Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin, China on Monday. Xi and Putin used the event to tout their vision of a new post-American, post-European world order, and seemed intent on fitting India into that vision.
Putin and Modi held hands and smiled as they were greeted by an equally delighted Xi at the annual SCO summit, held this year in China’s port city of Tianjin. Modi posted footage of the meeting on his YouTube channel:
International media eagerly picked up on the message Modi was sending by chumming it up with the world’s two most dangerous authoritarian rulers, even as relations between India and the United States have become strained.
The UK Telegraph called Modi’s embrace of Xi and Putin a “double humiliation for Trump,” juxtaposing the SCO summit with Modi refusing to take Trump’s phone calls after the U.S. imposed a 25% punitive tariff on India for buying Russian oil.
The Telegraph said Modi’s high-profile attendance at the SCO summit was Xi’s “biggest coup,” as Modi seemed ready to join a legion of doom that also includes North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
Modi’s happy meeting with Xi was all the more remarkable because Indian and Chinese troops were beating each other to death with improvised weapons in the Himalayas not long ago, while Trump and Modi seemed to have developed a close personal friendship. Trump also has personal and business ties to India’s business elites.
Besides the Trump administration’s heavy focus on India’s oil purchases from Russia as a major source of funding for Putin’s war machine, relations between the U.S. and India appear to have ruptured over Trump’s intervention in the rapidly-escalating conflict between India and Pakistan in May.
India is clearly uncomfortable with Trump’s outreach to Pakistan, and as the Telegraph put it, India “pointedly did not” agree with Pakistan’s nomination of Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.
NBC News said Modi, Xi, and Putin “put on a display Monday that seemed designed to turn heads in Washington,” although the actual content of the remarks all three leaders made in Tianjin was less remarkable than the “cozy optics” of their get-together.
Putin even made a point of giving Modi a ride in his armored limousine, a “not-so-subtle” mockery of Trump giving Putin a ride in his own limo at their Alaska summit a few weeks earlier. Russian state media highlighted Modi spending almost an hour chatting with Putin in the limo.
In his opening remarks at the SCO summit, Modi described India’s partnership with Russia as “special and privileged.” He said peace in Ukraine was the “call of the entire humanity,” but avoided criticizing Russia for starting or prolonging the brutal conflict.
Modi told Putin that “1.4 billion Indians are waiting with excitement” to welcome him when he visits New Delhi in December.
Putin responded by describing Modi as a “dear friend” and hailing the “friendly, trusting” relationship Russia and India have enjoyed for decades.
In his address to the SCO summit, Xi called on the “Global South” — a grouping of developing nations that both China and India have claimed to speak for over the years — to unite and “take a clear stand against hegemonism and power politics,” a not-very-thinly-veiled slap at Trump’s trade policies.
Putin praised the SCO economic and security bloc for conserving “genuine multilateralism” and laying “the political and socio-economic groundwork for the formation of a new system of stability and security in Eurasia.”
“This security system, unlike Euro-centric and Euro-Atlantic models, would genuinely consider the interests of a broad range of countries, be truly balanced, and would not allow one country to ensure its own security at the expense of others,” said Putin.
The Russian autocrat makes an unlikely spokesman for “multilateralism” since he launched a devastating war of conquest against Ukraine in 2022 that has destabilized the entire world and caused tremendous hardship for developing nations. The SCO summit is one of the few major international events Putin can attend, because he is the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.
Xi and Putin used the summit and its roster of 27 member nations to roll out a new global order in which Western notions of peace, sovereignty, and human rights would be obsolete, and the signal was clearly sent that India is at least considering membership in the China-led order.
One of the few short-term action items Xi mentioned in his agenda was the creation of an SCO development bank, which would be part of China and Russia’s long-term goal of completely neutralizing Western sanctions by creating an alternative financial system.
Xi backed up the SCO bank concept by offering $1.4 billion in loans over the next three years to SCO members, plus the opportunity for SCO member states to switch to BeiDou, China’s alternative to the U.S.-created Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite network.
“The world has entered a new period of tumultuous change and global governance has arrived at a new crossroads,” Xi declared.
The next stop for Xi, Putin, and some of the other SCO attendees will be China’s massive, expensive, and deliberately intimidating military parade to celebrate victory over Imperial Japan in World War 2. The parade will be held in Beijing on Wednesday. As of this weekend, it was unclear whether Modi would attend.
President Donald Trump defended his approach to India on Monday, countering the attention paid to the Xi-Putin-Modi meetings by arguing that India’s relationship with the United States has been “one-sided” for decades due to high Indian tariffs and commensurately low imports from the United States.
“Also, India buys most of its oil and military products from Russia, very little from the U.S.,” he noted.
“They have now offered to cut their tariffs to nothing, but it’s getting late. They should have done so years ago. Just some simple facts for people to ponder!!!” Trump concluded, clearly signaling he was not intimidated by Modi’s embrace of Xi and Putin at the SCO summit.
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