'Chess Piece’ to ‘Blood Bag’? What Trump-Xi Summit Could Spell for India |
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To understand the real impact of US President Donald Trump’s recent visit to China on India, the key lies in clearly grasping the essence of this visit. In the China-US summit briefing released on the White House website on May 17, the most striking new US official characterisation of bilateral relations is the phrase “constructive strategic and stable China-US relationship”, which fully adopts the Chinese formulation, including the English wording. This strongly suggests that Washington has completed a paradigm-level shift in its foreign strategy, one that could have comprehensive implications for India.
Trump’s visit may signal completion of America’s grand strategic shift
In the decade before Trump’s second term, the underlying logic of the US strategy toward China was rather clear — mobilising its allies, quasi-allies, and partners to jointly contain China, thereby consolidating and maintaining the US dominated global order. Therefore, whether it was the Obama-era “pivot to Asia”, Trump’s first-term “Indo-Pacific strategy”, or the Biden administration’s “small yard, high fence”, they were all essentially different versions of this same logic.
Under this framework, India was seen as a key piece to counterbalance China. To a large extent, the US changing its policy slogan from “Asia-Pacific” to “Indo-Pacific” was precisely to highlight India’s pillar role. The essence of this US arrangement is the “chess piece model”, meaning the US provides allies and partners with security commitments, technical support, market access, and even cash incentives in exchange for their geopolitical cooperation, or even obedience. From the junior partner’s perspective, this means that as long as they assume the role assigned by the US, they can obtain all-round US support and guarantees, band-wagoning to gain the upper hand over China.
However, the premises supporting this “chess piece model” up to now have become difficult to sustain. In Trump’s second term, the costs of multiple rounds of trade wars with China, chip blockades, and maritime restrictions are laid out before the White House – rare earth product supply disruptions, collapse of agricultural exports, and technology band against China even accelerating the latter’s breakthroughs in key areas. Facing this situation, the US easily concludes that pushing China so harsh is such a bad deal that costs way more than it gains, and it would be better to find a balance point for coexistence with China.
It was against this backdrop, that the US has naturally lost interests in investing in and supporting the regional “chess pieces”. Trump’s visit to China is a reconfirmation of this major change. During the visit, what China and the US reached was not a breakthrough-style thaw, but a framework consensus of “maintaining stability amid competition.” This precisely indicates that the US has completed its shift, with its diplomatic strategic focus changing from “how to mobilise junior partners to confront China” to “how to maximise gains while stabilising China”.
In this context, the “blood bag model” has become the policy choice of the Trump administration – since it cannot profit by confronting China, it now turns to maximise the utilisation of the junior partners, exploiting their anxiety toward China. The US wants to convert the relations to makes them continuously dependent and pay a high premium for that dependence.
The “chess piece model” and the “blood bag model” have a fundamental difference: in the former, allies are still chess pieces with partial autonomy, while in the latter, they are merely repeatedly exploited and discarded after use. Only by understanding this distinction can one decipher the seemingly contradictory phenomena in the current and future international landscape: China and the US continuously release signals of détente on the surface, but the US keeps escalating its security rhetoric when it comes to one-on-one conversation toward its junior partner.
There is a clear logic behind this. If China is no longer portrayed as a terrifying threat, the junior partners lose their source of anxiety, and the US loses the pretext to “bleed” its allies. At the same time, the US is not willing have an open confrontation vis-à-vis China, because it is simply unwilling to bear the high costs that........