Are we starting to witness a "battle for second place" between the U.S. and India?https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/are-we-starting-to-witness-a-battleMao Keji - whom I have the pleasure to know personally - is one of the most thought-provoking thinkers in China right now.
Mao studied at Tsinghua University - China’s top academic institution - and worked during several years as an analyst at China’s influential National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the central organization coordinating China’s economic planning and policymaking. He is currently on leave as a visiting PhD Candidate at Harvard University.
Mao’s main field of study is India’s geopolitics, and he was one of the very few to predict the counter-intuitive cooling of US–India relations all the way back in March 2025, almost 6 months before Trump’s punitive August tariffs, and before the warm Modi-Xi-Putin meet at the SCO summit in September.
But his wisdom goes way beyond India. Long-time followers will recall I’ve written about his thoughts three times before: first on his analysis of Chinese youth and their pragmatic rejection of Western ideological tribalism, the second time on his striking parallels between Trump’s DOGE movement and episodes like Khrushchev’s secret speech and China’s Cultural Revolution, and lastly I shared an article he wrote about interpreting Nezha 2 geopolitically.
What makes Mao such a valuable thinker is precisely this range: he moves fluidly between civilizational analysis, domestic politics, history and geopolitics, always grounded in material realities rather than ideological abstractions. And, most importantly, he’s typically right.
Long story short, he just published a new article in Sinification and, true to form, it’s easily the sharpest piece of geopolitical analysis I’ve come across this month.
In that article Mao analyses the sharp deterioration of US-India relations and even ends with this striking prediction: that the US and India may eventually find themselves locked in a “battle for second place” - competing for the silver medal in a world where China has become the unassailable number one.
Let’s look at his arguments.
Decline and anxiety as the root causeMao believes - as do I - that there’s been a fundamental shift in the U.S. strategic approach to the world caused by two intertwined factors: 1) structural reality - the actual erosion of relative American power and in particular the narrowing gap with China, and 2) the associated decline anxiety which he says is particularly acute within the MAGA coalition’s “national survival” narrative.
As he puts it, the US now increasingly perceives the costs of geopolitical confrontation with traditional adversaries as outweighing the benefits. Containing China and Russia requires sustained investment that the U.S. now fears is accelerating its decline: “the Trump administration has been deeply preoccupied with concerns over America’s own relative decline, displaying a far more pronounced inward-looking tendency and adopting extreme caution towards traditional forms of geopolitical competition, lest the depletion of strategic resources accelerates that very decline.”
Under that new strategy, nominal “allies” aren’t investments anymore but liabilities: the U.S. is paying for their security, their access to American markets, their privileged position in the global order - and essentially getting nothing in return if geopolitical confrontation is now something the U.S. wishes to steer clear of.
Heck, under that new framework “allies” are even actively harmful: they’re tripwires that could drag America into exactly the kind of costly confrontations it’s now trying to avoid, and they’re altogether obstacles to the deals Washington wants to strike with Moscow and Beijing. From Washington’s new perspective, allied solidarity isn’t a force multiplier anymore but a straitjacket.
From “chess pieces to encircle enemies” to “blood bags”Mao uses a vivid metaphor which I find excellent: he says that the U.S.’s new approach is to treat “allies” no more as “chess pieces to encircle enemies” but as “blood bags”, in the medical sense of the term whereby a patient in decline requires constant transfusions just to stay alive. Allies aren’t there to help encircle China or Russia anymore - they’re there to be tapped: their markets opened to American goods, their industries subordinated to American priorities, their resources extracted to revitalize a declining hegemon.
The relationship has gone from predominantly strategic to overwhelmingly parasitic.
This logic explains what otherwise looks like incoherence. Why is Washington harsher on say Europe than on Russia? Because Russia has power - and continuing confrontation risks accelerating American decline. Europe does not (or, rather, it could have power but it prefers to bend the knee), making it a safer target. The friend-foe distinction has collapsed into something simpler: who can impose costs, and who can be a “blood bag”?
In this frame, China and Russia become not threats to contain but actors to coexist with - perhaps even, as Mao provocatively suggests, “collaborators in forms of geopolitical collusion.”
The ultimate “battle for second place” with IndiaThis all brings us to India, which as a reminder is Mao’s core area of expertise.
For two decades, India was Washington’s darling. The US practiced what Mao calls “strategic altruism” - supporting India’s rise without demanding returns, on the assumption that a stronger India would naturally balance China. Trump’s first term followed this orthodoxy faithfully: he revived the Quad in 2017 after it had lain dormant for nearly a decade. Biden afterwards intensified the India investment, launching iCET to give India access to cutting-edge technology in AI and semiconductors, elevating the Quad to leader-level summits, and creating INDUS-X to deepen defense cooperation. The consensus seemed unshakeable.
Trump’s second term dramatically broke the pattern. India now faces 25% tariffs plus an additional 25% secondary sanction for buying Russian oil - a total of 50%, higher than China. H-1B visa fees have been hiked dramatically, targeting the Indian diaspora. The proposed HIRE Act would impose a 25% tax on outsourcing, threatening India’s $260 billion IT sector. And the rhetoric has turned vicious: Trump mocking that “the Indian economy is dead,” advisers calling India “a laundromat for the Kremlin,” figures from Trump’s camp branding Indian immigrants “Third World invaders.”
There might seem to be, at first glance, a contradiction with what Mao is otherwise saying: if Trump is looking to step back from geopolitical confrontation with Russia, why is he trying to pressure India with these sanctions for buying Russian oil and why the demonizing rhetoric around being “a laundromat for the Kremlin”? Not quite, as Mao argues: the Russia angle is a pretext, not a principled policy. If Washington genuinely cared about Russian oil purchases, it would apply similar pressure to China and Turkey - but it doesn’t, because they can impose costs. India cannot, so it gets squeezed and Russian oil becomes a handy justification. Principle has nothing to do with it.
Why such harshness with India? Mao’s answer is that, essentially, India is becoming what China was - a rising power that won’t bend the knee.
It’s in a way remarkably similar to the shift in approach that Trump took with regards to China during his first term. Of course China wasn’t exactly “Washington’s darling” the way India was, but up until Trump 1.0 the nominal policy towards China was engagement - the assumption that integrating China into the global economy would eventually liberalize it. Trump shattered that consensus, opting for a strategy of aggressive confrontation towards a rising China that wouldn’t subordinate itself to the U.S.
Now he can’t confront China much anymore as they can hit back and impose real costs. But he can still do India. Same pattern: rising power, won’t align fully (doesn’t want to become a full-fledged blood bag), confident about its own destiny. And India is still at a stage where it can’t hit back meaningfully so they’ve become the safe outlet for the same impulse the U.S. had towards China: punish the upstart that won’t defer.
As Mao puts it, in the U.S.’s eyes “India appears conspicuously ungrateful” for benefiting from American generosity while refusing to play by American rules. It’s the same narrative once applied to China: we opened our markets, transferred our technology, welcomed you into our order - and you repay us with defiance instead of deference?
Mao argues this friction is structural, not personal - and will outlast Trump. China’s rise hit America’s manufacturing base, fueling Trump 1.0’s trade war. India’s rise hits America’s service sector - the white-collar jobs America retreated into after deindustrialization. China took the factories and India is coming for the offices. And that’s arguably worse politically: it threatens the educated middle class who thought they were safe.
Follow the logic forward and you arrive at Mao’s most provocative prediction: the US and India, instead of allying against China, may end up competing against each other -for second place beneath Beijing.
And if China’s lead becomes truly unassailable? Mao sees a scenario where China’s structural tensions with both Washington and New Delhi might “mutually unwind,” as each rival would become more preoccupied with the other than with Beijing.
The great irony would be complete: the whole point of America’s two-decade investment in India was offshore balancing, building up a regional counterweight so China could be checked without direct US confrontation. In Mao’s scenario, China becomes the offshore balancer - secure at the top, watching its two rivals turn on each other.
The battle for the number 2 spot may have just begun.