Donald Trump kicked off Friday with a sulky swipe at America’s standing on the world stage, blasting out a Truth Social post that wailed the U.S. has “lost” Russia, and India, to “deepest, darkest China.” “May they have a long and prosperous future together!” he added, dripping sarcasm as images of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi shoulder-to-shoulder at a China-hosted summit ricocheted around the globe.
The timing wasn’t an accident. Xi just played ringmaster at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation gathering in Tianjin, complete with high optics meetings and grin-and-grip photo ops featuring Putin and Modi. It was a power tableau tailor-made to tweak Washington, and Trump bit hard.
Trump’s public pout doubles as a self-own, critics say, because his own trade salvos are partly to blame for the frost with New Delhi. In late August, the White House slapped an extra 25 percent tariff on Indian imports, taking the tab to as high as 50 percent in retaliation for India’s discounted purchases of Russian oil. New Delhi has defended those buys as essential for its 1.4 billion people, but the tariff shock landed like a brick in a glass shop.
Meanwhile, Modi and Putin were busy sending their own message. On the sidelines in China, the pair reaffirmed their “special” relationship even as Washington keeps warning India that Russian crude props up Moscow’s war chest. The optics were unmistakable: clasped hands, easy laughs, and a united front, exactly the kind of imagery that fuels Trump’s “we’ve lost them” lament.
Inside India’s foreign-policy circles, analysts say the shift didn’t start with Trump, but his trade hammer has sped things up. Harsh V. Pant of the Observer Research Foundation argued this week that while India-China reconnection predates Trump, his policies are “accelerating” New Delhi’s willingness to work more closely with Beijing and Moscow to push back on U.S. economic “unilateralism.” Translation: keep squeezing, and India will keep hedging.
China and Russia intend to extend the war in Ukraine as long as possible because it leaves an opening for China to annex Taiwan.
The next 60 days will be insane.
All eyes on October 1st. pic.twitter.com/DShFLIgNo9
— CHASE GEISER (@realchasegeiser) September 3, 2025
Trump’s feed didn’t stop at the “lost” line. He lobbed a familiar complaint that the U.S.-India trade relationship has been a “one-sided disaster,” then claimed India has now offered to slash its tariffs to zero, “but it’s getting late.” That boast tracks with his broader hardball narrative, but any actual breakthrough remains hypothetical, and New Delhi hasn’t publicly confirmed a zero-tariff pivot.
Here’s the rub: Washington wants India as a counterweight to China, India wants cheap energy and strategic autonomy, Russia wants markets and friends, and China wants to choreograph a new world order with itself at center stage. That SCO stagecraft in Tianjin was designed to broadcast exactly that, and Trump’s post amplified the signal.
Trump’s early-morning vent was pure tabloid bait, moody, punchy, and guaranteed to trend. But beneath the bluster sits a real geopolitical headache. Tariffs and tough talk may score quick points at home, yet they also risk nudging New Delhi into a tighter triangle with Moscow and Beijing. If the U.S. truly has “lost” India and Russia to China, as Trump grumbled, it’s at least partly because the other side just threw a parade, and Washington brought a trade war.
The U.S. president has no capacity to think and analyze rationally, and his foreign and trade advisors are even worse. Peter Navarro and Marco Rubio are even greater disasters in their respective posts. At the end of this president’s term, the U.S. position on world order will be at the bottom of the list, just above Congo.