A Trumpy shadow over Tianjin

India's Modi, livid at the legally dubious US tariffs, cozies up to Xi and Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. Will the US Supreme Court fix this global meltdown?

The weekend’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, which ends today, offered interesting authoritarian theater. Xi Jinping presided with imperial serenity, Vladimir Putin basked in a legitimacy denied him elsewhere (with the odd exception of Alaska), and stern-faced Central Asian leaders played their assigned roles. But the most interesting case was that of Narendra Modi, leading the world’s most populous country, flirting with Xi and Putin.

Pledging with Xi to be “partners, not rivals,” Modi’s message for America was that India is livid at Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs. From conversations I had I can relate that Indians are also puzzled. Maybe the US cannot be trusted, a TV interviewer suggested to me. Well … It’s not inconceivable! There was also little faith that the US Supreme Court will back last week’s lower court ruling fixing the problem. You get the feeling they consider the court a rubber stamp for Trump, just because it once ruled that the president has near-total immunity.

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What, some may ask, is the SCO, exactly? This convocation started small and has become part of China’s campaign to present itself as America’s equal in a bipolar world. Russia and especially India aren’t exactly down with that plan, but the Trump emergency is pushing them all together, at least for the photo-op. Also on hand are the autocrats of Turkey and North Korea and Azerbaijan and more, so is America concerned about a global authoritarian tsunami? Well, Trump likes authoritarians and plainly wants to be one, so … maybe not. Americans should be though.

The SCO was launched in 1996 as the Shanghai Five — China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. At that time, its purpose was narrow and pragmatic: to settle post-Soviet borders, reduce troops near those frontiers, and prevent conflict along thousands of kilometers of border, some of it tense. By 2001, with Uzbekistan’s entry, the group rebranded and expanded its remit to combating the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Note the middle evil, easily blamed on the other two; it is not favored by empires. Ukraine was separatist, and very bad things happened. Putin would like that to be clear.

After 9/11, as the United States established bases in Central Asia to support its war in Afghanistan, Moscow and Beijing nudged the SCO toward a counter-Western posture, portraying it as a balancing force against NATO. Membership swelled, and on paper the SCO is formidable: it claims about 40 percent of the world’s population, nearly a quarter of its landmass, and perhaps a third of global GDP when measured by purchasing-power parity.

China’s trade with SCO members, observers, and dialogue partners reached an estimated $890 billion in 2024, a seventh of its total foreign commerce. But it has no collective defense clause like NATO, no integrated economy like the European Union. Its secretariat in Beijing is weak, and its much-discussed “development bank” hypothetical. The SCO is best understood as aimed to create the appearance of a bloc convened outside Western frameworks, staged to contrast with a West that increasingly looks brittle.

That last part, alas, is real, as the West is busily hacking off its arm and poking its own eyes out. Its progressives sneer at the idea of Western civilization (and even flirt with supporting jihadist groups that would happily behead them) — while the populist right is abandoning alliances, science and vaccines. Indians, who have their own massive problem with Islamists (because of the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan), look at this and scratch their heads. They were once a little peeved at only being a “guest” at G7 summits, the main forum of “the West” — and now they wonder whether it still makes sense to bother. And, of course, India insists it is not part of any bloc — definitely not one dominated by China, which (with almost 1.5 billion people) it is has recently surpassed in population.

Moreover, India-China relations are full of tension, or were, until Trump managed to push them together a little. The enmity has been persistent and sometimes acute, rooted above all in an unsettled 3,400-kilometer frontier. The trauma of the 1962 Sino-Indian war — when Chinese troops swept aside Indian defenses and seized Aksai China, high-altitude plateau in the western Himalayas, never faded in Delhi. Since then, mistrust has been layered over every interaction, even as both sides tried at times to maintain a facade of normalcy.

From the 1980s onward, confidence-building measures allowed for more trade and diplomacy, but the core disputes remained unresolved. China’s deepening embrace of Pakistan, combined with its Belt and Road initiatives across South Asia, rekindled Indian fears of strategic encirclement. The rivalry played out at sea as well: Beijing’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean — through ports in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Pakistan — was read in Delhi as an attempt to hem India in.

The tensions flared most vividly in the past decade. The 2017 Doklam standoff, a military confrontation that lasted over two months, brought Indian and Chinese soldiers eyeball-to-eyeball for weeks on Bhutanese soil. Three years later came Galwan, a brutal clash in Ladakh in which at least 20 Indian soldiers were killedin hand-to-hand combat. That episode shattered whatever trust had remained, unleashing a wave of anti-China sentiment across India. Follow-on standoffs in eastern Ladakh left thousands of troops deployed in freezing, high-altitude terrain, with only partial disengagement by 2025.

Trade has been the engine of slow rapprochement. China is now one of India’s largest trading partners, despite bans on Chinese apps and curbs on investment after Galwan. Yet this area too has become a problem, because India runs a trade deficit of over $100 billion. Trump is wrong to consider deficits something close to an act of war, but India’s with China — from which it imports ten times its exports — is actually absurd.

Of course, the trade issue that agitates the Indians even more is Trump’s sweeping 50 percent tariffs on Indian imports. It is an interesting case. Trump appears angry that India imports a third of its oil from Russia, skirting sanctions and helping prop up Russia’s war economy. I have written that India indeed needs to be nudged away from this. But blanket tariffs are not the way.

But there are only two small problems: India can rightly point to signals from the West that this was viewed as legitimate during the Biden administration, as a way to stabilize oil prices, and as long as the crude was purchased at a cap. Second, well, it doesn’t really track with what is otherwise Trump’s consistent, bizarre and embarrassing fawning over Putin. The Indians don’t buy the idea that Trump gives a hoot about Ukraine — and they’re not the only ones.

It really does just seem that Trump loves tariffs, maybe because the word reminds him of “sheriff.” He can sell them as punishment to shifty foreigners, and he obviously assumes MAGA voters will never figure out that Americans are paying the tariffs. If, that is, he understands that himself; it’s one of the mysteries of our times.

Either way, India–US trade reached $212 billion in 2024, with India running a $46 billion surplus — which does a little to balance the situation with China. For America, it is little more than a blip in what should be a critically important geostrategic and commercial relationship. Indian exports pharmaceuticals, textiles, IT services, and even the new iPhone assembly lines that Apple has relocated from China. The sudden trade war validates those in India who always wanted the country to be non-aligned and built on strategic autonomy: joining the US-led Quad with Japan and Australia, but also the BRICS and SCO; buying weapons from Washington and Paris, but also Moscow; boycotting no one.

That instinct is rooted in deep memory. Colonized by Britain and sidelined during the Cold War when Washington favored Pakistan, India emerged with a fierce desire never to be a junior partner. Especially under Modi’s nationalist leadership, India sees itself as a civilizational power asserting sovereignty.

China is delighted to portray itself as sitting atop a new global order that includes a budding alliance with India and might even prove enticing to confused Westerners. I’m sure he expects to win over Trump himself, perhaps with some shiny knickknacks, the right to brand a tower, or a good word about Ivanka.

Xi’s dictatorship offers the mirage of competence and order — gleaming infrastructure, poverty reduction, long-term planning — if one trades freedom for order and some prosperity. Over the past decade, as Western dysfunction grew, more people began to wonder if that bargain might be worth it. China’s bureaucracy can appear more professional than the revolving cast of Western populists. Certainly, you don’t have to wonder whether the Chinese know how tariffs work. They’re capitalist communists, after all.

In my TV appearances, I tried to argue that the US Supreme Court may actually back the federal lower court that last week struck down most of Trump’s tariffs as lying outside the bounds of executive privilege. Which, of course, they do.

The host treated my musing about actual due process and fact-based deliberations with incredulity. The Indians seem to think that America has gone full-banana republic.

But the law only allows the president to mess with trade this way in the case of a national emergency. Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs on essentially every country require us to believe that the US is in the throes of a national emergency with country in the world, related basically to almost every industry.

I mean, can Brett Kavanaugh say this with a straight face? Oh, forget I said that. Clarence Thomas? Wait. Amy Coney Barrett? Hmm. John Roberts? There may be some hope with Roberts, but it does seem that we may actually have a problem.

Time for Plan B, then. You know what, India? The US consumer will punish you by paying higher prices and forking over a chunk to the US government! Take that, Modi! You have been warned, Xi! Unless, that is, you offer up a shiny bauble.