India’s RCEP Refusal, Russia’s Eurasian Vision, and Next Week’s BRICS Summit — Andrew Korybko

Andrew Korybko is more pessimistic than Pepe Escobar on this. I think he may be a bit too pessimistic. India's strategic alignment is a balancing act for the government in power. India has along history of playing the US and Russia against each other for its own advantage. The really big issue is the relationship of India and China, traditional enemies that are still locked in various disputes over boundaries. Here again, India is using the US as a hedge with respect to China.

Getting the Eurasian alignment right, both in the East and relative to the West is going to occupy the next several decades at least, and the Modi government is not going to be around that long to deal with it. So we will see. 

India, Russia and China are wily players, focused on national interest, which includes regional peace, world peace, and a prospering global market to which they have access. But that all have domestic issues also, and these limit international flexibility. Hovering over this process is a Western hegemony led by the US that doesn't want to lose global dominance after having it for half a millennium.

GlobalResearch
India’s RCEP Refusal, Russia’s Eurasian Vision, and Next Week’s BRICS Summit
Andrew Korybko

Pepe Escobar — Russia-India-China share a room with a view

Leaders of these three countries met in virtual secrecy. The very few media representatives present in the shabby room were soon invited to leave. Presidents Putin, Xi and Modi were flanked by streamlined teams who barely found enough space to sit down. There were no leaks. Cynics would rather joke that the room may have been bugged anyway. After all, Xi is able to call Putin and Modi to Beijing anytime he wants to discuss serious business.

New Delhi is spinning that Modi took the initiative to meet in Osaka. That’s not exactly the case. Osaka is a culmination of a long process led by Xi and Putin to seduce Modi into a serious Eurasia integration triangular road map, consolidated at their previous meeting last month at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek.

Now Russia-India-China (RIC) is fully back in business; the next meeting is set for the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September.

In their introductory remarks, Putin, Xi and Modi made it clear that RIC is all about configuring, in Putin’s words, an “indivisible security architecture” for Eurasia....

Pow! Take that Uncle Sam. Butt out.

Analysis follows.

Asia Times
Russia-India-China share a room with a view

Pepe Escobar

Modi wades into Eurasianism — M. K. Bhadrakumar

If international diplomacy indulges in symbolism, this must be one of the most poignant ones in world politics in the recent times. The RIC has always been a red rag for the US — ever since the great Soviet strategic thinker and Kremlin statesman Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov first proposed the tantalising idea in 1999. The profound symbolism cannot be lost on Trump that India is consorting with the two “revisionist powers” on the planet (Russia and China) which, according to the US, are each working its way toward making a power grab on the world stage....

Russia, India and China jointly control the "world island" (Halford Mackinder), the home of 80% of the world's population. An RIC alliance would dominate the world economy, with the US as an outlier relegated to dominating only the Western Hemisphere and having to contend with RIC incursion into Latin America.

India Punchline
Modi wades into Eurasianism
M. K. Bhadrakumar | retired diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service

See also

Oriental Review
Modi-Xi-Putin Meeting At SCO Summit Vital For Re-Shaping The World Order
Matthew Ehret