US President Donald Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy aimed to preemptively avert Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China to prevent having its natural resources turbocharge the trajectory of Washington’s only true systemic rival.
To that end, the US envisaged entering into a resource-centric strategic partnership with Russia following the end of the Ukrainian conflict, expecting that this shared objective would incentivize Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to significant territorial and/or security concessions.
Trump’s inability or unwillingness to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into any of Putin’s demanded concessions, paired with increasingly concerning reports about NATO’s potential deployment to Ukraine, have spooked Putin into ditching his balancing act and pivoting harder to China.
The successful conclusion of their long-negotiated Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline deal, which will nearly double Russia’s gas exports to China to roughly 100 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year – at cheaper prices than the European Union paid – marks a significant failure of Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy.
Putin may have been willing to wait longer had Trump not inadvertently catalyzed an incipient Sino-Indian rapprochement via his hypocritically punitive tariffs that aim to derail India’s rise as a great power.
That spooked India into patching up ties with China, which alleviated their security dilemma that the US was exploiting to divide and rule them. This, in turn, reduced India’s worries about closer Russian-Chinese energy cooperation that it previously feared could lead to Russia becoming a junior partner to Beijing.
While never officially articulated, astute observers and those who have spoken to Indian strategists know that New Delhi was concerned that China might leverage its influence over Russia to persuade it to curtail or halt military exports to India, thereby giving China a pivotal edge in their border dispute.
The Trump-induced Indo-US split and the attendant alleviation of the Sino-Indo security dilemma freed Russia to clinch the Power of Siberia 2 deal without fear of spooking India into the US’ arms and thus dividing and ruling Eurasia.
The growing convergence between BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – both of which aim to gradually reform global governance and accelerate multipolarity via complementary efforts – is in no small part driven by India’s embrace of both in response to new strategic threats from the US.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in seven years to attend the SCO Leaders’ Summit, during which he held a key bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping, is expected to usher in a new normal in Sino-Indian ties.
Although the root causes of Sino-Indian tensions remain unresolved, Russia now likely expects that they’ll be better managed. This likely contributed to Moscow’s timing in concluding the Power of Siberia 2 agreement with China, right as it became clear that the US would not help it with any of what it wants from Ukraine.
Trump’s apparent willingness to escalate US involvement in Ukraine, reportedly as a quid pro quo for a US-EU trade deal coupled with an improvement in Sino-Indo ties as Indo-US relations worsened, made the Power of Siberia 2 deal politically possible.
Trump’s foreign policy in Eurasia has thus failed. His team’s misguided approach towards Russia and India, by demanding too much from both, led them to work out their differences with China, both bilaterally and regarding their ties with the US.
That, in turn, has accelerated multipolar processes at the expense of unipolar US interests. The Rubicon has been crossed with the pipeline deal, and it remains to be seen how the US will respond.
This article was first published on Andrew Korybko’s Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become an Andrew Korybko Newsletter subscriber here.