As America and China swap roles in their great power rivalry, India should think of how to maximize gains

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Last week, US President Donald Trump’s historic two-day meeting with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, the first in Beijing at this level since 2017, ended without a commercial breakthrough despite the presence of a high-powered technology delegation of 17 American CEOs, including Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. China did not respond to US overtures, including the potential sale of Nvidia’s cutting-edge H200 chips to Chinese entities that the Joe Biden administration had blocked and Trump administration reversed. US officials dismissed a lack of business progress as immaterial.

Markets disagreed. The absence of a high-technology purchase package, despite the delegation theatrics, exposed a rare crack in the seemingly unstoppable AI boom. US markets corrected sharply, with chip stocks falling after a prolonged bull run.India should read this sequence of events clearly.

The US is increasingly behaving like China once did, using statecraft to sell things. And China is behaving like the US once did, policing commercial flows through ideological and political tests.US mercantilism is a given, but American commercial dealings have traditionally also been mediated through political ideology. Earlier restrictions on chip exports are one example.

But Cold War relations with the Soviet Union are perhaps the most memorable. Trade between the two blocs was heavily restricted, despite the potential for large-scale commerce, peaking at just 1% of total US trade in 1979.Similarly, China’s historical commercial pushiness across the world is well documented. Since 2000, Beijing has been Africa’s largest trade partner, providing not only goods, but also investments and unconditional aid.