A major global change

• India is at a pivotal point in global value chains, with the country set to become the third largest economy.

• The post-colonial order, characterized by rule-based restrictions, has become obsolete with China surpassing the United States as the largest donor and in the share of manufacturing and global trade.

• The G-7 split has left a vacuum, leading to more requests for membership from global institutions like BRICS.

• The US President Donald Trump is responding to a more equal world moving out of the colonial frame, requiring countries to subordinate their interests.

• The ‘breakup’ of the G-7 and G-20 leaves global agenda-setting open, with the U.S., China, the European Union, and India contributing nearly threequarters of all growth since 2020.

• The U.S. and China are evenly balanced in terms of influence, trade, technology, defensive military capacity, and playing tit-for-tat on tariff levels.

• India needs to be strategic to grasp new opportunities with the ‘dismantling’ of the WTO, managing trade relations with the U.S. pushing its agricultural and energy surplus and building on the rapprochement with China.

• India’s world-class diplomats should be given the task of coming up with a new type of principles of global governance for a more equal world.

• India has the endogenous capacity to aim for global technological leadership by developing open source software that will shape future multilateralism and international cooperation.

• The West developed on the foundation of colonialism unlike the East, and new policy groups need to engage and seek complementarity with China, ASEAN, and Africa as value chains get restructured.

• India needs to formulate grand challenges with academia and industry to leverage its world-class human talent, vast data, and proven digital stack to build the best large language models in the world, making India a formidable cyber power.