India’s options in a world becoming bipolar again

• India’s National Security Adviser Ajit Doval met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the BRICS National Security Advisers’ meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia.
• The question arises whether India’s diplomatic engagement with China, strained since the June 2020 Chinese incursion into Galwan Valley, is about to improve.
• India’s relations with the U.S. have been thriving, with the U.S. viewing India as a useful partner to counter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
• The U.S. and China are vying for global hegemony, but this is not the bipolarity we knew during the Cold War.
• The U.S. is the largest investor in China’s economy, owns more U.S. Treasury Bonds than any other country, and sends more tourists to China than any other Asian country.
• The U.S. has been contested in political, military, economic, and technological spheres since the end of the Cold War.
• China’s rise, fuelled by American investment in its industries and booming export trade, has rehauled the global order.
• The U.S. is evolving a strategy to counteract China, similar to the U.S.’s “containment” during the Cold War.

The Sino-American Bipolarity: A New Canvas

• The U.S. and China are intertwined economies, unlike the total economic separation during the Cold War.
• China’s economic might makes its claim to global hegemony greater than the Soviet Union’s ever was.
• The term “cold war” is used to describe the Sino-American bipolarity, preferring terms like “competitive coexistence” or “conflictual coexistence”.
• The U.S. and U.S.S.R. were nearly equal militarily, but China is nearing parity with, and in some areas, threatens to outstrip the U.S.
• The Pentagon reports that China’s navy has surpassed America’s in the number of battle-force ships over the past decade.
• The People’s Liberation Army Air Force has the potential to become the world’s largest air force.
• Unlike in the Cold War, proxy wars between the two rivals do not litter the world today.
• The Sino-American competition is not about ideology, but the axis of China and Russia.
• The new canvas of the Indo-Pacific includes China’s goal of creating a blue water navy, India’s emergence as a possible counterbalance to China, and the role that the U.S. will play in shaping the contours of the shift in power from the west to the east.