Upon Xi Jinping’s arrival for a State visit to the United States on September 23, 2026, US President Donald Trump personally went to Joint Base Andrews to receive the Chinese President. The welcome featured a red carpet and a military ceremony, including an ostentatious bomber flypast. It felt like déjà vu, except last time Trump travelled to Anchorage, Alaska on August 15, 2025 to receive Russian President Vladimir Putin on the tarmac.
Although the US-China summit that followed in Washington had more spectacle than substance, the modesty of the deliverables is the story itself. It continued a pattern from the Busan and Beijing encounters in October 2025 and May 2026, respectively, where Trump framed the meetings as ‘G2’ moments.
Economist C Fred Bergsten first floated the idea of a US-China condominium or G2 in 2005, imagining shared leadership through existing institutions rather than their abolition. China itself once promoted the related idea of a ‘new type of great power relations’, founded on mutual respect for sovereignty and core interests. The present understanding of G2 is less a scheme of institutional co-governance than an acknowledgement that Washington and Beijing possess disproportionate material power, and that decisions between them have consequences far beyond their bilateral relationship.
Simultaneously, another configuration exists in the same landscape: a triumvirate, or troika, rather than a dyad. Moscow remains materially weaker than either the US or China in economic scale, but it retains the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, enormous military reach and energy leverage, and a proven capacity to disrupt the calculations of stronger economies.
It forces upon us a profound and unsettling question: as the world wanders, shocked and grieving, through the ruins of the old order, are we witnessing the birth pangs of a new, more concentrated world order? A G2, a duopoly of American and Chinese power, or perhaps a G3, a troika that also accommodates a revanchist Russia?
G2’s allure lies in its simplicity: the two largest economies, the two most powerful militaries, and the two most consequential technological ecosystems would agree on a framework for stability, leaving the rest of the world to adapt. It is a pragmatic, transactional approach that prioritises managing great-power competition over the messy, multilateral consensus-building of the post-war era.
For Washington, this is a form of burden-sharing, a way to manage its relative decline by ceding some regional hegemony to Beijing in exchange for stability in the core arenas of global concern. For Beijing, it is the ultimate recognition of its status as a peer competitor, validating its century-long quest for national rejuvenation. Yet, for all its apparent logic, the G2 is a profoundly destabilising proposition for the rest of the world. It risks creating a system of hierarchical control where the interests of all other nations, from the European continent to India to Brazil, are subsumed by the whims and rivalries of the two.
The narrowly expansive alternative is G3, in which Washington manages both rivals at once, inverting the logic Henry Kissinger pioneered in the 1970s, when the opening to China was designed to isolate Moscow.
Its central argument is the ‘paradox of dual-containment’: Washington's efforts to confront China and Russia simultaneously can encourage greater Sino-Russian cooperation, increase American strategic overstretch, and generate alliance fatigue. In that formulation, Russia is not necessarily a peer competitor to either Washington or Beijing; it is the disruptive third vertex whose actions alter the other two's calculations. A potential G3 is also a pressure-regulating layer atop three subordinate frameworks in Northeast Asia: US-Japan-South Korea deterrence, China-Japan-South Korea cooperation, and a China-Russia-North Korea axis.
For Moscow, this is a vital path back to the top tier, a way to transcend its pariah status and reassert its great-power prerogative. Its ‘no limits’ partnership with China, as detailed in Global Affairs, provides the foundational axis for such a configuration, a shared desire to counter Western dominance and reshape the international system.
The Kremlin's willingness to contemplate a trilateral meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen in November 2026, and Trump's broader interest in dealing personally with Moscow and Beijing, are bound to raise questions about whether the old architecture of blocs is giving way to a smaller geometry of great-power bargaining.
Proponents of this emerging great-power cooperation argue that it is the only realistic path to managing an increasingly fragmented world. They see it as a return to the 19th-century Concert of Europe, where great powers managed their rivalries and spheres of influence to prevent a general conflagration.
The shadow of a potential G2 or G3 looms large over the global landscape, casting a pall over the efficiency and importance of multilateral groupings like BRICS, G20, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), G7, the European Union and the African Union, based on which middle powers like India, Japan, Brazil, France and Egypt aim to build a multipolar world.
By concentrating agenda-setting authority in two or three capitals, such constructs risk converting the G20 from a premier forum for global economic governance into a ratification chamber for pre-cooked great-power bargains; the G7, already a Western caucus, becomes either a residual bloc of anxious allies or a venue for coordinating pressure on the excluded; and BRICS and the SCO are pulled in opposite directions, simultaneously serving as vehicles for alternative multilateralism and as arenas where China and Russia seek to discipline or co-opt the Global South.
India occupies a rather uncomfortable position precisely because it does not fit comfortably into either model. A G2 would raise fears of strategic exclusion; a G3 would raise them even more sharply. It is caught between a transactional Washington that could diminish its priority, a China with which relations remain freighted by an unresolved border and a yawning trade deficit, and a Russia whose dependence on Beijing raises the prospect that Moscow can no longer balance Chinese power in Asia on India's behalf. New Delhi must focus on building economic and military weight, preserving strategic autonomy and diversified partnerships, and keeping multilateral groupings as pragmatic clubs rather than solidified blocs.
Manish Tewari | MP, lawyer, former Union I&B minister and author of A World Adrift
(Views are personal)
(manishtewari01@gmail.com)
