Donald Trump loves nothing more than what used to be called a “Kodak moment” – a huge photo opportunity that might be remembered years later, a visual legacy for future historians.
Trump, determined to secure himself a Nobel Peace Prize, has been racing around the world trying to force a rapid peace on either Israel and Gaza or Russia and Ukraine to get his big moment, so far all in vain.
This week, there was finally a shot that might become a genuinely significant historical moment, so it must be all the more galling to Trump that he’s not in it.
Instead, the photo shows the leaders of Russia, China and India – Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Narendra Modi – clasping hands in a warm three-way handshake.
The moment, at the SCO summit in the Chinese city of Tianjin, was clearly carefully stage-managed. Putin and Modi entered the room together after a bilateral discussion, hand-in-hand, and immediately went together to greet Xi. The three men carefully posed, all smiles and laughter, for some time before they allowed translators and others into the frame.
The signal could not be clearer: there is a new alliance here, and neither America nor Europe is in it.
More than a third of the world’s population lives in either China or India, and both are still among the fastest-growing economies in the world. Russia has neither the population nor the economic prospects of the other two nations, but still has considerable military might, a nuclear arsenal, and huge reserves of oil and natural gas. Of such stuff serious geopolitical alliances are made.
The bitter irony is that it is Trump that has driven these three rivals together, at the expense of America’s dominance over global affairs.
Trump’s chaotic efforts to start a trade war with China, at the same time as launching tariffs against the rest of the world, left all parties in need of new, more reliable trading partners. Trump’s decision to ramp up and then back down from tensions with Russia, time and again, over Ukraine, has emboldened China to deal with it more openly.
America has spent decades trying to keep India aligned with the US, rather than with China – a position helped by long-standing tensions between the two neighbouring nations. But Trump managed to offend India in two different ways at once: he cosied up too transparently to Pakistan, who nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, while also imposing punishing secondary sanctions on India over buying Russian oil, despite not punishing Russia itself.
square WORLD Why Putin's summit with Xi and Modi shows he doesn't need Trump - or peace in Ukraine
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Trump’s confused and indifferent policy-making, and his underlying unreliability, has made it much easier for the strongmen leaders of the three nations to put on a unified front, make nice for the cameras, and to try to do a deal.
If there is some comfort for Trump, it is that this photograph might prove to be as much of a mirage as some of Trump’s own photo opportunities. There is no deep or binding treaty out of this summit, and no imminent prospect of one. Long-standing tensions between the leaders remain, too: Putin would like to be seen as an equal of Xi, but he would clearly be the junior partner in any closer relationship. That is unlikely to suit his ego. China, India and Russia might be getting along better, but they are not yet even close to having the deep alliances of Western nations.
But all of that is substance, and Trump is a president who cares far more about the sizzle than the steak. There is a new picture showing who’s making the moves on the global stage, and Donald Trump isn’t in it. That’s got to hurt.
James Ball is the political editor of the ‘New World’
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