Has the New 21st Century Begun in Tianjin?

At the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Narendra Modi’s India moved closer to Russia and seemingly reconciled with China, thus turning its back on the United States. If sustained, this spectacular normalisation between Asia’s two giants and rivals could only help advance the “Global South’s” ambition to supplant a post-American international order. Yet is India really prepared to renounce its “strategic autonomy” in favour of an international system dominated by China?

Of all the images coming out of China recently, the most striking is not that of giant nuclear warheads parading through Tiananmen Square on 3 September 2025 to mark the eightieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender and the definitive end of the Second World War, under the gaze of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. After all, the Chinese, Russian and North Korean leaders have long been known allies. And China is the world’s largest military power by troop numbers. What is truly historic, however, is the official photo from the Tianjin summit, dated 31 August, which symbolically seals the exclusion of Europe and North America.

At a time when the United States is scaling back its global engagement and Europeans are proving less and less able to stand united in defence of democratic values, the rule of law, freedom of expression, and judicial independence, China is rallying around forty countries convinced their moment has come. In the photo, their leaders are lined up before a backdrop of urban landscapes combining heritage and modernity at the SCO’s annual summit. This intergovernmental organisation, until now meant to strengthen ties in a region spanning from Europe’s eastern gates to the Far East, now clearly intends to build a new anti-Western world order. This ambition has been fuelled by the inward turn of the United States initiated under Donald Trump’s first term and reinforced by his provocations and outbursts since returning to the White House in January 2025.

Presiding over this grand gathering in Tianjin, Xi Jinping delivered a very clear message in the notable presence of UN Secretary-General António Guterres: the world has entered “a period of turbulence and change” making it imperative to establish a “new global governance”. According to him, this shift must “democratise international relations” and “enhance the representation of developing countries”. Beijing thus presents itself as an alternative, responsible power, working for a fairer and more stable world. The project brings together an impressive array of authoritarian leaders: Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, of course, but also Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Myanmar’s Min Aung Hlaing — and several “autocrats”, the polite term currently in vogue for those who, unlike outright dictators, still hold nominally democratic elections to maintain appearances, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, and India’s Narendra Modi.

The latter’s presence was one of the major events of the SCO summit. Until now, he had largely ignored the forum, having been represented by his foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar at the organisation’s annual meetings in 2023 and 2024. The theatrically inclined Indian Prime Minister strolled hand-in-hand with Vladimir Putin and laughed loudly with him and Xi Jinping before the world’s cameras. It was a way to make people forget the bitter pills he has had to swallow as the price for his forced renunciation of the “friendship” he once enjoyed with Donald Trump. The U.S. president did not hesitate to impose 50% tariffs on Indian goods on 27 August, aiming to halt India’s exports to the U.S. due to Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil despite the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Western sanctions on Moscow.

There had been a precedent in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term, over Iranian oil. But at that time Delhi complied and stopped the purchases in question. This time, Trump’s aggressiveness has apparently gone too far, even if partly driven by two other ultra-sensitive issues: Narendra Modi’s refusal to support his candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize, and his refusal last spring to acknowledge Washington’s role in ending the short war India launched against Pakistan following a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. Now abruptly at odds with the United States, India has little choice but to turn to Russia and China to maintain the geopolitical and civilisational stature it claims on the international stage.

Convinced that the 21st century will be “India’s century”, Narendra Modi, cornered, is now redirecting his foreign policy. The “multi-alignment” he once extolled seems to have reached its limits. By trying to exploit the opportunities created by global contradictions, India — which dreamed of being everywhere — finds itself nowhere. Some Indian commentators see this as the spectacular failure of Modi’s “hug diplomacy”, which he has practised for over a decade, embracing every foreign leader he meets even at the cost of deep embarrassment for them. So too, they argue, is the vanity of the massive public rallies staged to flaunt supposed closeness, complete with overplayed displays of affection, as with Donald Trump in Houston, Texas in 2019, and in Ahmedabad, Modi’s political stronghold in Gujarat, the following year.

In today’s frosty climate with the White House, the Hindu nationalist leader is now flaunting his ties with the Russian president while simultaneously making an absurd rapprochement with the Chinese president. His appearance in Tianjin was all the more striking as he had not set foot in China for seven years due to the diplomatic tensions between the two Asian giants following several incursions by Chinese troops into Indian territory along their 3,800-kilometre shared border in the Himalayas. More than ever, Narendra Modi is sweeping under the rug the fact that in 2020 the Chinese army killed around twenty Indian soldiers and seized 1,000 square kilometres of Indian territory in Ladakh — a region from which Beijing had already taken 37,000 square kilometres in 1962. Moreover, China clearly supported Pakistan during the armed clash with India in May 2025 following the attack in Kashmir.

Between 2014, when he took office, and 2020, Narendra Modi had met Xi Jinping eighteen times. Fond of acronyms, he boasted of transforming bilateral relations with China from “INCH” (India and China) to “MILES” (Millennium of Exceptional Synergy). Now the two nuclear powers, with a combined population of 2.8 billion people — more than a third of humanity — are reconciling and, symbolically, restoring direct air links that had been cut five years ago. Sceptics may note that before heading to Tianjin, Narendra Modi signed major contracts in Japan, one of his closest Indo-Pacific partners alongside Australia and France, or that it is highly unlikely India will suddenly abandon the infrastructure projects it is painstakingly developing from Iran to Myanmar to counter Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. Nonetheless, China has now become India’s largest trading partner, overtaking the United States, and has expressed readiness to invest in the country.

The Tianjin summit nonetheless marks a radical turning point in the SCO’s ability, buoyed by the apparent unity between China, Russia, and India, to challenge Western dominance on the global stage. The display of varied Asian ambitions around China on 31 August 2025 in Tianjin thus marks the start of a new era — and perhaps the true beginning of the 21st century.

This shift — seemingly made inevitable by unbridled Trumpism and the rise of nationalist retrenchment in Europe — will have major geopolitical consequences. In the immediate term, if the Sino-Indian rapprochement is confirmed, it will undermine U.S. and Japanese efforts to position Delhi as a counterweight to China’s unchecked expansion. It also severely weakens the Indo-Pacific strategy that Donald Trump himself had endorsed back in 2017. And it presents an equally troubling prospect for France, which could find itself very isolated in the Indian Ocean, where India and its navy have so far been close — even indispensable — partners.