From The New York Times:
First Light Brief - 01.09.2025
Trump is alienating America’s friends. Can China win them over?
The most interesting thing about the big security summit in China this week is the guest list.
More than 20 leaders have joined President Xi Jinping at the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which started yesterday in Tianjin.
That’s the most in the organization’s history.
They include Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Vladimir Putin of Russia. But the list also includes the leaders of American partners like Turkey and Egypt, and their presence speaks to a rapidly changing geopolitical reality.
China has summoned the non-Western-aligned world to this event to tell Washington: “You are no longer calling the shots.”
The thing that’s special about this summit is that geopolitics is at play in a way that we haven’t seen in a very long time.
The Trump administration has upended the U.S. alliance system. It’s gifting this incredible opportunity to Xi Jinping to pull friends away from the U.S.
Modi was scheduled to come here before the dust-up with Trump. But it has certainly injected a lot of momentum into his trip. Modi is signaling to the U.S. that he has options, that there are consequences for the chaotic foreign policy that’s coming out of Washington.
It’s striking that Trump has used these incredibly different approaches to Russia and India: Red carpet for Putin, tariffs for Modi. But both these approaches seem to help China.
Xi feels validated for sticking by Putin. He was under so much pressure after the invasion of Ukraine. Now they’re watching Putin show up on American soil, the red-carpet handshake, and they suddenly no longer feel U.S. pressure for this relationship.
In a previous era, stability offered by China might have been worth much less because the U.S. and the West offered stability, too. But in a world where that stability is no longer a given, it comes at a premium.
That is the story China is trying to tell. But let’s be clear: China isn’t the most reliable partner either. They are not a security partner the way that the U.S. is and if you’re from a country that values democracy and human rights, they’re not going to stick up for you on any of those things.
The summit will be followed by a big military parade in Beijing marking the end of World War II. What’s the message that China is trying to project here?
The conflict with Japan during World War II is the engine of nationalism in China, fueled by China’s sense that Japan has never sincerely apologized for its wrongs. So, at home, the message is: China has a world-class military that will never let something like World War II happen again. But there is a message to the world, too: China is saying, “we played a bigger role than the West gives us credit for in World War II” — much like Putin is saying.
One of the reasons China is interested in highlighting this history is because there were these arrangements made with the West during and after World War II that would have given China greater territorial claims in the South China Sea and over Taiwan.
So China is using its military, its history and its diplomacy, all to enhance its ambitions today.
So it’s kind of a message about the past, but really it’s a message directed at shaping the future.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/world/asia/xi-putin-modi-china-summit.html
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