Why the US spares China but punishes India - and the long shadow of Sino-Indian thaws

Yet the focus has not been on the mechanics of global trade alone but on the extraordinary double standards in Washington’s treatment of India and China.

In recent weeks, the United States is set to impose a crippling 50 percent tariff on Indian goods, justifying the move on the grounds that New Delhi continues to import Russian oil.

But curiously, China—whose appetite for Russian crude is far larger and far more consequential—has been spared. The asymmetry could not be starker.

Trump’s advisers, notably Marco Rubio and Peter Navarro, have defended this approach on economic grounds. The argument is that sanctioning China would risk destabilizing global energy prices, potentially triggering a supply shock that the world economy cannot absorb. India, by contrast, is treated as both expendable and pliable, a country that must be disciplined into compliance to signal Washington’s toughness on Moscow.

What New Delhi sees, however, is hypocrisy of the highest order. The European Union continues to import Russian energy, and Washington itself has found loopholes to sustain limited flows, but India alone is made to pay the price.

This sense of being unfairly singled out is not without consequence. India has long prided itself on strategic autonomy—a concept deeply rooted in Jawaharlal Nehru’s foreign policy imagination.

When Nehru spearheaded the Panchsheel Agreement in 1954, articulating the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence with China, he laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) the following year in Bandung.

For Nehru and his successors, the essence of non-alignment was not passivity but active independence: the freedom to pursue national interests without becoming a pawn in great power rivalry.

China, too, understood the symbolic power of non-alignment. Despite border tensions and ideological divergence, Beijing saw in NAM a shield against both Soviet encirclement and American dominance.

It is often forgotten that Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, whatever their suspicions of India, sought to project solidarity with the Third World. Zhou’s embrace of Nehru at Bandung was as much a tactical manoeuvre as it was a civilizational statement—that Asia would not be dictated to by either pole of the Cold War.

That spirit of thaw has resurfaced time and again, even after bitter ruptures. The 1962 Sino-Indian War, which scarred Nehru’s final years, did not permanently sever ties. In 1988, Rajiv Gandhi’s historic visit to Beijing reopened dialogue, culminating in agreements to manage the disputed border peacefully.

In the 1990s and 2000s, India and China deepened trade, expanded cultural exchanges, and even engaged in joint military exercises. These were not signs of naïveté but of pragmatism—the recognition that rivalry need not preclude cooperation.

Today, history is repeating itself. As Trump’s tariffs corner India, New Delhi is recalibrating. Prime Minister Narendra Modi may have sought to align more closely with Washington during his earlier terms, but the hard lesson of punitive tariffs is that American friendship is transactional and fickle.

Beijing, sensing the opening, has signalled a thaw: restoring pilgrimage routes to Kailash Mansarovar, reviving cultural diplomacy, and suggesting renewed trade talks.

China seeks to remind India that they once stood shoulder to shoulder as voices of the Global South, united in their desire to craft a world order free of hegemonic coercion.

The contradiction, of course, remains unresolved. China and India are still locked in border disputes, and trust is shallow. Be that as it may, as of August 2025, both sides recognise the utility of balancing American unpredictability with a measure of Asian solidarity.

For China, reaching out to India dulls the edge of encirclement in the Indo-Pacific. For India, warming to China restores some leverage against Washington’s frivolous use of tariffs. The logic of non-alignment, born in Bandung, lives on.

What this reveals is that great power hypocrisy invariably drives middle powers to rediscover the old instruments of autonomy.

Washington may assume that tariffs are tools of discipline, but their overuse is pushing India back toward a familiar posture: risk distribution, balancing, and, when necessary, thawing relations with old rivals to preserve room for manoeuvre. The irony is unmistakable.

By sparing China and punishing India, the U.S. has not weakened Moscow or Beijing but has instead revitalized the very principle of non-alignment that once challenged its dominance.

For Southeast Asia, the lesson is sobering. ASEAN must not allow itself to be cornered by punitive tariffs or overbearing demands from any great power.

Just as Nehru and Zhou once saw the value of an independent Asian voice, ASEAN must remember that its strength lies not in choosing sides but in preserving autonomy through collective diplomacy.

The revival of non-alignment, in both South Asia and Southeast Asia, may yet prove the most enduring answer to the age of tariffs and flippant diplomacy.

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Phar Kim Beng, PhD, is Professor of ASEAN Studies and Director of the Institute of Internationaliation and ASEAN Studies (IINTAS) at the International Islamic University Malaysia.