arms exporters. Despite self-deputy campaigns, indigenous platforms remain limited and most high-value military technologies are imported.

Analysts say that this inadequacy shapes the diplomacy of India.

It is a reality which, according to many, underlies the visit of Modine in China in the middle of what seems to be a prudent thaw in the links, frozen after the fatal clashes of Galwan of 2020. (Nothing captures this imbalance between the two larger countries than the trade deficit of 99 billion dollars of India with China, which exceeds its defense budget for 2025-26.).

Stressing the change of relations, the Chinese envoy to Delhi Xu Feihong recently denounced the steep Washington prices on Indian products, calling the United States “tyrant”. Last week, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi echoes the conciliatory tone during a visit by Delhi, urging neighbors to see themselves as “partners” rather than “adversaries or threats”.

However, the criticisms ask: why does India choose to open a strategic dialogue with Beijing now?

Happymon Jacob, a stock market for strategic affairs, asks the blunt question in an article on X: “What is the alternative?” For decades to come, he argues, the management of China will be the “basic strategic concern of India”.

In an article separated from the Hindustan Times newspaper, Mr. Jacob also places recent talks between Delhi and Beijing in a broader framework: the trilateral interaction of India, China and Russia.

These three conversations, he notes, reflect broader realignments in response to American policy and allow Delhi and Beijing to report to Washington that alternative blocks are possible.

But Mr. Jacob also warns that without normality with India, China cannot take advantage of “Indian misfortune” with Trump to his “wider geopolitical ends”.

The larger image concerns the distance that can really be reconciled.

As Sumit Ganguly underlines the Hoover Institution of the University of Stanford, the American-Chinese rivalry remains “structurally irreconcilable”, while Russia has been reduced to “Junior Partner” in Beijing. In this backdrop, the India’s maneuvering room becomes clearer. “The current strategy of India, as far as I can discern, is to try to maintain a semblance of a working relationship with China to buy time,” he told the BBC.

Regarding Russia, India has shown that little tends to comply with American pressure.

Moscow’s crude crude crude price remains at the heart of its energy safety. Jaishankar’s recent visit to Moscow said that despite Western sanctions and the deepening of Russia’s dependence on China, Delhi always sees the value of keeping the relationship with hot – both as a fouus of energy rescue and as a reminder of its autonomy as a foreign policy.

Mr. Ganguly says that India also deepens his relationship with Russia in large part for two reasons: he fears an additional closure of the ranks between Moscow and Beijing, and due to the quimming links between Delhi and Washington under Trump.

Trump’s repeated statements at the end of the recent war with Pakistan has annoyed Delhi, while a highly publicized trade agreement seems to have blocked, apparently American requests for better access to the agricultural markets in India. Cheap Russian Russian oil’s public reprimands added to the cold – a position that India is inexplicable because China is a much larger buyer.

However, history suggests that even serious rifles have not derailed relationships when more important interests were at stake. “We faced the most difficult challenge until the next most difficult challenge,” said Misra.

He underlines the difficult sanctions of Washington after India’s nuclear tests in 1974 and again in 1998, which had isolated moves from Delhi and has been tense for years. However, less than a decade later, the two managed to assemble a historic civilian nuclear agreement, signaling a desire on both sides to overcome distrust when strategic logic asked.

The deeper question, as analysts maintain, is not whether the links will recover, but what form they should take.

In a new essay in foreign affairs, Ashley Tellis, a main woman from the Endowment for International Peace Carnegie, argues that India flirts with multipolarity undermines its safety.

Since the United States, even in relative decline, “will become on the two Asian giants”, India should cement a “privileged partnership” with Washington to contain China, he said. Delhi’s refusal to choose, he warns, may leave him exposed to a “hostile superpower” on his door.

But Nirupama Rao, former Indian ambassador to Beijing and Washington, says that India is “a titan in Chrysalis” – too large and ambitious to bind to great power. Its tradition and its interests require flexibility in a world which is not divided perfectly into two camps but fracturing in a more complex way. The strategic ambiguity, she maintains, is not weakness but autonomy.

In the midst of these duel visions, one thing is clear: Delhi remains deeply uncomfortable of a non -American world order led by China, supported by Russia.

“Frankly, the choices of India are limited,” explains Mr. Ganguly. “There is no prospect of rapprochement with China – the rivalry will last.”

Russia, he adds, “can be invoked but only to one extent”. As for Washington, “even if Trump is likely to be in office for about three years, the American-Indian relationship will continue. The two countries have too much to let it collapse on Trump’s idiosyncrasies.”

Others agree: India’s best option is simply to absorb the pain.

“India does not seem to have a better choice than taking the United States on the chin and letting the storm pass,” said Misra. In the end, strategic patience can be the only real lever effect in India – the bet that storms pass and partners come back.