With Asia and the Indo-Pacific region now accounting for most of the economic wealth and military spending in the international system, global power is shifting away from the West. As it does, a multipolar world order is emerging with several different poles of influence replacing the once hegemonic and unipolar dominance of Washington. Within such dynamics, the growing synergies and convergence of worldviews apparent in the triangular relations between Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi are hastening this trajectory, and represent a major strategic challenge for US and Western leaders alike.

With Asia and the Indo-Pacific region now accounting for most of the economic wealth and military spending in the international system, global power is shifting away from the West. As it does, a multipolar world order is emerging with several different poles of influence replacing the once hegemonic and unipolar dominance of Washington. At the vanguard of this rearranged structure is a rising China but to which we can also add a rapidly modernising India, as well as a once dormant but now reawakened Russia.

Over the last 80 years, the mainstay of the US-led liberal international system has been an emphasis upon maintaining a rules-based order. During his first term, yet now significantly accelerating during his second term, United States President Donald Trump is systematically undermining the norms underpinning this order.1 This assault includes not only attacking human rights and free trade (via the increasingly indiscriminate use of tariffs) but also Washington’s withdrawal from various multilateral organisations, such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, the World Health Organisation and UNESCO.

These two factors are combining to produce new strategic realities concerning great power politics and the re-orientation of the international system, but are also appearing to confirm the denouement of the American Century and the dawn of the Asian Century. Within such dynamics, the growing synergies and convergence of worldviews apparent in the triangular relations between Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi are hastening this trajectory, and together represent a major challenge for US and Western leaders alike.

The war in Ukraine that started in 2014 but escalated with a full-scale invasion by Russia in 2022 — and the various responses of the world’s leading countries to it — was in many ways an inflection point for considering this new complexity in global affairs. From a Western perspective, it unveiled a deepseated fear that the historically dominant position of the United States was under threat. The rise of China — and concerns over Beijing’s ever-strengthening alliance with Russia — appeared to also be crystallising into an intrinsic challenge to the current order. In addition, the realisation that India has very close ties with Russia, and was unwilling to openly criticise Moscow, only emboldened these fears.

Towards Beijing, Western leaders and commentators began to claim that close Moscow–Beijing relations represent the beginning of a Cold War II. This axis is drawing together two actively authoritarian countries, both of whom are keen to undermine — if not supplant — the existing international liberal order. Observers also noted that Beijing could be keen to ape Moscow’s actions towards Ukraine by enacting military action against Taiwan. Such Western narratives resuscitated past instabilities in global politics — of democracies versus autocracies — but with a discernible 21st century spin.

Such an easy narrative was then complicated by a clear Moscow–New Delhi link, which defied many assumptions that a major democracy such as India would naturally fall in line with the West. Instead, New Delhi refused to abandon its longstanding strategic partner, abstained in United Nations resolutions concerning Ukraine and increased its gas and oil imports from Russia by 700 per cent since early 2022.² New Delhi thus maintained a path of maximum strategic flexibility, self-reliance and autonomy in global affairs, and even offered itself up as a diplomatic bridge between Moscow and its Western antagonists.

This article investigates and analyses these contemporary interactions to show how a strategic triangle between China, Russia and India is now becoming evident. It will begin by considering ever-growing relations between China and Russia. From this basis, it then reviews the historical and present ties between Beijing and New Delhi, before linking these to the bilateral pairing of India–Russia relations. Doing so will confirm a growing complexity in international affairs that is vital for all countries — including New Zealand — to recognise and respond to. Such dynamics will be the mainstay of the Asian Century and vitally illuminate where the strategic calculi of Wellington and others need to focus.

Unlimited relationship

In 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that China–Russia relations had ‘no limits’. Although they are not formal allies, the two countries display a deep-seated strategic convergence.³ These ties revolve around growing military links (with bilateral military exercies becoming more regular since 2012) and complimentary economies (with China being Russia’s number-one trading partner, and Moscow being Beijing’s sixth-largest partner). They also frequently vote together on UN Security Council resolutions, and have growing shared diplomatic aims reflected by groups such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS (Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa) grouping (as will be discussed in more detail below).

From such foundations, their shared interests also converge around shared status ambitions to be great powers in global affairs and for a more equitable — read, less US dominated — international system. Such linkages include something more fundamental than a pure opposition to the geopolitical machinations of the West, and encompass the tacit promotion of a similar political or economic ideology. In the modern context, such commonalities are apparent under the wider umbrella of authoritarianism as a counterpoint to Western democracy. This basis further coalesces with norms of non-interference and nonintervention, as ways to protect themselves from external criticism.

Whilst there is no unifying ideology, such as communism or another political proclivity being used to draw other countries away from Western influence, their domestic politics echo each other. As such, the shared impulse of elites amongst Moscow’s oligarchs and within Beijing’s Chinese Communist Party is a basic desire for absolute control over any forms of opposition or representation that threaten their domestic political monopolies. Both sets of leaders thus use the judiciary as an extension of their power so as to stifle free speech, to curtail an active and meaningful civil society and to stop political plurality. That such acts are being echoed across many Western societies⁴ — of course, albeit in a far milder fashion — reduces the extent to which the United States can effectively combat such policies.

More broadly, China’s authoritarian-capitalist economic system underpins such political proclivities. Openly embracing the virtues of free market liberal economics, while maintaining China’s one-party state, Beijing seeks to blend neo-liberal elements with authoritarian centralised control. This success represents a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the current US-led liberal economic order — which expected economic liberalisation to lead to political liberalisation — and is one that seeks to actively recraft the global system along more authoritarian lines. Xi has described China’s authoritarian-capitalist system as ‘a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence’,5 especially autocratic-minded ones. President Trump’s tariffs only increase the attractiveness of such an approach as they attack free trade and globalisation, under which economic growth often prospers.

Energy security and food security are also now major pillars of relations between Moscow and Beijing. These include the completion of the Strength to Siberia 2 pipeline that massively increased gas exports to China to at least 98 billion cubic metres of natural gas in 2023.6 Russian agriculture has also been opened up to Chinese markets, allowing China to reduce its reliance upon grain imports from the West. Russia and China have further set up polar trade routes across the Arctic, while promises by President Putin to begin using the yuan as its main foreign currency helps Russia to sidestep Western sanctions, and to even challenge the US dollar status as the world’s reserve currency.

In the context of the Russo-Ukraine War, and the relative rise of Asia at the expense of the United States and the European Union, concerns over a China–Russia axis denote fear. A fear of competition and of successful challenge by strategic rivals. A fear of being surmounted and demoted in global affairs, as centuries of Western dominance come to an end. A fear that the ‘rules-based’ international order is not as universal as thought. To make sense of this tumult, old narratives are being reflexively deployed — a new Cold War, a new axis — frequently to just simplify the complexity of contemporary international relations. However, this is a new set of countries — China and Russia but also India — that are rapidly increasing their aggregate power and are doing so with any opportunities they can take.

Returning powers

Within these dynamics, the closeness of India and China has the potential to significantly magnify Western strategic headaches. Such an observation is apparent despite the deadly military clashes between the two sides at Galwan in 2020 amid on-going border issues. Even though this event — and other historical ones like it — momentarily decreased positive ties between the two, new energy has been injected into relations through the targeting of both New Delhi and Beijing with very high tariffs from the United States in mid-2025.

Taking a longer-term view of the strategic outlooks and central foreign (and domestic) policy aims of Asia’s two most popu- lous countries, it is clear that they both want many of the same things. These overlaps relate in economic terms concerning desiring to be developed and modernised countries that raise living standards and eradicate poverty. On the global stage, both China and India also wish to be recognised and respected as returning and influential great powers in international affairs, who can act autonomously and without interference from external (especially Western) countries. Underscoring this perspective are on-going efforts to reconceptualise the world order as being fundamentally multipolar — rather than unipolar and USdominated — in nature. All these strategic ambitions have the potential to deeply bind Beijing and New Delhi together.

While there may be differences between New Delhi and Beijing, it is this common long-term view of the international order that is of most significance. In this way, while India remains wary of ever-closer China–Pakistan ties and the Belt and Road Initiative, and Beijing has concerns relating to — at least before the 2025 US tariffs — a growing India–US strategic convergence over the last decade and the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Australia, India, Japan and the United States), which is designed to contain China regionally, they can be seen as secondary concerns to the primary goals of mutual gains. Both thus want to have a peaceful, secure and prosperous — as well as more democratic, that is, less Western-dominated — world in which all countries can pursue their development. From such a basis, an Asian Century — with China and India as big powers — can be fulfilled.

Both countries are also currently led by forceful, self-assured and at times bellicose leaders in the shape of Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. These leaders are able to tap into powerful domestic nationalist forces that serve as an extra unifying factor across the populations of China and India in their countries’ great power quests. This inter-linkage includes a shared desire to overcome past humiliations at the hands of external colonisers, particularly throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, when both countries badly suffered at the hands of Western oppressors. Such an emotive repository — and deep-seated anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism — limit any possible alliances with the West.

This repository has acted as a safety net for New Delhi to be able to now resuscitate its relations with Beijing. They are also emboldening a potential decoupling of India–US ties, which in the last two decades had been defined by ever-closer economic, military (including large defence purchases) and diplomatic linkages. Through a set of measures enacted in early 2025, Prime Minister Modi appeared to have dodged the ire of the US president. Such steps included aiming to increase bilateral trade from $210 billion in 2024 to $500 billion by 2030, launching the ‘US–India COMPACT (Catalysing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce & Technology) for the 21st Century’7 and reducing tariffs on many US imports coming into India’s markets.

Despite such efforts, in August 2025 US President Trump imposed tariffs of 50 per cent on all Indian imports into the United States, largely in response to New Delhi’s continued close links with Russia. Signifying a major trust deficit between the two, this action defied the dominant US strategic outlook of the last twenty years, whereby the West needed to actively court New Delhi to act as a counter-balance to an ever-more assertive and ambituous Beijing. Indeed, in 2023, US President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific advisor Kurt Campbell noted: ‘it is no secret that India is one of the most sought-after players on the global stage’ and that India–US ties are ‘the most important relationship on the planet’.⁸ The instability, distrust and diplomatic damage engendered by US tariffs has blown up such assumptions.

Special ties

The final bilateral side of the China–Russia–India strategic triangle concerns ties between New Delhi and Moscow, which are under-studied and under-appreciated in the West. India and Russia have enjoyed a deep-rooted, enduring and resilient relationship dating from the 1950s. Stemming from the initial socialist orientation of Indian domestic politics, sizeable amounts of Soviet aid helped India to develop an autonomous heavy-industry and technological base. From this time, New Delhi also received Soviet military co-operation and diplomatic support for any issues in the UN Security Council.

Crucially, the Soviet Union remained neutral during the 1962 India–China War, due to shared sentiments concerning Chinese intentions. Prior to the 1971 East Pakistan War (which led to the creation of Bangladesh), the two sides signed the Twenty-Year Peace, Friendship and Cooperation Treaty that protected India from UN censure and balanced against an emergent Islamabad–Beijing–Washington triple entente. New Delhi’s success in that conflict cemented foundations of trust with Moscow for the rest of the Cold War.

After the end of the Cold War, close relations heightened. India continued to gain a ‘strategic edge’ from these relations concerning military arms supplies, with Moscow supplying New Delhi with over $44 billion worth of weapons from 1992 to 2024⁹ — 65 per cent of all India’s military imports during this time. For India, these links are variously aimed at redressing strategic imbalances with China, ensuring superiority over Pakistan and projecting an image as a great power across all domains of an expanding Indian military.

Beyond the military domain, Russia’s diplomatic protection via the UN Security Council bolsters Indian claims in Kashmir and her primacy in South Asia, while Russia is the leading supplier of hydrocarbons to India and a major investor in multiple nuclear-reactor projects. The relationship has also involved joint military operations and technological (especially military and space) co-operation. In 2010, their relations were upgraded to be ‘special and privileged’, making it New Delhi’s foremost important global strategic partnership. All these historical and contemporary foundations explain India’s behaviour relating to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the overall depth and resilience of Russia–India ties.

From this basis, current Western policy has not been able to counteract New Delhi’s ties with Moscow. Nor has it been capable of isolating the Russia–China axis in global affairs or finding significant ways to draw India away from either of these actors. Beyond needing to recognise historical and current India–Russia ties, the much deeper strategic concern for the United States and the West now centres upon a grand convergence between these three countries. In this scenario, and despite their own occasional difficulties, the interests binding each bilateral relationship coalesece into a shared trilateral front. Such a unison would palpably tilt the prevailing global balance of power away from the West.

There are already several well-established mechanisms pointing to such a realisation. One such point of convergence is at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Eurasian security organisation that aims to combat the regional threats of terrorism, secessionism and extremism. Founded in 2001, it has Russia, China and India as members, along with most of Central

Asia; they share the co-ordination of joint military operations, energy security concerns and a belief in a pluralistic multipolar world order. It can now be considered the world’s largest regional security organisation, representing 41 per cent of the global population10 and 32 per cent of its GDP.11

In turn, BRICS, which also includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia as members, is another alternative multilateral body. With its recent expansion, BRICS’ share of global GDP (in PPP) was 39 per cent in 2023, plus 48.5 per cent of the planet’s population and 36 per cent of total global territory, which vastly outstrips the G7 (of the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada). Moreover, BRICS accounted for 72 per cent of the globe’s reserves of rare earth minerals, 43.6 per cent of global oil production, 36 per cent of the world’s natural gas production and 78.2 per cent of the global production of coal.12 BRICS’ plans for a reserve currency — potentially called the R5 or the R5+ — could also mark the end of the US dollar’s dominance and the de-dollarisation of the global economy.

Moreover, the Russia–India–China (RIC) Trilateral Grouping has been meeting since the late 1990s as a counterbalance to the Western alliance. Frequently gathering on the side-lines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the G20, in 2019 Narendra Modi noted the diplomatic value of the RIC for discussing ‘reformed multilateralism, climate change and cooperation’,13 as well as modifications to the existing global order. Observers also note that it can be seen as ‘a significant non-Western platform for dialogue and cooperation… to shape a new multipolar order’.14 The RIC’s significance may ebb and flow in line with its internal bilateral balances, but when its trilateral interests are aligned it is a potent political bloc.

Embracing complexity

As China, Russia and India continue to accumulate more economic strength, to the relative detriment of the United States, the European Union and the West as a whole, the world’s balance of power will appreciably shift towards a new multipolar basis. In particular, the conversion of Beijing’s and New Delhi’s financial clout into military, institutional and diplomatic prowess will solidify this new ordering of the world. It will also necessarily make relations between the world’s great powers ever more complex. This complexity will be typified by a movement from a unipolar system dominated by the United States and the West to a system of inter-playing sub-sets of myriad bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral relationships.

The Russia–India–China strategic triangle would be one of the most powerful of these relationships, especially given its basis as a clear alternative to the United States and European Union. That its members wish to revise the prevailing nature of the system, and are keen to maximise their power however they can — with India as the pre-eminent example — only emboldens such a threat. To counteract it will require dexterity and imagination from the West. Such innovation had been in evidence with the Quad as a democratic, rule by law grouping set up to counteract China in Asia. However, with the Trump tariffs of 2025 its significance and ability to help order the Indo-Pacific to Western strategic goals has been debased.

These tariffs also draw into question the reliability and stability of the United States as a strategic partner, not only for prospective suitors such as India but also countries traditionally aligned with the West, such as New Zealand. In combination with the rise of the Indo-Pacific region as the central sphere of interaction in 21st century international affairs, as well as the enormous structural power of the China–Russia–India strategic triangle, a new epoch of global diplomacy is emerging. From such a basis, it appears that pragmatism, selectivity and the pursuit of realpolitik will undergird this world, and are elements that Wellington and others will do well to abide by. Within these dynamics, New Zealand will need to carefully select not only what kind of relations to pursue, likely more economic than diplomatic, but also with whom — perhaps more with India and the European Union than with China and Russia — and not to seek exclusivity with any (Western) bloc at the expense of another.

The possibility of a return to the simple realities of an era of unquestioned American dominance or of bipolar Cold War dichotomies is now gone in international affairs. The RIC and these other new groupings — and the many others that will emerge in the coming decades — all belie the increasingly counter-intuitive and paradoxical strategic environment that typifies the emergent multipolar international system. This will be the hallmark of the 21st century. Leaders, diplomats, analysts and observers will all need to fully embrace this strange reality, no matter the resultant complications and strategic headaches it will provoke.

Notes

1. Chris Ogden, ‘The New World Disorder of Donald Trump — and Where it May Lead’, Newsroom, 3 Jun 2025 (www.thepost.co.nz/ nz-news/360709370/new-world-disorder-donald-trump-andwhere-it-may-lead).

2. Jon Mathew, ‘How Russian Oil Bulked Up India’s Exports’, Fortune, 9 Mar 2023 (www.fortuneindia.com/long-reads/how-russian-oilbulked-up-indias-exports/111838).

3. Clara Fong and Will Merrow, ‘Where the China–Russia Partnership Is Headed in Seven Charts and Maps’, Council on Foreign Relations, 12 Dec 2024 (www.cfr.org/article/where-china-russiapartnership-headed-seven-charts-and-maps).

4. Chris Ogden, The Authoritarian Century: China’s Rise and the Demise of the Liberal International Order (Bristol, 2022).

5. Tom Phillips, ‘“A Huge Deal” for China as the Era of Xi Jinping Thought Begins’, The Guardian, 19 Oct 2017 (www.theguardian. com/world/2017/oct/19/huge-deal-china-era-of-xi-jinping-thoughtpolitics).

6. Reid Standish, ‘Explainer: What Did The Xi–Putin Meeting In Moscow Achieve?’, Radio Free Europe, 22 Mar 2023 (www.rferl.org/a/ russia-china-xi-putin-meeting-ukraine/32329780.html).

7. Kenneth I. Juster, ‘Why a US–India Trade Deal Makes Sense’, Council on Foreign Relations, 10 Jul 2025 (www.cfr.org/article/ why-us-india-trade-deal-makes-sense).

8. Patrick Wintour, ‘Watered-Down G20 Statement on Ukraine is Sign of India’s Growing Influence’, The Guardian, 10 Sep 2023 (www. theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/10/watered-down-g20-statement-on-ukraine-is-sign-of-indias-growing-influence).

9. SIPRI, ‘Arms Transfers Database’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (armstrade.sipri.org/armstrade/page/values. php).

10. World Bank, ‘Population Total’, World Bank Data (data.worldbank. org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?most_recent_value_desc=true).

11. World Bank, ‘GDP PPP (Current International $)’, World Bank Data (data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?most_recent _value_desc=true).

12. ‘BRICS Data’, 20 Jan 2025 (brics.br/en/about-the-brics/brics-data).

13. Rajeswari Rajagopolan, ‘Russia–India–China Trilateral Grouping: More Than Hype?’, The Diplomat, 5 Jul 2019 (thediplomat. com/2019/07/russia-india-china-trilateral-grouping-more-thanhype/).

14. Jagannath P. Panda and Wooyeal Paik, ‘The Russia–India–China Trilateral After Ukraine: Will Beijing Take the Lead?’, China Brief, vol 22, no 16 (2022) (jamestown.org/program/the-russia-india-chinatrilateral-after-ukraine-will-beijing-take-the-lead/).

Dr Chris Ogden is associate professor in global studies specialising in the interplay between identity, culture, security and domestic politics in India, China, South Asia, East Asia and the Indo-Pacific. His expert knowledge concerns shifting world orders; global authoritarianism; the Asian Century; great power politics; Hindu nationalism; and the global rise of India and China. For more information, see https://chrisogden.org/.