Substantial readouts from Beijing and New Delhi on Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi's recent meetings with Indian PM Modi, FM Jaishankar, and National Security Advisor Doval in India.
Any thaw between India and China has to be set against precedent: decades of Sino-Russian hostility, deeper and more violent, yet set aside for the foreseeable future. The India–China conflict is narrower, but Tibet locks in the asymmetry. Beijing controls Himalayan headwaters and high-altitude radar; with satellite guidance added, the imbalance is built into the map and cannot be overcome or negotiated away. India’s only option is accommodation, as Russia has already done—without the same risks.
Modi’s business constituency has pressed for a thaw for years, ruled by profit, not strategy. Unlike other elite enthusiasms, this one carries wider consequences: large-scale employment, urbanisation, even poverty relief all require Chinese inputs at industrial scale. No other economy has either the capacity or the experience.
Beijing is no naval threat in the Indian Ocean: with dependence on West Asian oil declining, the prohibitive cost of projecting power from its own shores leaves it without appetite, its attention fixed instead on securing food flows from South America across the Pacific, via corridors from Peru to Brazil. Should it ever attempt control in the medium term, it would confront a United States without the economic base to sustain dominance at that scale, notwithstanding AI-driven hype and quixotic attempts at reindustrialisation; that Delhi should chase an American alliance on this basis baffles.
Silicon Valley and Wall Street’s Indian-American grandees, once boosters of the U.S. connection, have largely drifted off, secured by asset hoards and Ivy League passage for their offspring.
With the commanding strata of the diaspora largely uninterested, the U.S.–India connection survives only as a vanity project. India’s foreign-policy cadre, backed by its American fixers—second-rate academics and journalists who built careers repeating Washington’s catechism—will work to obstruct any rapprochement with China. What remains is a policy in the hands of a narrow segment of the elite, weak and insecure, without a popular base, buttressed only by a degraded English-language media ruled by clicks and eyeballs, craving a prestige invisible abroad and useless at home.
Any thaw between India and China has to be set against precedent: decades of Sino-Russian hostility, deeper and more violent, yet set aside for the foreseeable future. The India–China conflict is narrower, but Tibet locks in the asymmetry. Beijing controls Himalayan headwaters and high-altitude radar; with satellite guidance added, the imbalance is built into the map and cannot be overcome or negotiated away. India’s only option is accommodation, as Russia has already done—without the same risks.
Modi’s business constituency has pressed for a thaw for years, ruled by profit, not strategy. Unlike other elite enthusiasms, this one carries wider consequences: large-scale employment, urbanisation, even poverty relief all require Chinese inputs at industrial scale. No other economy has either the capacity or the experience.
Beijing is no naval threat in the Indian Ocean: with dependence on West Asian oil declining, the prohibitive cost of projecting power from its own shores leaves it without appetite, its attention fixed instead on securing food flows from South America across the Pacific, via corridors from Peru to Brazil. Should it ever attempt control in the medium term, it would confront a United States without the economic base to sustain dominance at that scale, notwithstanding AI-driven hype and quixotic attempts at reindustrialisation; that Delhi should chase an American alliance on this basis baffles.
Silicon Valley and Wall Street’s Indian-American grandees, once boosters of the U.S. connection, have largely drifted off, secured by asset hoards and Ivy League passage for their offspring.
With the commanding strata of the diaspora largely uninterested, the U.S.–India connection survives only as a vanity project. India’s foreign-policy cadre, backed by its American fixers—second-rate academics and journalists who built careers repeating Washington’s catechism—will work to obstruct any rapprochement with China. What remains is a policy in the hands of a narrow segment of the elite, weak and insecure, without a popular base, buttressed only by a degraded English-language media ruled by clicks and eyeballs, craving a prestige invisible abroad and useless at home.