On August 30, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India travelled to Tianjin, a city in eastern China, for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. His presence there, after five years of simmering India–China tensions, was widely read as signaling the possibility of a global geopolitical realignment. Modi’s visit came in the wake of the United States imposing 25% tariffs on India, along with additional punitive duties linked to India’s continued purchase of Russian oil. China, for its part, played up the SCO as a display of geopolitical confidence and an alternative pole of attraction.

A rival spectacle unfolded in Washington. Over the past several months, a procession of world leaders has made the pilgrimage to placate President Donald Trump in the hope of securing favorable trade deals. Trump, in turn, has announced a flurry of agreements and investment promises with Vietnam, Malaysia, Japan, and others. The spectacles in Tianjin and Washington dramatize a world in which major powers increasingly rely on public theatre, transactional bargains, and the symbolism of court-like diplomacy to project hierarchy and distribute favor. The tariff war Trump has unleashed has certainly produced a frenzy of activity.

But does it amount to a deeper geopolitical realignment?

President Trump’s tariffs have certainly induced a different diplomatic orientation. States are behaving more opportunistically—bargaining issue by issue, extracting short-term relief, and avoiding long-term entanglements. If part of geopolitics once involved the creation and maintenance of global institutions, that ambition has all but vanished. The world now appears far more fluid.

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As tariffs, export controls, and investment screening become normalized instruments of statecraft, countries are reordering their economic exposure: diversifying supply chains, seeking new export markets, relocating manufacturing, emphasizing self-reliance, and introducing currency-swap arrangements to make themselves less vulnerable to the fallout of an economic war between the United States and China. Modi’s Tianjin outreach and the processions to Trump’s court in Washington reflect this broader recalibration. States are seeking room to maneuver in a system where economic bargaining, rather than ideology or shared aspiration, shapes behavior.

Yet none of this amounts to a fundamental geopolitical realignment. Much of the drama is still best understood as crisis management within an existing hierarchical order. The choreography of hedging between Washington and Beijing, while simultaneously adjusting to American pressure, masks a deeper continuity. That continuity is anchored in two forces: the domestic constraints that limit the strategic choices of states, and the pre-existing security architectures that still bind them more tightly to the United States than to any emerging alternative.

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A restructuring of the international trade order was inevitable. The liberal international order could be sustained only under two conditions: that it generated domestic economic outcomes that shored up the political legitimacy of global integration within major economies, and that the trading system produced broadly shared gains without fundamentally threatening American hegemony.

Both these conditions had been slowly eroding. The United States has worried about the loss of........

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