Trump’s tariffs are forging a new global order

Trade de-dollarisation: Traditional trade relationships centred on the dollar-denominated, SWIFT-enabled financial architecture face systematic challenges. The development of BRICS Pay, utilising blockchain technology to circumvent dollar transactions, and a much-discussed BRICS common digital currency, possibly backed by gold, may still seem technically primitive, but represents the blueprint for an emerging global financial architecture.

Military and security framework: The SCO's Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, headquartered in Tashkent, represents more than institutional counterterrorism coordination. It embodies the gradual emergence of an alternative security architecture that operates independently of Western-dominated frameworks such as NATO or bilateral security pacts with Washington.

This security convergence proves particularly significant as it provides a legitimising framework for military cooperation between nations that Washington considers strategic competitors or adversaries. Joint exercises, intelligence sharing, and coordinated counterterrorism operations under SCO auspices establish patterns of military collaboration that, while ostensibly defensive, create the institutional foundation for broader security partnerships. The framework's true strategic value lies not in its current operational capacity but in its potential to normalise alternative security arrangements that challenge the presumption of Western-led global security governance, transforming tactical cooperation against shared threats into the building blocks of a multipolar security order.

Energy realignment: Perhaps most consequentially, energy flows are reorganising along new geographic axes. Russia's pivot toward Asian markets, facilitated by the Rupee-Ruble and Yuan-Ruble settlement mechanisms, creates alternative energy trade mechanisms that are insulated from SWIFT sanctions. China's green energy investments overseas—over $100bn invested since 2023—demonstrate how the energy revolution creates new economic interdependence.

Modi's calculus

Modi's journey to Tianjin crystallises how ascending global powers navigate a treacherous passage when the global hegemon employs increasingly self-interested measures to preserve its own economic supremacy.

Nothing illustrates India's sophisticated diplomatic calculus more clearly than how its rapprochement with China directly enhances New Delhi's bargaining position against US economic coercion. India has masterfully exploited strategic autonomy for decades, orchestrating a delicate equilibrium between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing that maximises leverage while preserving core national interests.

The warming of China-Indian relations—culminating in Foreign Minister Wang Yi's August visit to New Delhi and breakthrough agreements on border management—represents tactical statecraft of the highest order. This rapprochement serves primarily as diplomatic leverage over Washington, signalling that excessive pressure will drive India toward accommodation with America's primary strategic rival.

Beijing grasps this dynamic with equal understanding. India's overtures constitute pragmatic manoeuvring in response to US pressure rather than long-term strategic realignment with China. Both powers recognise that their fundamental rivalry—encompassing security and economic realms and intensified by their shared geography—is likely to persist.

Yet, this tactical cooperation serves the immediate interests of both nations precisely because it is understood as such. For China, closer economic ties with India offer a crucial alternative market at a time when Beijing faces sustained pressure from Western efforts to de-risk supply chains. China's $113bn in exports to India provides a vital outlet for Chinese goods, especially as access to US markets becomes increasingly restricted.

India represents a key component of Beijing's strategic pivot toward strengthening the Global South's trade networks. The timing of improved relations—coinciding with escalating US-China and US-India trade tensions—demonstrates how geopolitical pressure can create opportunities for alternative arrangements among significant and interdependent stakeholders.

However, beneath the tactical consensus lies a deeper strategic convergence that transcends immediate great power calculations. To secure a sustained economic rise, both China and India share an inherent interest in depolarising global trade networks and reducing their vulnerability to America's increasingly erratic policy shifts toward its international partners.

While short-term reconciliation between President Trump's administration and New Delhi may still create 'honeymoon' periods, India, just like China, is keenly aware that dependence on US-dominated systems—from SWIFT payments, dollar-denominated trade, to the American tech infrastructure—creates strategic vulnerability that no amount of bilateral goodwill can ultimately remedy. This imperative for economic sovereignty may prove more durable than the immediate tactical considerations that brought China and India closer, transforming what began as pressure-driven cooperation into a cornerstone of the emerging multipolar order.

The Tianjin paradigm

The gathering in Tianjin, from 31 August to 1 September, represents the further crystallisation of a 'Global South consensus'—the belief that the international order should reflect contemporary rather than historical power distributions.

Read more: Putin to unveil his vision for a more balanced world in Kazan

We must confront an inexorable global economic reality. By 2050, economic projections indicate that China, India, and the US will constitute the world's three largest economies in precisely that sequence on a nominal GDP basis.

The forging of economic ties between China and India, however tactically motivated, represents a fundamental pivot of global economic gravity toward Asia. When the world's two largest prospective economies deepen their integration, the impact extends beyond bilateral relations to reshape the entire world economy.

From this perspective, Washington's simultaneous confrontations with both future economic superpowers appear strategically counterproductive. The US cannot effectively contain both China and India as middle global powers without also summoning its own demise.

Unlike the Cold War's bipolar confrontation, this emerging order is genuinely multipolar, with shifting coalitions based on specific interests rather than ideological alignments. India imports a substantial volume of tech products from China while maintaining defence ties with the US. The future Global South grouping is neither 'pro-Western' nor 'anti-Western.' It simply is 'non-western.'

President Trump's tariff policies, while demonstrating the US's resolve, also reveal the limitations of coercive power in a world moving towards a diminishing of US dominance over time. The emergence of parallel institutions for trade, finance, technology, and security cooperation suggests that the unipolar moment is ending, not because of America's decline, but despite it.

Rather than resisting this transition through increasingly coercive measures, statesmanship demands adaptation to new realities while preserving essential interests. The leaders gathering in Tianjin understand this dynamism. The question is whether Washington will also recognise it while the window for constructive transition towards a multipolar world closes.

Ultimately, Modi's journey to China reveals the prospect of a new multipolar order, one in which the West is no longer the sole architect. Whether this system emerges through cooperation or confrontation will define the remainder of this century. The Tianjin moment should be an awakening call deserving of historical contemplation.