Xi Jinping's Washington visit was a genuine spectacle. Trump personally greeted him at Joint Base Andrews, complete with a military review, a B-2 bomber flyover, F-22 fighters, bilateral talks and a state dinner — protocol so elevated that commentators reached back roughly six decades for a comparable precedent. But the real story isn't who "won" the ceremony. It's why the leader of a country Washington has spent years trying to contain was treated not as a supplicant but as a power whose cooperation and retaliation had to be negotiated.
New Delhi has long branded its foreign policy "strategic autonomy" or "multi-alignment": active in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, close to Russia, invoking the Global South, while deepening ties with the US, Japan and Australia through the Quad. This is usually framed as sophistication — refusing exclusive blocs while working with everyone. But strategic autonomy isn't measured by summits attended or flags displayed. It depends on credible outside options and a tolerable cost of exit — the ability to say no to a powerful partner without ruinous consequences.
The Trump era tests that distinction sharply. Both China and India face an America willing to weaponize tariffs, technology controls and market access. Their capacity to respond has diverged dramatically. Beijing retaliated hard during the 2025 tariff escalation, pushing duties on US goods to 125%, and — more consequentially — leveraged its dominance in rare-earth mining and refining to constrain Washington's room to escalate further, as Reuters reported ahead of the September 2026 summit. This doesn't mean China is invulnerable; trade wars hurt both sides, and Beijing has reasons to want stability. But it demonstrated something narrower and important: China holds instruments capable of changing America's calculus. That is leverage.
India's experience with Trump's tariff pressure shows the other side of the equation. Despite its status as a key Indo-Pacific partner and Quad member, India's response to US tariff threats has been mostly negotiation, diversification and diplomatic management — not retaliation capable of imposing comparable costs on Washington. This isn't a call for India to copy China's approach; the two economies differ too much in structure and exposure. The point is about capability, not bravado. China could make retaliation credible because it controlled assets Washington couldn't quickly replace. India has fewer such instruments.
This clarifies what's wrong with the rhetoric around multi-alignment. Riding multiple horses can be rational — the Quad offers value in maritime security and balancing China; BRICS offers development finance and non-Western institutional options; Russian energy remains useful even as India expands Western tech ties. But a portfolio strategy only works if its assets create usable alternatives. Diplomatic diversity is not strategic autonomy.
The two horses — BRICS/Global South nonalignment on one side, the US-led Indo-Pacific architecture on the other — could once be ridden together because they moved in roughly the same direction. As US-China rivalry sharpens, they're pulling apart. The danger isn't dual membership itself; it's that commitments to one bloc erode the credibility of commitments to the other. If Washington believes India can't afford to scale back cooperation, the temptation to impose costs rises. If BRICS partners believe India will retreat whenever friction with Washington appears, India's influence within BRICS weakens too.
China's autonomy, by contrast, doesn't come primarily from balancing one protector against another. It comes from material capability — manufacturing depth, market scale, export capacity, technological development, and control over critical supply-chain segments. Its BRICS and Global South relationships add options, but those options sit atop substantial domestic power. That's the real meaning of Xi's reception: not that Washington has ceded primacy, but that a challenger with credible retaliatory capacity must be negotiated with. This is also why the summit isn't evidence against BRICS or multipolarity — it's evidence that alternative centers of power have become consequential enough that the dominant power must bargain, which is precisely what a multipolar transition looks like.
India's problem is different: it aspires to be a pole in a multipolar order while remaining heavily dependent on relationships, technology and markets controlled by others. Its diplomacy has multiplied partnerships faster than its economy has multiplied credible exit options. Personalized summitry with Trump — warmth, praise, photographs — cannot substitute for bargaining assets. In repeated interactions, if India's cost of exit is far higher than America's, the threat to walk away isn't credible, and the stronger side can keep extracting concessions while expecting India to return to the table. China altered that payoff structure through tariffs and rare-earth leverage; India hasn't yet demonstrated the same reciprocal capacity.
This echoes an old dilemma. Nehru's non-alignment, born of a much weaker economy, aimed to prevent dependence on one bloc from becoming politically decisive. Indira Gandhi showed autonomy sometimes required selective alignment. Post-1991 India pursued autonomy through deeper global integration. Modi's multi-alignment extended that portfolio logic further. But the test hasn't changed: has the strategy actually enlarged India's credible options and lowered the cost of refusal? Right now, the record is shaky — the Quad hasn't blocked US economic pressure, BRICS hasn't offset dependence on Western finance and technology, Russian ties can't replace the broader Western relationship, and China ties remain constrained by border rivalry.
None of this means India should abandon the Quad, turn BRICS into an anti-American bloc, or pick a side — that would just recreate the dependence autonomy is meant to avoid. The lesson is that strategic autonomy can't be declared into existence through terminology; it has to be built — through industrial capacity, technological independence in critical areas, diversified energy and finance, real supply-chain participation, and outside options that can actually be exercised, not just cited.
China's red carpet followed its tariff war — it didn't precede it. India's foreign-policy debate needs to move past celebrating multi-alignment as an accomplishment in itself and ask a harder question: not how many horses India can ride, but whether it can control where it lands when those horses split apart. A country becomes truly autonomous not when everyone courts it, but when no partner can assume it has nowhere else to go.
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*Honorary Director, UNEP/UNCTAD Consultant Centre for Economics & Finance, Visiting Professor
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