As Donald Trump rolls out his plans to isolate China with a new threat of tariffs on $300 billion worth goods, the current round of trade wars has created new alliances, perhaps pushing the world towards an America-versus-the-Rest scenario. For starters it has brought Russia and China, two nations that already have close ties, to form an anti-US Axis. Russian President Vladimir Putin, recently cozying up to Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Bolshoi Theatre, said the ties between the two countries had touched “an unprecedented high level”.  President Xi even gushed and toasted the Russian leader as his “best friend”.

Underlying all the sabre-rattling is Trump’s latest bid to blacklist and ban Chinese technology giant, Huawei. This found an echo in the Putin-Xi meeting where the Russian leader welcomed a Huawei 5G rollout in Russia and accused the US of trying to “bully” successful Chinese companies. Significantly, Putin has recognised the current stage of the conflict calling it “the first technological war of the dawning digital era”. As China prepares to fight a long- drawn trade war with the US, it has found a sympathetic ally in Russia, which is smarting from a slew of American trade and other sanctions imposed after it seized Crimea from the Ukraine in 2014.

At the core of Donald Trump’s ire with China is the successful growth of Huawei to a $105 billion giant that has posted revenues higher than IBM’s, and has been selling more smartphones than Apple. He has used an old ‘imperialistic’ trick—that of demonising Chinese competition as spies and security threats. The real US object is more banal: that of keeping the world trade routes and markets firmly under American control and preventing the cheaper and better Chinese technology from taking over. As the ‘digital’ and trade war clouds gather, PM Narendra Modi begins his two-day visit to Kyrgyzstan from June 13 for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). In the coming battle of the elephants, India will have to tread carefully and keep its options open.