After the Xi–Trump Washington Summit, a Managed US–China Rivalry Leaves India Exposed on Tariffs and Strategy

The news

Washington. The Xi–Trump summit was carded here on September 24 and 25; what is new on September 28 is the papers’ verdict — thin outcomes, a durable framework, and India left outside the shelter China has secured. President Donald Trump received Chinese President Xi Jinping at the airport on September 23 with a military flyover, an honour The Indian Express notes no sitting U.S. President had given a visitor since John F. Kennedy greeted Harold Macmillan in 1962. The outcomes: the trade truce struck at Busan last October, due to expire on November 10, was extended by two months, to January 10, 2027; tariffs were cut on $30 billion of “non-sensitive” goods each way; a board of trade and investment is to be operationalised; China reaffirmed $17 billion a year of U.S. farm purchases with no new commitment, and will buy 10 million tonnes of coal (The Economic Times); an AI dialogue, with its next round in November, and a channel for AI-related incidents were agreed. Semiconductors, rare earths and a frozen $14 billion Taiwan arms package were left unresolved. The leaders will meet again at APEC in Shenzhen and the G-20 in Miami — four meetings in a year. A trade truce is a temporary promise not to escalate tariffs while talks continue. The Hindu’s editorial, “New equilibrium”, reads the “constructive relationship of strategic stability” as a rivalry with a floor under it, and warns that the Indian assumption of being Washington’s “bulwark” against China “increasingly appears open to question”. The sharpest point for India is tariffs. On September 18 Mr. Trump signed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act (SRIA), allowing 100% tariffs on top buyers of Russian energy — primarily China and India. Ajay Srivastava of the Global Trade Research Initiative told IE the truce “gives Beijing protection while India remains exposed”, recalling that in July 2025 Washington spared China but put an additional 25% tariff on India for Russian crude; analyst Evan Feigenbaum doubted Mr. Trump would use the law against China and asked whether India, “a softer target”, would be hit. An Indian official countered that China wanted the truce until the end of Mr. Trump’s term and got two months. In IE, Salman Khurshid and Pushparaj Deshpande warn India risks the “Thucydides Trap” — the theory that war follows when a rising power challenges a ruling one — which Mr. Xi invoked on U.S. soil. The syllabus link is GS2: the effect of developed countries’ policies on India’s interests.

Static syllabus linkage

1. The ‘Thucydides Trap’ is Graham Allison’s name for the danger of a power transition. The phrase was coined by the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison and popularised in his 2017 book Destined for War. It draws on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote of the Peloponnesian War that it was the rise of Athens and the fear this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable. Allison studied sixteen cases over roughly five hundred years in which a rising power challenged a ruling one and found that twelve ended in war. Chinese leaders, including Mr. Xi, have used the phrase to argue that confrontation is avoidable if the established power accommodates the rising one; the Khurshid–Deshpande article extends it to the danger of two great powers colluding to constrain a third.
2. The Quad was revived in 2017 on the premise that India balances China, and remains a partnership, not an alliance. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue of India, the United States, Japan and Australia first met in 2007 at the initiative of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe but lapsed after Australia withdrew in 2008. It was revived at the level of officials in Manila in November 2017 on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit, and held its first leaders’ summit virtually in March 2021 and its first in-person summit in Washington in September 2021. It has no treaty, no secretariat and no mutual-defence clause, and works on vaccines, critical technologies, maritime domain awareness and infrastructure. Its strategic logic, from Washington’s side, has rested on India as the continental counterweight to China, which is the premise The Hindu now calls into question.
3. Strategic autonomy is India’s successor doctrine to non-alignment, and it rules out treaty alliances. Non-alignment, formalised at the Belgrade conference that founded the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, meant staying out of the Cold War blocs. After 1991 the idea evolved into strategic autonomy — the freedom to decide each issue on India’s own interests — and more recently into multi-alignment, the practice of partnering with rival groupings at once, such as the Quad on one side and BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on the other. India is not a treaty ally of the United States, though it has signed the four ‘foundational’ defence agreements: GSOMIA (2002), LEMOA (2016), COMCASA (2018) and BECA (2020). The 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation remains the closest India has come to an alliance.
4. U.S. presidential tariff power is borrowed from Congress through specific statutes. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to lay duties (Article I, Section 8). Congress has delegated slices of it: Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, 1962 allows tariffs on national-security grounds, Section 301 of the Trade Act, 1974 allows action against unfair foreign trade practices, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), 1977 grants economic powers after the President declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, 1976. The broad 2025 tariffs imposed under IEEPA were challenged in U.S. courts on the ground that the Act does not mention tariffs at all. A law like SRIA, passed by Congress for the specific purpose of tariffs on Russian-energy buyers, is far harder to challenge, which is why India reads it as a more durable threat than an executive order.

Why UPSC loves this

1. The GS2 syllabus names the effect of great-power policy on India’s interests. The line “effect of policies and politics of developed and developing countries on India’s interests” was written for stories like this one. UPSC has asked in Mains whether the Quad is changing its character, and how China uses its economic relations and trade surplus as instruments of power in Asia. A US–China ‘managed rivalry’ is the next logical question: what happens to India when the two powers it balances between start managing each other.
2. Prelims tests the vocabulary of groupings and strategic concepts. Membership of the Quad, APEC, the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative and similar groupings is standard Prelims material, and India’s absence from APEC is a classic trap. Named theories such as the Thucydides Trap and doctrines such as strategic autonomy also appear in PSIR and in the Essay paper.
3. GS3 now asks about supply chains as a strategic asset. The de-Sinification argument — that factories move easily but industrial ecosystems do not — connects this story to GS3 questions on manufacturing, the Production Linked Incentive schemes and India’s place in global value chains. An answer that links foreign policy to industrial depth will stand out.

Analysis

1. A managed rivalry lowers India’s scarcity value more than an open one ever did. When the United States and China were sliding towards confrontation, India’s size and geography made it indispensable to Washington, and New Delhi could extract technology, defence cooperation and tolerance of its Russia ties. A rivalry with a floor under it — four summits a year, an AI channel, a board of investment — reduces Washington’s need for a counterweight in a hurry. That is the real meaning of The Hindu’s warning about the ‘bulwark’ premise. The counter-view is that the structural contest over technology, Taiwan and the Asian order is unresolved, as the Indian Express explainer by G. Venkat Raman shows, so India’s value is deferred rather than lost. Both can be true: India remains strategically relevant, but it can no longer assume relevance translates into leniency.
2. China bought its shelter with leverage India does not yet have. The truce protects China because China could hurt the United States back, most visibly by withholding rare earths and magnets, as Mr. Venkat Raman notes the 2025 confrontation demonstrated. Mr. Feigenbaum’s phrase “softer target” names India’s problem precisely: it has few instruments that would make a 100% tariff costly for Washington. The government official’s point that China got only two months is fair, and short extensions are indeed checkpoints on Chinese compliance. But a two-month shelter is still a shelter, and India has none. The lesson is not to retaliate but to build chokepoint value of its own — in pharmaceuticals, IT services, talent and eventually components — over a decade.
3. SRIA turns the Russian-oil question from a negotiation into a standing legal threat. The July 2025 penalty tariff was an executive act that could be traded away in a deal. A statute passed by Congress stays on the books whoever occupies the White House, and gives any President a ready weapon. Mr. Srivastava’s warning is that the threat is aimed at pushing India into a “deeply unequal” trade agreement in exchange for temporary relief. The counter-view is that India and the United States already agreed a framework deal in February, so the tariff threat may be a bargaining lever that settles into a negotiated rate rather than a punishment. Either way, the burden of proof has shifted to India to show why it should be exempt.
4. The Khurshid–Deshpande critique is partisan in tone but its central question is legitimate. Their charge that the government has “kowtowed” and committed to $500 billion of American purchases is an Opposition argument and should be read as one. Yet their core question — whether Washington sees India as a sovereign equal or a junior partner — is the same one The Hindu’s editorial asks in neutral language. Their own article also concedes why India cannot swing towards Beijing: China has breached India’s territory, runs a trade surplus with India of about $100 billion, and has blocked India’s bids for the UNSC and the Nuclear Suppliers Group. That leaves India where strategic autonomy has always placed it: hedging with both, dependent on neither, and needing domestic strength to make the hedge credible.
5. Watch the Taiwan language and the island-chain debate, not the pandas. Mr. Xi pressed Washington to move from saying it “does not support” Taiwan independence to explicitly opposing it, and the $14 billion arms package has been frozen since May. ET’s columnist Kai Xue describes a U.S. debate between a Council on Foreign Relations report on critical minerals and a Defense Priorities report arguing that the first island chain is too vulnerable to defend — and notes that India is not mentioned in either. If American strategic thinking narrows to the Western Pacific, India’s Indian Ocean role becomes a regional concern rather than a pillar. Seema Sirohi’s line in ET captures India’s bind: it wants neither a US–China confrontation nor a condominium of the two.
6. De-Sinification shows where India’s durable leverage actually lies. G. Venkat Raman’s op-ed in The Hindu argues that moving a factory out of China is easy but moving the supplier networks, tooling and skills behind it is not. Japan’s TDK expanding battery production in Haryana and Murata Manufacturing expanding in India show that parts of those ecosystems are arriving. The test he sets is whether such investments deepen linkages with Indian suppliers or stay assembly shells, and he applies the same test to Chinese investment. This is the strongest answer to the Thucydides problem: a country with a deep industrial base cannot be treated as a softer target for long.

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