Opinion | Biden’s China policy tweaks could bring fresh tensions for India and Russia

Name: China mocks the US as Beijing compares chaos at Capitol with Hong Kong protests
Uploaded: 2021-01-17T19:00:13.000Z
Duration: 3 min 23 s
Description: China mocks the US as Beijing compares chaos at Capitol with Hong Kong protests

A more collective US approach to dealing with China will force India and Russia to rebalance power relations, especially in a post-pandemic world requiring greater cooperation

India will increasingly be caught between the tug and pull, as closer ties with US fray relations with Russia

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India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar (from left), Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Moscow on September 10. Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry Press Service via AP

C. Uday Bhaskar

Published: 3:00am, 18 Jan 2021Updated: 3:08am, 18 Jan 2021

When the United States swears in a new president on January 20, there will be sighs of relief at home and abroad, especially after the January 6 storming of Capitol Hill by Donald Trump’s supporters in denial over Joe Biden’s election victory.

One hopes this group makes no further attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power in the world’s oldest and most relevant democracy, though there are disturbing reports of a “Million Militia March” across the US to protest against the swearing-in.

The White House transition is expected to return a much-needed normalcy to US governance and a stability and predictability to American diplomacy after the tumultuous Trump years.

Biden’s team is expected to review ties with China in the first instance, which will affect Russia, India and the relations that link these four nations in an uneven quadrilateral. Whatever President Trump’s transgressions in steering US foreign policy, which often lurched from one extreme position to the other, it is agreed that China was smoked out of the grey zone that characterised the Washington-Beijing relationship post-Cold War.

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China mocks the US as Beijing compares chaos at Capitol with Hong Kong protests

From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, presidents prioritised the US-China relationship along the economic-trade-investment track with an abiding but understated security-strategic dissonance. The received wisdom was that, as Beijing prospered, it could be brought to the global table and encouraged to conform to the prevailing US-led international order. Yet Obama’s second term saw a Xi Jinping-led China become more assertive, not least in the South China Sea, even as America invoked international law and freedom of the high seas.

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