China is considering retaliatory measures on US agriculture and food products in response to tariffs from the Trump administration that are scheduled to take effect on Tuesday, according to the Global Times.
Beijing’s response will likely include tariffs and non-tariff measures, Communist Party-backed Global Times reported, citing a person they didn’t identify. China’s soymeal prices surged 1.5% on concerns that escalating trade tensions could disrupt US shipments of soybeans and tighten the market further.
Two recent documents—one from the FDA, the other from a commission organized by The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology—indicate an evolving mindset toward treating obesity as a chronic disease.
The World Health Organization has been sounding the alarm on obesity since the 1990s. Now, regulators and other leading experts are redefining the terms of the global obesity epidemic—with potential implications for patients, practitioners and drug developers.
In an update to a 2007 guidance regarding weight loss drugs, the FDA issued a new draft guidance last month dubbed “Obesity and Overweight: Developing Drugs and Biological Products for Weight Reduction.” The new document is open to feedback through early April.
Meanwhile, a global commission organized by The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology published its recommendations of new diagnostic criteria for clinical obesity, moving beyond the standard body mass index (BMI) measurement.
Perhaps one of the biggest changes to the FDA guidance is the agency’s definition of obesity. In its 2007 guidance, obesity was referred to as a “chronic, relapsing health risk,” according to IQVIA (the old guidance is no longer publicly available, an FDA spokesperson confirmed to BioSpace). Now, obesity is being defined as a “chronic disease,” reflecting a shift in the understanding of the condition and emphasizing the importance of long-term management.
“What the FDA is saying is that they’re recognizing obesity is a real health crisis,” Ray Stevens, CEO of Structure Therapeutics, told BioSpace.
Mark Bagnall, CEO of Phenomix Sciences, agreed that the healthcare system as a whole is moving toward recognizing obesity as a disease. The American Medical Association declared obesity to be a complex, chronic disease in 2013.
Eli Lilly was also supportive of the definition. “We believe that guidance should recognize the abundance of clinical evidence that identifies obesity as a complex, chronic disease and that additional or alternate criteria may be needed to help appropriately identify patients with obesity for inclusion in clinical trials,” a company spokesperson told BioSpace in an email.
Interestingly, the FDA did not change the efficacy standard it set forth in 2007. The bar remains at “weight reduction greater than or equal to 5% of baseline body weight or BMI” after one year of treatment. Considering the efficacy of currently approved GLP-1s and others in development—Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy, for example, can elicit up to 18.7% weight loss in 72 weeks—this seems woefully low, Bagnall told BioSpace.
“Five percent is, well, it’s not meaningful,” he said, adding, “Everybody deserves to lose a percentage that gets their disease resolved.”
Maintenance Matters
In addition to redefining obesity as a chronic disease, the FDA’s new draft guidance also puts more emphasis on the use of weight loss drugs as maintenance therapy, with the document repeatedly referring to drugs “intended for weight reduction and maintenance.”
This could be the agency recognizing the phenomenon of patients unable to stay on GLP-1 drugs for long periods of time, Blai Coll, chief medical officer at Structure, told BioSpace. A recent study by Prime Therapeutics and Magellan Rx Management found that 85% of people who begin taking a GLP-1 agonist for obesity are no longer on the drug after two years.
The study also showed that patients taking GLP-1s for obesity without diabetes paid an average of $4,206 more in their second year of treatment than those taking the drug for non-obesity indications.
“By [FDA] putting more emphasis on the maintenance, I think it opens the door for therapeutic options that can be more accessible to all,” Coll said.
The new draft guidance also places less emphasis on lifestyle interventions than the previous document, while placing greater importance on pharmacological treatments, according to STAT News. It is also less conservative in its approach to the pediatric population, removing prior recommendations that studies should first be conducted in higher-risk children.
Another potential positive for companies in the obesity space is that the new guidance does not include a requirement for a cardiovascular outcome trial in order to gain approval for chronic weight management. There was speculation that the FDA would add this requirement, as it had for type 2 diabetes, Coll said. However, if no cardiovascular signals are detected in earlier stage studies, a cardiovascular outcome trial is not required as part of the registrational package.
The new guidance does recommend that trials “include subjects with comorbidities, such as cardiovascular disease, heart failure, liver disease and chronic kidney disease.”
It’s a “fleshing out of things people are doing but hadn’t necessarily been formalized in a prior guidance document,” Brian Lian, CEO of Viking Therapeutics, said in a presentation at the JP Morgan conference in January, adding that the guidance did not impact Viking’s Phase III study design for its obesity candidate VK2735.
Beyond BMI
Obesity has historically been defined solely by body mass index. If someone has a BMI of 30 kg/m2 or higher, they are diagnosed with the disease.
While the new FDA guidance recommends that patients included in Phase II efficacy trials have a BMI of at least 30 kg/m2, or at least 27 kg/m2 with one or more comorbidities, it also includes a recommendation to monitor body composition in a subset of patients to assess the quality of weight loss. Many experts have emphasized the need to distinguish between fat loss and lean mass loss, as loss of muscle mass is associated with poor outcomes, especially in the elderly.
Both Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound were initiallyapproved with BMI requirements. In March 2024, Novo removed the BMI descriptor from Wegovy’s label “based on feedback from the FDA,” a company spokesperson told BioSpace in an email. The label for Eli Lilly’s Zepbound has also dropped the term, instead listing the drug as intended for “adults with obesity or with overweight in the presence of at least one weight-related comorbid condition.”
In the same vein, a commission of 58 metabolic surgeons, internists, exercise specialists, dietitians and patients recently convened to come up with a better way to define obesity. Theypublished their findings in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology in January.
David Cummings, director of the weight management program in the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and a member of the commission, said that the problem with obesity defined solely by BMI is that there are people with a BMI over 30 kg/m2 who are not obese, but rather “relatively short and maybe muscular.” There are also people with a BMI under 30 kg/m2 who might be sick because of excess adipose tissue (body fat), he said, so the BMI criterion used alone can both overdiagnose and underdiagnose the disease.
The commission didn’t throw out BMI completely, however. Cummings said it is still a useful screening tool in clinical practice to identify patients for additional testing. The range likely relevant for the new classification is between 25 kg/m2 and 40 kg/m2. Practitioners would assess patients within this range using a variety of tools, including physical measurements and a DEXA scan, he explained.
The official recommendation of the group is to then divide patients identified with excess adiposity into two classes: preclinical obesity—in which patients with excess adipose tissue are not yet ill—and clinical obesity, where they are.
“People with preclinical obesity should not be ignored; they just might be a bit lower on the priority scale for treatment with aggressive and frankly expensive interventions,” Cummings said.
The commission defined clinical obesity—where patients are ill because of too much body fat—as a disease in and of itself “which deserves covered treatment just like any other disease.” Any compromise to daily living activities due to excess body fat would also constitute clinical obesity.
Eli Lilly appears to be in agreement with this line of thinking. “We also stress the need for new clinical endpoints that include measures of adiposity,” the company spokesperson wrote to BioSpace.
Currently, the group is discussing what to do with the information. How it is ultimately implemented, Cummings said, will likely vary between countries.
Noting the expense and supply issues often associated particularly with GLP-1 drugs, Cummings said it is the commission’s hope that these new definitions of obesity could allow the improved allocation of limited resources to people most in need of them.
Coll said that, unfortunately, there is “a little bit of discrepancy” between The Lancet report’s new definition of obesity and the FDA’s requirements for drug developers. While he does not believe there are currently any major changes for drug developers within the two documents, Structure is incorporating some of the new recommendations from the commission so it will be available for prescribers and in the event of future FDA guidances.
For Coll, the metabolic space is moving into an “unprecedented” situation where, for the first time, a precision medicine approach is possible, as it is for oncology and cardiovascular diseases.
“The field is evolving with this new, precise definition,” he said. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all.”
India's trade minister Piyush Goyal started on a trip to the United States on Monday to pursue trade talks, two government officials said, with weeks to go for President Donald Trump's planned reciprocal tariffs.
Goyal's visit was sudden, as he departed after cancelling previously scheduled meetings until March 8, the officials said. He is also the minister for industry.
During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the U.S. last month, both nations agreed to work on the first segment of a trade deal by the fall of 2025, aiming for bilateral trade worth $500 billion by 2030.
Trump's proposal to impose reciprocal tariffs from early April on trading partners including India is worrying Indian exporters in sectors ranging autos to agriculture, with Citi Research analysts estimating potential losses at about $7 billion a year.
China could reestablish import controls on coal, after leading industry groups warned on mounting oversupply in the world’s biggest market for the fuel, according to Morgan Stanley.
The bank said a complete ban is unlikely given China’s obligations to the World Trade Organization, but purchases could be discouraged if the authorities impose delays or inspections on imports, analysts including Sara Chan said in a note. Similar controls were imposed in 2014, 2017 and 2018.
A close friend of Vladimir Putin - and like the Russian president, also a spy - has been engineering a restart of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe with the backing of US investors, a once unthinkable move which according to theFT, shows the breadth of Donald Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow. According to the Nikkei-owned publication, the efforts on a deal werethe brainchild of Matthias Warnig, an ex-Stasi officer in East Germany who until 2023 ran Nord Stream 2’s parent company for the Kremlin-controlled gas giant Gazprom.
Warnig’s plan involved outreach to the Trump team through US businessmenas part of back-channel efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine while deepening economic ties between the US and Russia.
If this was just some unilateral attempt to get the pipeline that was bombed by Western intelligence agents and assorited Ukrainian hangers-on back online, it would hardly be a surprise. However, according to the report it appears that at least several "prominent" Trump administration figures are aware of the initiative to bring in US investors, and they see it as part of the push to rebuild relations with Moscow.
While there have been several expressions of interest, one US-led consortium of investors has drawn up the outlines of a post-sanctions deal with Gazprom.
Meanwhile, senior EU officials have become aware of the Nord Stream 2 discussion only in recent weeks, and leaders of several European countries are concerned and have discussed the matter, although it is unclear what the prevailing sense on the ground within the corridors of Brussels. It is far easier, for example, to guess what Germany thinks about a return of much cheaper and far more abundant Russian energy if virtue signaling and politics were not an issue.
One of Nord Stream 2’s two pipelines was blown up in what now appears to have been a US attack in September 2022 that destroyed both pipelines of its older sister project Nord Stream 1. The other Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which has an annual capacity of 27.5bn cubic metres of natural gas, is undamaged but has never been used.
The latest plan would in theory give the US unparalleled sway over energy supplies to Europe, after EU countries moved to end their dependence on Russian gas in the aftermath of the invasion.
That said, the obstacles are considerable: a deal would require the US to lift sanctions against Russia, Russia to agree to resume sales it cut off during the war, and Germany to allow the gas to flow to any potential buyers in Europe.
“The US would say, ‘Well, now Russia will be dependable because trustworthy Americans are in the middle of it’,’” said a former senior US official, who was aware of some of the dealmaking efforts. The US investors would collect “money for nothing”, he added.
Putin has talked up the economic benefits he says the US could reap with the Kremlin in the event of a settlement in Ukraine, claiming that “several companies” were already in touch over potential deals.
Nord Stream 2 AG, the pipeline’s Swiss-based parent company, received an exceptional stay on bankruptcy proceedings in January by at least four months.
According to a redacted court document, Nord Stream 2’s shareholder — Gazprom — argued that the new Trump administration, as well as the German election in February 2025, “presumably can have significant consequences on the circumstances of Nord Stream 2” to warrant a delay. The submission pointed to “complex geopolitical affairs” and the sanctions regime.
Warnig told the Financial Times he was “not involved in any discussions with any American politicians or business representatives”, adding that he was “following in this respect the rules [as a] US-sanctioned person”. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said he had no information on any talks regarding the pipeline.
Warnig, 69, has said he became a close friend of Putin’s in the 1990s after setting up an office for lender Dresdner Bank in St Petersburg, where the then-unknown Putin headed the city’s foreign relations committee. The two became so close that Putin asked Warnig to put up his daughters at the banker’s house in Rödermark when their mother was seriously injured in a car accident.
Putin, who speaks fluent German, taught Warnig’s children to ski in Davos and invited him to his father’s funeral, according to a 2023 interview with the former Stasi officer in Die Zeit.
But Warnig called Putin’s invasion an “indescribable mistake” and resigned from the boards of two Kremlin-run energy companies after the war in Ukraine broke out in 2022. He told Die Zeit that he made a personal appeal to Putin to end the invasion a few months in and said the Russian president was so isolated that “the only person who can still say something to him is me”.
Warnig left Nord Stream 2 AG, the Russian-owned company that manages the pipeline, in 2023, but told Die Zeit that Gazprom’s chief executive, Alexei Miller, had guaranteed to cover its costs in the hope of saving what remained.
Joe Biden’s US administration sanctioned Warnig and Nord Stream 2 AG in 2022. Biden officials showed little interest in a proposal to buy Nord Stream 2 last year from Stephen Lynch, an American businessman with a record of working in Russia. Other potential investors have come forward since Lynch first expressed interest. The person with direct knowledge of Gazprom’s discussions told the FT that its advanced talks were with a different US-led consortium from Lynch.
Trump was outspoken in his criticism of the pipeline during his first term as president. It has become a symbol for those who blamed Germany and Europe, by extension, for relying too much on Russian gas and helping to finance Moscow’s military machine. But some of Trump’s team now see the pipeline, which runs from Russia’s Vyborg in the Gulf of Finland to Greifswald on Germany’s Baltic coast, as a strategic asset that can be leveraged in the Ukraine peace talks, according to administration officials.
That said, the complex ownership structure of Nord Stream 2 presents serious potential obstacles for any investment. Nord Stream 2 is 100% owned by Gazprom. But five European energy companies — Shell, Uniper, OMV, Engie and Wintershall — collectively provided around half of its $11bn construction costs through loans. All five European companies have written off those debts.
The German government in 2022 pulled the plug on the licensing procedure of Nord Stream 2 and never issued the paperwork required to operate it.
Ownership of the pipeline could in theory give US investors a leve r to control Russian gas flows to Europe, which is a key market for US liquefied natural gas exports shipped across the Atlantic in tankers.
But former senior US officials and western businessmen with experience investing in Russia said Trump and Putin’s sign-off alone would not be enough to get Nord Stream 2 up and running.
“I can’t imagine the board of any major US corporations saying, ‘Hey, let’s jump back into the Russian market’ right now, and the Russians know this too — they’ve seen these oscillations in American policy,” a former senior US official said.
“Europe still has sanctions in place, and Germany signing up for the rehabilitation of Nord Stream would cause huge rifts. Anything like that is a ways off.”
One can only wonder which three-letter agency said former senior US official worked for. Meanwhile, news of the report is - according to one of Goldman's top traders - one of the reasons why the bank expects a brutal short squeeze tomorrow, to wit:
Tomorrow will be a painful short squeeze day, as risk assets are likely to rally aggressively not only on the crypto news flow over the weekend: I see 4 positive weekend news.
Putin ally pushes deal to restart Nord Stream 2 with US backing. Short EU natural Gas still in place.
US hints that tariffs on Mexico and Canada could be lower than 25%. Probably an EM risk rally.
Germany's new gov are quickly setting up two 400bn special funds, one for defence one for infrastructure.
Bessent weekend interview focused on 1) lowering inflation via controlling 10y yields 2) Tariffs as a path dependent toll 3) Constructive on the relationship with China.
This article is the second in a series titled “India: The Next Five Years.” Conversations with subject experts, thought leaders, innovators, strategists, and diplomats will explore India’s foreign relations and its global outlook from 2024 to 2029.
India, the world’s fastest-growing economy, is also growing in its understanding of itself. As it does so, its “grand strategy”—the way it views its place in the world—is largely defined by China, experts say.
“China looms increasingly large in India’s strategic consciousness,” writes Dhruva Jaishankar in his recently released book, “Vishwa Shastra: India and the World.”
“Indeed, China’s rise is likely the primary factor influencing India’s grand strategy today.”
“Vishwa Shastra,” is a Sanskrit phrase that means “treatise on the world.” The book offers a consolidated, linear analysis of Indian foreign policy from ancient to modern times.
Jaishankar, who serves as executive director of the Washington-based Observer Research Foundation, told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview that there are broadly five objectives to India’s “grand strategy.”
“Strengthening India at home, militarily and economically, is [the] number one priority. [Second is] ensuring a stable neighborhood, which has been a big challenge, but the neighborhood has always, again, been a first priority internationally,” Jaishankar said.
Maintaining a balance of power is India’s third priority. The fourth is to address legacy issues concerning India’s partition, which led to the formation of Pakistan and created larger regional consequences. The fifth is to advocate for India’s adequate participation in global rule-making institutions, he said.
These five objectives have largely defined India’s grand strategy since its independence in 1947. Today’s India has more opportunities and resources to achieve these objectives than it has ever had before, according to Jaishankar.
“India is less on the defensive than in the past. It has more resources than in the past. So that’s good in many respects. It has an ability to modernize. It has an ability to settle some of the issues in its periphery. It has the ability to bypass and isolate Pakistan and things like that.”
Articulating India’s Grand Strategy
Srikanth Kondapalli, dean of the School of International Studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), told The Epoch Times that every major power has a grand strategy that defines its trajectory, looking out 20 to 25 years. Along with its planning for economic, technological, and military development, the grand strategy details a country’s national ethos.
An expert on China’s foreign and security policies, Kondapalli said how much of a nation’s grand strategy is disclosed depends upon the purpose ascribed to it by that nation.
“For example, the Americans have the [Quadrennial] Defense Review and national security strategy. ... The Russians have a strategy like this. The UK has one. China also articulated it in terms of national rejuvenation by 2049, and they have several steps—from up to 2021 up to 2035,” said Kondapalli.
India’s grand strategy has rarely been explicitly articulated, and various authors have attempted to express the country’s vision. Jaishankar’s work attempts to define India’s global impact, exactly 25 years away from the mid-century world. The mid-century is also the timeframe of China’s grand strategy of national rejuvenation, sometimes dubbed “Global China 2049” or “China 2049.”
Kondapalli cited “India 2020,” a 1998 work by India’s former president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Y. S. Rajan. The book outlined a strategy for a developed India looking at the first two decades of the new millennium.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed Indian strategy as “Viksit Bharat 2047.” The phrase “Viksit Bharat,” which means “developed India,” conveys the Indian government’s vision to transform the country into a self-reliant and prosperous economy by 2047.
Kondapalli described the areas defined under Viksit Bharat 2027 as “soft areas of the grand strategy.”
Meanwhile, many of India’s security-related issues are kept guarded and undisclosed, he said. A number of the undisclosed areas concern China.
Despite its possibilities, India faces many challenges to the achievement of its grand strategy. Looming large among them is China, which analysts define as a major challenge to India’s rise on the world stage.
Geography and history provide the context for the challenge from China. That’s according to Monish Tourangbam, director of the India-based Kalinga Institute of Indo-Pacific Studies.
“Since its inception in 1949, the Sino–Indian war of 1962 and its rise as a global power in the 21st century, communist China has influenced the conception and operationalization of India’s grand strategy,” Tourangbam told The Epoch Times.
Jaishankar said China challenges each of India’s grand strategy objectives.
“The biggest obstacle in each of these five objectives today, arguably, is China. So China is the biggest obstacle to India’s defense procurement, its technology policy, its trade policy, its industrial policy,” he said.
Kondapalli said that since 2009, India has viewed China as a “long-term threat” to its strategic plans. He defined a short-term threat as one within a timeline of five years, a medium-term as 15 years, and long term as one with a timeline of about 35 years.
It was in 2009 that the Indian position shifted to fighting a two-front war—meaning against Pakistan and China—“under the nuclear threshold,” he said, “because both are nuclear.”
“But this is the armed forces strategy, rather than national strategy,” he said, adding that India faces tremendous challenges from China from all other fronts.
Kondapalli said that within India’s grand strategy, the China factor is “uncertain or even negative” due to its territorial dispute with India. He said this dispute is long-term.
“This is not going to be resolved [in the short term]. So you have to factor China in the territorial dispute in the grand strategy,” he said.
Jaishankar cited active competition from China in India’s neighborhood—in countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. Meanwhile, the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific has also been altered by China’s rise. India is working with other countries to counter that, he added.
Even in international institutions, China is trying to block India’s ascent, he noted.
“China is ultimately the main power most responsible for blocking, say, U.N. Security Council reform, India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group on certain trade issues, and things like that. There is a conflict of interest,” he said.
India’s role in global institutions is increasing. Throughout its 2023 presidency of the Group of 20 (G20) international forum, it played a crucial role in an expanded BRICS and in other platforms of global governance, according to Tourangbam.
However, China is using a two-pronged approach to challenge that increasing influence, he said.
“China’s challenge to India’s rise in global institutions is both ideational and material,” Tourangbam said. India’s democracy and its inclusive model of global governance make it appealing, he said. However, China’s sheer economic size and influence are a challenge for New Delhi to navigate in global institutions.
China’s grand strategy is to be number one: to replace the United States, in particular. Beijing also wants to be number one in Asia, Kondapalli said. But there are powers in Asia—India, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam—that can compete for that influence and do not want China to mitigate their footprint.
“China’s role in South Asia, Southeast Asia, where it wants to marginalize India, is not acceptable to India,” he said. India’s grand strategy will thus include countering the Chinese grand strategy vis-a-vis territorial issues and competition in Asia.
There are many elements of the strategy, he noted. One element is the QUAD alliance between India, the United States, Japan, and Australia in the Indo-Pacific. Another is Exercise Malabar—joint maritime military exercises between the QUAD countries. Another element is the individual Free Trade Agreements between India and various nations.
And yet another is the recent Modi–Trump meeting. Of that, Kondapelli said, “what transpired we don’t know.”
With its rapid economic growth, India is forecast to be the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, behind the United States and China.
Jaishankar described three global schools of thought—unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity—viewed from the perspectives of the three likely leading global economies over the next two decades: the United States, China, and India.
The academic terms describe three systems of geopolitical power distribution. A unipolar world is dominated by one power; a bipolar world is dominated by two major powers, and in a multipolar world, power is distributed among several states.
India’s grand strategy needs to be understood in the context of expectations that it will make the list of top global powers in the near future, he said.
The United States “is number one,” Jaishankar said. “In an ideal world, the U.S. wants a unipolar world. It has a pure competitor in China today.”
Meanwhile, China—despite its long-term ambition for a unipolar world in which it is number one—acknowledges the bipolarity of today’s world. Its ambition to be the leading global power does not contradict that acknowledgment.
“When China says it wants a new type of great power relationship or talks of avoiding the Thucydides Trap, it is actually acknowledging a bipolar world, but asking the U.S. not to contest it,” Jaishankar said. The Thucydides Trap is the theory—popularized by Harvard scholar Graham Allison—that when a rising global power threatens a ruling one, war frequently results.
Further, “India, being number three, wants a multipolar [world],” he said. “So I think part of it just depends on where they sit.”
While China supports multilateralism on certain issues and forums, Tourangban said, its support is aimed at blunting America’s influence.
India, on the other hand, aims to create a more inclusive global order, he said.
“India wants to create an externally conducive security environment for its economic rise, and its support for a multipolar world order recognizes the interdependence of economies. Expanding its basket of economic partners, without jeopardizing its core security interests, lies at the heart of India’s support for effective multilateralism in a multipolar world,” he said.
With India’s imminent rise as the third largest global economy, a new global economic paradigm will evolve, according to Jaishankar.
The U.S. economy is currently worth over $30 trillion. The Chinese economy is worth over $19 trillion. India is currently the fifth-largest global economy. It is expected to steal Japan’s fourth-place spot in the next year or so. And, according to a report from S&P Global Ratings, by 2030, India is expected to surpass $7 trillion and become the world’s third-largest economy.
Nonetheless, “there [will] be a big gap between the U.S. and China, on the one hand, and between China and India on the other,” Jaishankar said. There will also emerge a big gap between India and everyone else on that list, he said. But precisely by virtue of that gap, India will play a leading role in a multipolar world, he said.
The situation will secure a unique place for India, Jaishankar said. India will guard that place to prevent its interests from being marginalized in decision-making by the United States and China.
“India will strive for a more multipolar world, which means a world where everything is not simply decided by the U.S. and China. I think that’s a great, good concern for India,” he said.
How India will secure and advance its interests in a multipolar world order will be a “test of fire” for India’s grand strategy, said Tourangbam.
When asked what role India would play in facilitating a multipolar world, Jaishankar listed a number of objectives.
Those include taking a leadership role in Southeast Asia, securing the Indian Ocean, connecting with its neighbors and with the Middle East, and using “carrots and sticks” to coax Pakistan away from supporting terror groups.
They also include managing India’s relationship with China in a way that promotes competition but doesn’t lead to conflict, according to Jaishankar.
Delving into this further, Kondapalli explained that India’s approach to multilateral forums is led by its interests.
Both India and China are a part of various common multilateral forums. It’s assumed that they are not there to discuss bilateral issues or sovereignty issues, he said. Instead, their involvement implies that problems can be resolved through confidence-building measures and peaceful strategies.
Multilateral forums can be useful for advancing bilateral issues. Kondapalli cited a subtle approach by India on multilateral platforms—one example being the meeting between Modi and China’s Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan last year. The two leaders decided to let their national security advisers discuss their territorial dispute.
“And then we saw some forward momentum in this regard,” he said.
Jaishankar emphasized that India’s thought leadership in a multipolar world would involve working with balancing powers, like the United States, Japan, Australia, and others, to “diversify and strengthen” supply chains.
It would also mean countering China by diversifying Indian strategic interests. Having many strategic or economic partners would ensure that if China threatened to cut off supply chains or investment, it would not unduly affect India, he said.
