Can the new India-China bonhomie reshape trade and hurt the US in Asia? | Donald Trump

New Delhi, India – Five years ago, United States President Donald Trump was being welcomed in India, and China condemned.

In February 2020, Trump addressed a massive rally titled “Namaste Trump!” in Ahmedabad, on his first visit to India as US president, as bilateral ties and trade soared, and the American leader’s personal bonhomie with Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on public display.

By June that year, relations with China, on the other hand, came crashing down: 20 Indian soldiers were killed in clashes with Chinese troops in Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region. India banned more than 200 Chinese apps, including TikTok, and Indian and Chinese troops lined up along their disputed border in an eyeball-to-eyeball standoff. New Delhi also expanded defence and strategic cooperation with the US and the Quad grouping, officially the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which also includes Japan and Australia.

As recently as May this year, India treated China as its primary adversary, after Pakistan used Chinese defence systems during its four-day war with India after a deadly attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.

But Trump’s tariff wars, especially against India – which has been slapped with a 50 percent duty on its imports – and rapid geopolitical shifts have led to a thaw in New Delhi’s relations with Beijing.

The White House under Trump, meanwhile, political analysts say, is undoing decades of diplomatic and strategic gains foundational to its influence in Asia, home to more than 60 percent of the world’s population.

“Dragon-Elephant tango”

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Modi sat down with China’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, as he hailed “respect for each other’s interests and sensitiveness” and “steady progress” in bilateral relations.

On his two-day visit to New Delhi, Wang also met with Indian Foreign Minister S Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval to discuss the countries’ disputed border in the Himalayan mountains.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the countries have entered a “steady development track” and should “trust and support” each other. In their meetings, both sides announced confidence-building measures: resumption of direct flights, easier visa processes and border trade facilitation. In June, Beijing allowed pilgrims from India to visit holy sites in Tibet. The two countries also agreed to explore an “early harvest” settlement of parts of their long, contested border, which is the biggest source of historical tensions between them, including a war they fought in 1962.

Modi also formally accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin – a regional grouping led by China and Russia that many analysts view as aimed at countering US influence in Asia – scheduled for late this month. It will be Modi’s first visit to China in more than seven years.

“The setbacks we experienced in the past few years were not in the interest of the people of our two countries. We are heartened to see the stability that is now restored in the borders,” Wang said Monday, referring to the Galwan clashes, in which four Chinese soldiers were killed as well.

Earlier this year, President Xi called for Sino-Indian ties to take the form of a “Dragon-Elephant tango” – a reference to the animals often seen as emblems of the two Asian giants.

Sana Hashmi, a fellow at the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation, told Al Jazeera that the efforts to minimise tensions and differences between India and China have been under way for some time.

Last October, Modi and Xi broke the ice with a meeting in Kazan, Russia, after avoiding each other for years, even at multilateral forums.

“However, Trump’s policies on tariffs and [favourable approach towards New Delhi’s rival] Pakistan have left India with little choice but to reduce the number of adversaries, including China,” she said.

The US has twice hosted Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, this year, including for an unprecedented White House meeting with Trump. The US president has also repeatedly claimed that he brokered the ceasefire that ended the fighting between India and Pakistan in May, despite New Delhi denying that Washington played a mediator.

“For Beijing, the outreach [towards India] appears largely tactical, while for New Delhi, it stems more from uncertainty and the shifting geopolitical landscape,” Hashmi said.

While there are no visible signs that Trump is seeking to isolate China, Hashmi said the White House “is certainly trying to isolate a key strategic partner, India.”

Trump has imposed an additional 25 percent tariff – on top of another 25 percent – on India’s goods, citing its continued imports of Russian oil. He has not imposed such tariffs against China, the largest buyer of Russian crude.

Biswajit Dhar, a trade economist, said that the Trump tariffs are causing a realignment in Asia. “The pace of improvement [in India-China relations] has certainly hastened over the past few months,” he said.

“There seems to be a genuine shift in the relations,” he added, “which is here to stay.”

Asian trade bloc?

Political and economic experts also noted that if India-China ties were to get warmer, that could soften the blow of US tariffs for both.

With Washington raising barriers on key Indian exports, access to Chinese markets, smoother cross-border trade and collaborative supply chain networks would help New Delhi reduce its reliance on the US market.

In 2024-25, India recorded a trade deficit of $99.2bn with China, backed by a surge in imports of electronic goods. Beijing is India’s largest trading partner after the US – yet, India’s trade deficit with China is roughly double that with the US.

China is attempting to woo India and has indicated that it will provide greater market access for Indian goods, said Hashmi, of the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation. “This could offer India some relief from Trump’s tariffs and mitigate the impact of strategic and economic vulnerabilities and also help reduce the significant trade imbalance India currently has with China,” she said.

For China, winning India over would also be a major strategic gain for its influence in the Asia Pacific, Hashmi said. “New Delhi has been a key pillar of the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy, so closer ties with India would allow China to demonstrate that it, rather than the US, is a reliable economic and security partner,” she added.

Both in India and China, there is a realisation that they have lost too much geostrategically due to their tense relationship, said Ivan Lidarev, a visiting research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies, specialising in India-China relations.

“China realised that it has pushed India way too close to the US, and New Delhi realises that its close relations with the US now cost it to a great extent,” he said.

“The China-India rapprochement creates greater space for Asia-led trade blocs that are independent from Washington,” Lidarev said, adding that there could be an increase in the bilateral trade between India and China.

However, Hashmi pointed to limitations that she suggested were in-built into how closely India and China could cooperate. India, like several other countries, has been trying to derisk its supply chains by reducing overdependence on any one source. That, she said, “is proving ineffective without a strong response to the growing dependence on China”. And for India, “this challenge has only deepened with the new US tariffs”.

“A thaw in relations may help normalise bilateral ties, but it is unlikely to transform them, as competition and conflict will persist,” she told Al Jazeera. “[And the] global trade dependence on China will continue, as countries rush to normalise economic relations with Beijing amid Trump’s tariffs.”

Quad, minus the edge

Since the George W Bush presidency, India has been framed in Washington as a democratic counterweight to China. Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia” gave New Delhi a central role in balancing Beijing’s rise – that only grew sharper with the creation of the Quad, which includes the US and India alongside Japan and Australia.

For the US, the Quad became a centrepiece of its Asia Pacific strategy, steering billions of dollars into Asia Pacific infrastructure, supply chain resilience and critical technologies. Experts noted that the Quad allowed the US to project influence without relying solely on formal alliances, while still embedding New Delhi in a cooperative security and economic framework.

Since the Cold War era, New Delhi has pursued a foreign policy premised on strategic autonomy – it will partner with different countries on specific issues, but will not join any military alliance and will not ideologically position itself in a bloc against other major powers.

Still, in Washington, the underlying assumption was that closer US-India ties, coupled with historical distrust between New Delhi and Beijing, would turn India into a critical pillar against China. To keep India on board, successive US administrations steered clear of pressuring New Delhi too much over its traditional friendship with Moscow, a major weapons supplier to the South Asian nation over the past half-century. That policy continued during Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the US, in fact, encouraged India to buy Russian oil that Western nations were boycotting, to keep global crude prices under check.

Now, Trump is upending that equation and wants India to formally pick a side.

Referring to India’s foreign policy, White House Counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro wrote in the Financial Times on August 18, “The Biden administration largely looked the other way at this strategic and geopolitical madness. The Trump administration is confronting it … If India wants to be treated as a strategic partner of the US, it needs to start acting like one.”

Indian officials, meanwhile, have signalled that New Delhi will not give up on its “strategic autonomy”.

Warming India-China ties would complicate US efforts to isolate China in global institutions, said BR Deepak, professor of Chinese studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

“If New Delhi were to align more closely with Beijing on issues like development financing, multilateral reform, de-dollarisation, or climate change, it would undercut Washington’s narrative of rallying democracies against China,” Deepak told Al Jazeera, adding that it lends legitimacy to Beijing’s push for an alternative global order.

Deepak said that a friendlier Beijing-Delhi line might temper India’s appetite for overtly anti-China positioning within the Quad, nudging the grouping towards a broader agenda of providing public goods in the Asia Pacific rather than functioning as a blunt counter-China bloc.

Lidarev, of the National University of Singapore, said that the India-China rapprochement will create “complications within the Quad that will undermine the mutual trust within the grouping and the sense of purpose”.

Still, Deepak said, the Quad’s “strategic relevance” will remain intact, especially over “shared goals such as resilient supply chains, emerging technologies, climate cooperation and maritime security”.

Hashmi pointed out that Trump had focused heavily on strengthening the Quad in his first term – but was now undermining its cohesion.

Right now, the Asia Pacific “doesn’t seem to be a priority” for the US president, she said. But if that changes, Washington will find an altered regional landscape too, she suggested: Convincing India to be a part of any anti-China coalition will prove difficult.