For over a month now, the world’s major powers have been busy reaching out to each other. In late August, Ajit Doval and Wang Yi, the Indian and Chinese Special Representatives on the border question, agreed in Beijing on an eight-point consensus to manage the border. On September 5, US President Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. A week later Chinese President Xi Jinping was in New Delhi for the BRICS summit (as was Putin), his first visit to India in seven years. In the meanwhile, Trump’s secretary of State, Marco Rubio, met Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in New York and invited Putin to the G20 summit in Miami in December. If Putin turns up in Miami, Europe is bound to lose sleep. Last week, Trump warmly received Xi at the White House, after threatening BRICS, of which Xi’s China is a member, and the two presidents extended their trade truce.

And amid all this, on September 18, Trump signed the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act that allows him to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the largest buyers of Russian oil and gas. India is at the top of Trump’s target list.

If you analyse these events side by side, you will begin to see an interesting pattern. The key powers are bargaining directly with each other, and the consequences of such great power consensus are for the less powerful countries to bear. For India, a country whose foreign policy seeks to work the gaps among the great powers, this........

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