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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Trump casts a long shadow over China’s gathering of global leaders
Analysis by Ivan Watson, CNN
Updated:
4:24 AM EDT, Fri August 29, 2025
Source: CNN
The leaders of three of the world’s largest countries will be
gathering for a Eurasian summit in China this weekend.
But when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President
Vladimir Putin, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping join other heads of state
in Tianjin for the 25th summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), absent will be American sparring partner President Donald Trump.
“For this particular summit, the US may not be at the table, but the
US is always present,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at
the Washington-based Stimson Center.
Trump will nonetheless be the talk of Tianjin.
“The one thing that they’re going to talk about is the United
States, its policies, its tariffs,” predicted Sushant Singh, lecturer
in South Asian Studies at Yale University.
Case in point, Prime Minister Modi. He will arrive in Tianjin days
after the Trump Administration imposed a stinging 50% tariff on Indian
goods, among the highest of Trump’s current tariffs. The White House
presents this partly as a penalty for India’s purchase of Russian
oil.
Trump’s unexpectedly tough approach to India ( much to New Delhi’s
chagrin), reverses decades of US cultivation of the South Asian giant
as a democratic counterweight to China
“It’s a massive shift. It’s a U-turn,” said Yale University’s
Singh.
Analysts say the tariffs broadside from Trump has pushed Modi into
making some concessions towards China and cautiously embrace Xi at a
time when the two giant neighbors had already been exploring.
“Mr. Modi had no option but to go and cut a deal with President
Xi,” said Singh, speaking on the phone from New Delhi.
This will mark the Indian leader’s first visit to China since 2018.
Relations between the two Asian giants cratered in 2020, after Chinese
and Indian soldiers bludgeoned each other to death in the first of a
series of violent clashes in a disputed Himalayan border region.
But after a freeze that lasted years, both countries recently started
re-issuing tourist visas for each other’s citizens and have said they
would resume direct flights cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic.
For years, India’s foreign minister stated that relations between the
two countries would never be normalized until tension on the disputed
border was resolved.
Modi’s mere presence in Tianjin will mark something of a strategic
recalibration and a demonstration of India’s new geopolitical
vulnerability.
The Kremlin’s best friend
Less than three weeks after Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin
at a US airbase in Alaska, the Russian president will be arriving for a
visit to China at a time when Moscow’s missiles .
He will not only participate in the Tianjin summit but also attend a
massive military parade in Beijing alongside Xi and North Korea’s Kim
Jong Un on September 3, setting the stage for a stark show of unity
between the three powers.
Trump’s on-again, off-again overtures to the Russian strongman are
unlikely to impact the so-called “no limits” partnership between
Russia and China.
That relationship has only deepened in recent years, as cross-border
trade has hit new heights. Meanwhile, both countries continue to engage
in security cooperation, most recently with the announcement that they
conducted their
Analysts say the glue that binds these once-hostile neighbors ever
closer is their shared perception of the US as a threat.
“There’s a famous saying in the Chinese policy community,” says
Sun from the Stimson Center. “China and Russia can share miseries but
not happiness.”
China, faced with a slumping domestic economy, is also grappling with
its own long and painful trade war with the US.
Meanwhile, Russia, with its much smaller economy and the international
isolation triggered by its invasion of Ukraine, desperately needs a
hand from China, turning Moscow into the junior partner in this
relationship.
Beijing’s top diplomat reportedly told European officials
It would be a “major devastation for the Chinese security
architecture if Russia were to fall or become Westernized,” said
Claus Soong, an analyst who specializes in China-Russian relations at
the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin.
New world order
In 2022, just days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin and Xi to call
for “shaping a polycentric world order.”
Their governments have chafed for years at the global dominance the US
has enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
President Trump’s chaotic foreign policy, which has included attacks
on longtime allies and the almost-overnight dismantling of global free
trade, presents China, the world’s second largest economy, with fresh
opportunity.
As world leaders gather for the SCO summit in Tianjin and the
subsequent World War II victory military parade in Beijing, expect Xi
to promote China as a stable alternative to Washington.
“China is definitely using this opportunity to demonstrate to
China’s neighbors that China is a benevolent leader, a benevolent
hegemon…dependable, predictable,” said the Stimson Center’s Sun.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has deep structural flaws,
including the between several of its member states and dialogue
partners (India and Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and
Azerbaijan).
But this Eurasian gathering may present a more appealing alternative to
nations worried by the US and its increasingly unpredictable position
on the world stage.
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