US media flags concerns as Modi-Xi-Putin troika takes spotlight: 'India left with little incentive'

The SCO summit in China's Tianjin, which brought together Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping on the same stage, caught the attention of the world as well as the scruitny of American media as US watches the visible warmth among the three leaders with a sense of unease.

The powerful photo-op from the summit, showing Modi, Xi and Putin in the same frame, made headlines in America, with The New York Times describing the three-way hand-holding as a "smiling manifestation of a troika that Moscow had recently said it hoped to revive."

In an article on the SCO summit, NYT highlighted the closeness between PM Modi and Putin who "rode together to a meeting on the sidelines of the summit."

The article also noted how India's "risk-averse bureaucracy" would have usually avoided such obvious display of warmth with China and Russia, to avoid irking Washington. It added that Trump's sweeping tariffs are forcing New Delhi to do so, which is left with "little incentive" to pull itself back.

It also highlighed PM Modi's social media posts, which were full of visuals from the meeting, saying that they reflected how suddenly India's "juggling act has been upended".

CNN, in its report about the meeting, said that the positive signals and warmth between the three countries will be closely watched by the Trump administration. It said that Trump's tariffs has threatened "years of efforts from US diplomats to deepen ties with the country as a key counterweight to a rising and increasingly assertive China."

A report in The Time said that PM Modi’s pivot towards China could be viewed as "a strategic blow to US", adding that the SCO summit is aimted at boosting Xi’s position as a global leader and countering Western influence.

NBC reported in its analysis of the meeting that President Trump’s steep tariffs on India have inadvertently nudged New Delhi toward a cautious rapprochement with Beijing, despite lingering mistrust between the two countries.

Jeremy Chan, a senior analyst on the China and Northeast Asia team at Eurasia Group, told Bloomberg that the de-escalation between the two countries has "unlocked a range of areas to deepen cooperation". He added that the underlying friction between India and China has not gone away. “Mutual suspicion will remain in both countries toward the other and this Modi-Xi meeting will not resolve the strategic rivalry,” Chan told Bloomberg.

In another report, Bloomberg said that the pictures of the three leaders in the same frame signaled the beginning of a new chapter in regional diplomacy. The report added that the "emergence of a new Xi-Putin-Modi alliance is a worrying development for defenders of the US-led global order."