In June 2020, 20 Indian soldiers paid the ultimate price, due to unwarranted aggression by Chinese forces in Galwan valley, now that dust has settled, people still have anger towards China, we have banned their apps, but things are going back to normal, I read in the news today, that we are easing up visas for Chinese nationals to boost tech manufacturing, flights are also on path to resumption. Few would remember the External Affairs Minister had met his chinese counterpart 8 days after Galwan, for the scheduled Russia-India-China trilateral meeting, without any boycott, or damatic exit. In November 2020, at the BRICS summit, both Modi and Xi were in attendance, and business as usual despite of the standoff at LAC, opposition had raised about this but nothing happened. One might think why not quit BRICS just like we rejected OBOR (One Belt One Road) but there is an important reason for that, which Dr Chaulia, and Indian IR expert in a study had written about, resonates with me, it is that we stay in BRICS not despite our conflict with China, but because of it. Unlike OBOR, whose sole purpose is to make distant markets accessible for Chinese exports, BRICS was founded in 2006 when the power gap between China and India wasn't as massive as today. Not only we were there at the table from day one, the founding member status locked in certain rights and veto powers that can't easily be taken away even though China's economy is now five times larger than ours. If we walk, we lose that leverage, China would have have free run of the entire South-South cooperation space without any checks. We'd be giving up one of the few institutional platforms where we actually have structural voice to moderate Chinese behavior. This is a soft balancing exercise, no t military alliances or direct confrontation, but using institutional mechanisms to constrain a more powerful rival. China uses BRICS to push back against American hegemony and we use BRICS to keep China bound to rules and prevent them from dominating these forums completely. This follows our track record in the past like when we joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank because it had transparent governance and we got second largest shareholding with enough voting power to block projects in disputed territories like PoK. BRICS in that way is a similar institution where the design gives us enough voice to make participation worthwhile. Russia on board also makes it more appealing as while Russia itself hedges against Chinese dominance in Central Asia and Eurasia, having India in these forums helps balance China from Russia's perspective too. After Galwan, the study notes that Russia quietly intervened to get Chinese forces to release Indian soldiers who were taken prisoner, not because of goodwill but the fact that border clash would have derailed the incoming RIC meeting. Even in Doklam in 2017, Indian threat of boycotting BRICS summit in China, worked to an extent because China valued the legitimacy BRICS provides and they understand that if India walks away, BRICS looks more like a Chinese puppet show and loses credibility as genuine multilateral cooperation. BRICS also provide hedging of different sort, like QUAD where purpose is simple to limit China but like we are seeing now how Trump is treating us despite being an ally, BRICS shows that deterrence is not enough, we also need engagement mechanisms where we can sit across the table, have voice in decision making, and create some institutional friction against Chinese unilateralism and that is what BRICS, SCO, even AIIB provide. Full study for anyone interested in the detailed analysis: Chaulia, S. (2021). [In Spite of the Spite: An Indian View of China and India in BRICS. Global Policy, 12(4), 519-523](https://jgu.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/jsia/GlobalPolicyVolume12Issue4.pdf). It's written specifically from Indian strategic perspective examining how we use these multilateral platforms.

Relevant text: Over the summer, President Trump made headlines when he lamented the expulsion of Russia from the Group of Eight—now the Group of Seven—as a “very big mistake.” He even suggested that he’d like to see China added to form a “G9.” His national security strategy proposes taking this a step further, creating a new body of major powers, one that isn’t hemmed in by the G7’s requirements that the countries be both wealthy and democratically governed. The strategy proposes a “Core 5,” or C5, made up of the U.S., China, Russia, India and Japan—which are several of the countries with more than 100 million people. It would meet regularly, as the G7 does, for summits with specific themes. First on the C5’s proposed agenda: Middle East security—specifically, normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Exclusive: Top Indian arms makers held rare meetings in Russia on potential joint ventures, sources say - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/top-indian-arms-makers-held-rare-meetings-russia-potential-joint-ventures-2025-12-09/

In this interview she comments on the aggressive tactics on both sides along with the origins of the conflict. She also shares views on dispute with China - says that India officially recognises Tibet as a part of China and that the Dalai Lama is not a political leader. Thoughts?

The remarks came during a White House meeting where Trump launched a $12-billion support package for American farmers, a core constituency that has been pressing him to counter rising imports.

A political analyst believes India strategically exploited a weakened Russia for oil and technology, another argues the visit was a major diplomatic victory for Putin against Western isolation.

I think India has been Finlandized to some extent. There is a growing chasm in capabilities between India & her adversaries. Furthermore, foreign partners are wary of India's potential to grow as a pole in of itself. Hence both the pre-eminent global powerhouses seek to contain India in their own ways. It seems both China & US have a veto on Indian foreign policy.

* **Title:** *“Himalayan Geometry Of Power”* * **Author:** Nirupama Rao (former foreign secretary, ex-ambassador to China) [The Times of India](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/defence-security/himalayan-geometry-of-power/articleshow/125746587.cms?utm_source=chatgpt.com) * **Tagline (paraphrased):** She argues that India and China need to accept a degree of “fracture” in relations and turn the LAC into something routine and predictable, which would also reduce Pakistan’s leverage over India–China ties. [The Times of India+1](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/defence-security/himalayan-geometry-of-power/articleshow/125746587.cms?utm_source=chatgpt.com) * **Hook of the article (paraphrased):** * She starts with the **recent detention of an Indian citizen in Shanghai**, apparently because she was from Arunachal Pradesh. * She calls it *not a crisis but a signal* — highlighting how even routine bureaucratic acts can become loaded with civilisational and strategic meaning in the India-China relationship. [The Times of India+1](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-plus/defence-security/himalayan-geometry-of-power/articleshow/125746587.cms) * She notes that the **Himalayas historically were a zone of movement and exchange**, not a rigid militarised frontier, and contrasts that with today’s hardened, contested border.

Former Pentagon official Michael Rubin says Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for bringing India and Russia closer. He also criticised Trump's handling of ties with India, which have been rocky.

how likely do you consider a scenario in which your government decides to side with China against Usa and its allies(Korea, Japan, Phillipines, Australia, Europe,...)? How eager would the people be to support such decision? In a country as large and as populous as India how does that even work, with all the groups and ethnicities etc? can the government realistically persuade/force so many different people into the same war?

Hello! Здравсвуйте! Вітаю!  I’m [Mike](https://x.com/Mike_Eckel) [Eckel](https://bsky.app/profile/mikeeckel.bsky.social), senior international correspondent for [Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty](https://www.rferl.org/author/mike-eckel/muvyqo), covering, reporting, analyzing, and illuminating All Things Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and pretty much across the former Soviet Union: from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, from Lviv to Kyiv; from Tbilisi to Baku, from the Caspian Sea to Issyk Kul, and all places in between.   I’ve been writing on Russia and the former Soviet space for more than 20 years, since cutting my teeth as a reporter in Vladivostok in the 1990s and continuing through a 6-year stint as Moscow correspondent with The Associated Press, and stints in Washington, D.C. and now Prague.   Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s authoritarian repression inside Russia, sucks up most of my reporting brain space these days, but I also keep a hand in investigative work digging into [cryptocurrency/sanctions evasion](https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-cryptocurrency-moldova-kyrgyzstan-a7-sanctions/33609918.html), [Russian businessmen who break out of Italian police custody](https://www.rferl.org/a/artyom-uss-escape-arrest-italy-russia-balkans-ukraine-invasion/32899209.html), [former Russian oligarchs in trouble](https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-gusinsky-mcgonigal-fbi-oligarch/33273859.html), and a subject I can’t let go of: the mysterious death of former Kremlin press minister, [Mikhail Lesin](https://www.rferl.org/a/lesin-autopsy-record/29824566.html).   Feel free to ask me anything about any of the above subjects and I’ll do my best to share insights and observations.   Proof photo [here.](https://imgur.com/a/t7INCNU)  You can start posting your questions and I will check in daily and answer from Monday, 15 December until Friday, 19 December.  

\[SS from essay by Jennifer Lind, ssociate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. She is the author of [*Autocracy 2.0: How China’s Rise Reinvented Tyranny*](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501784163/autocracy-2-0/#bookTabs=1).\] The churn of great-power politics shapes the world and touches, for good or ill, the lives of people everywhere. Wars among great powers have killed millions of people; victorious great powers have also set up international orders whose norms and rules affect global peace and prosperity. Great powers also intervene in other countries’ politics, covertly and overtly, sometimes violently. In other words, great powers matter. Polarity—how many great powers there are—matters, too. Consider the past three decades of U.S.-led unipolarity. Freed from the constraining effects of a great-power rival, Washington deployed its forces around the world and conducted military actions in multiple countries, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. The dangers of bipolarity, however, are different. Superpowers in a bipolar structure compete obsessively, creating spheres and buffers by cultivating protégés and installing puppets. Multipolarity, meanwhile, in which three or more great powers are present, is said to be the most prone to war because alliances are precarious and the fluidity of alignments makes the balance of power harder to estimate.

\[SS from essay by [Matthias Matthijs](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/matthias-matthijs), Dean Acheson Associate Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations; and [Nathalie Tocci](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/authors/nathalie-tocci), James Anderson Professor of the Practice at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna and Director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome.\] When U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, Europe faced a choice. As Trump made draconian demands for greater European defense spending, threatened European exports with sweeping new tariffs, and challenged long-held European values on democracy and the rule of law, European leaders could either assume a confrontational stance and push back collectively or choose the path of least resistance and give in to Trump. From Warsaw to Westminster, from Riga to Rome, they chose the latter. Instead of insisting on bargaining with the United States as an equal partner or asserting their self-declared strategic autonomy, the EU and its member states, as well as nonmembers such as the United Kingdom, have reflexively and consistently adopted a posture of submission. To many in Europe, this was a rational choice. Centrist proponents of appeasement argue that the alternatives—resisting Trump’s demands on defense, resorting to Chinese-style tit-for-tat escalation in trade negotiations, or calling out his autocratic tendencies—would have been bad for European interests. The United States might have abandoned Ukraine, for example. [Trump](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/topics/trump-administration) could have proclaimed the end of U.S. support for NATO and announced a significant withdrawal of U.S. military forces from the European continent. There could have been a full-scale transatlantic trade war. In this view, it is thanks only to Europe’s cautious attempts at placation that none of those things came to pass.

According to reporting by Defense One, there exists a longer, classified version of the US’ National Security Strategy that goes beyond the publicly released version. This document reportedly proposes creating a new global governance body, called the “Core 5” or C5, consisting of the US, China, Russia, India, and Japan. The main points in the longer version include: competition with China, a withdrawal from Europe’s defense, and a new focus on the Western Hemisphere. What was determined to be first on C5’s proposed agenda is the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. The classified NSS also emphasizes a strategic pivot away from Europe, treating the continent as largely irrelevant to US interests. It focuses on partnering with like-minded regional powers while acknowledging that permanent American hegemony is unachievable. According to Defense One, the longer version of NSS also proposes to focus U.S. relationships with European countries on a few nations with like-minded... administrations and movements. Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland are listed as countries the U.S. should “work more with…with the goal of pulling them away from the European Union. NSS explicitly details the “failure” of US global domination, describing it as “the wrong thing to want and it wasn’t achievable."

With everything that's going on right now in the world, and with Russia being considered a world power by Trump and even Western media. I think it's important that more people realize Russia's economic strength. GDP is just one of many metrics to try to describe an economy though.