Amb. Ajay Bisaria, IFS (Retd.)
Strategic Consultant · Author · Commentator on International Affairs
Let me begin with something that illustrates just how volatile this moment is. When Mali asked me the tariff rate before this event, I checked my phone and it was 10%. I checked again minutes later — it was 25%. That tells you everything about the world we are operating in. This is about the time Trump wakes up and tweets, and that changes the world again, dramatically. In many ways, Trump has been to geopolitics what Tiger Woods was to golf — the interest in geopolitics, not just as something that affects you directly but as a spectator sport, has gone through the roof.
What I want to do today is contextualise the Trump storm within the larger hundred-year play of geopolitics. After World War II, we had a stable bipolar system — the US and the USSR, mutually assured destruction, nuclear deterrence — that gave the world a degree of order for 45 years. When the USSR broke up in 1991, we moved to a unipolar world that lasted, in my assessment, until about 2008, when Russia woke up from the dead and pushed back in Georgia. From 2008, we have been living in an emerging multipolarity — a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the VUCA world — true for countries, true for business, true for individuals.
Four forces are compounding this. Geopolitics is shifting, geoeconomics is being weaponised, technology is disrupting faster than governance can respond, and climate change is adding another layer of systemic risk. The US-China rivalry sits at the centre of all four. China now produces 33% of global output. It controls critical minerals. It is challenging the US in AI, in supply chains, in standards, in Africa, in Eurasia. For Russia and Iran, the challenge to US primacy has already turned hot — in Ukraine and in West Asia. With China, it remains a cold war, a war of weaponised trade and supply chains. And India, I should note, sits at precisely the short end of this problem: our largest source of imports and our largest export destination both weaponised trade against us in the same period.
India’s response has been consistent with its historical instinct: strategic autonomy. What has changed is the vocabulary — from non-alignment to multi-alignment. The India Way, as Jaishankar framed it, is to engage America, manage China, reassure Russia, cultivate Europe, deepen ties with Japan and the Middle East, and champion the Global South. The challenge today is that all four major powers — the US, China, Russia, Europe — are behaving more volatilely, making that balance harder to manage. The US remains indispensable but is now a less reliable partner. China remains the strategic rival but we need tactical accommodation to keep the hundred-billion-dollar trade deficit from escalating into conflict. Russia is declining but still occasionally useful. Europe is ascending as a partner, particularly with Macron’s visit and the Rafale deal.
The India-EU trade deal — fifteen years in the making — is perhaps the most consequential development of recent months. It happened because Trump forced middle powers to hedge. That is the paradox of the Trump storm: it is accelerating precisely the diversification and coalition-building that India needs. The India-US deal framework was moving towards 18% tariffs, but yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling put that back on the drawing board. The administration says keep calm and tariff on — they will use other legislative routes to get back to 18%. For India, paradoxically, the stronger negotiating position is now ours. The Indian strategy should be: keep calm and negotiate short-term, diversify in the medium term, and strengthen the economy and defence capacity over the long term. Selective globalization — not retreat from the world, but engagement on our terms, with the right partners, in the right sectors.
Rabindranath (Rabin) B
CEO & Co-Founder, Quantrium
You described 2026 as potentially India’s geopolitical sweet spot. The China-plus-one story is well understood — Apple’s manufacturing presence in Chennai is the most visible example. But what I am seeing is an emerging US-plus-one diversification as well. Canadian pension funds I work with have 40 to 70% exposure in the US market — something that was simply inconceivable a year ago. They are now actively looking to India and the EU. That outflow of capital looking for a stable, growing alternative is a real tailwind. Indian companies need to move beyond being alternative suppliers and become indispensable partners — and that means going global, not just waiting for the world to come here.
Arjun Chakraverti
Independent Management Consultant
If I put Trump tremors at six on the Richter scale of business disruption, the AI revolution is nine or more — and the dimensions of its impact are still being discovered. The ambassador mentioned at the Delhi AI Summit that technology is running well ahead of governance. My own preparation for this evening confirmed it: I gave the invite brochure to Gemini and asked it to generate discussion questions. I was relieved to find the questions still weren’t good enough — there is still some relevance for the rest of us. But only just. Every management institution, every business, every government needs to decide right now where it wants to sit in Jensen Huang’s five-layer AI stack — chips, infrastructure, models, applications, and the edge. India will not compete at the bottom of that stack. But at the model and application layers, there is a real opportunity if we move with urgency.
Jagannathan Narayanan
Director & CEO, Fourth Dimension Technologies
The question of regional integration matters as much as global diversification. India lives in a genuinely tough neighbourhood — two traditional adversaries, two failing states on our borders. But the Sri Lanka story is a positive one, and Bangladesh is turning. The best model for reform, in my view, is competitive federalism — let states compete for investment the way countries compete for trade. Foxconn picked three Indian states not by accident, but because those states competed hard. That is the model: enable at the centre, compete at the state level, and make India the most attractive destination not just for global capital but for regional startups from Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and the wider neighbourhood.
Q&A
Rabindranath B
The institutions that held the postwar order together — the UN, WTO, NATO, the Paris Climate Accord — have been battered by the Trump storm. Are we witnessing the sunset of multilateralism, or will it reinvent itself? And how do Indian businesses navigate this upheaval?
AMB. AJAY BISARIA
There is no clean answer, because this emerging multipolarity is going to be defined by rules we haven’t yet agreed upon. We are in a hybrid order — part 19th-century might-is-right, part remnants of the 20th-century rules-based system. What is clear is that the UN Security Council has failed to bring peace. The 20-point plan for Gaza is Trump’s. The Ukraine deal framework is Trump’s. The UN is not in the room.
India’s position is that we need a reformed multilateralism — one that reflects the realities of today, not 1945. What that means practically is a G20 world more than a UN world, and a proliferation of opportunistic alliances: the Quad, BRICS, IMEC — the India-Middle East-Europe corridor. For business, this creates real opportunities precisely in these alliance frameworks and in the reshoring and friend-shoring supply chains they enable. My honest assessment is that it will take a decade before we settle on a new order. But that decade is also a decade of opportunity for those who are watching carefully.
Jagannathan Narayanan
Given the scale of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US — the $100,000 H1B fee proposals, potential tariffs on Indian software exports, even talk of banning H1B visas — how seriously should the Indian IT industry view these threats?
AMB. AJAY BISARIA
The Indian IT sector is facing a triple challenge simultaneously: geopolitical pressure, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the AI disruption. That is a formidable combination. But I would distinguish between noise and policy. The MAGA crowd does not like immigrants, but at the moment those voices are being checked by the tech broligarchy from the West Coast. Musk was explicit — he is willing to go to war on this one, because Silicon Valley was built on Indian talent. The fringe bills you are referring to — the higher H1B fee, the proposed tariffs on software exports — I think they will not see the light of day because there are simply too many countervailing interests. You may see anti-immigrant sentiment on the streets, but it will not become policy, at least not for the Indian tech professional. That is, I think, the more reassuring reading of where things currently stand.
Q & A — Audience
If you were advising a young Indian entrepreneur today, which sectors or global corridors would you consider most promising over the next decade?
AMB. AJAY BISARIA
Follow the money and follow the trade deals. Europe is suddenly emerging as a massive opportunity — political leaders are coming to India precisely because they have problems with China, Russia, and now the United States simultaneously. That combination of geopolitical pressure is creating real appetite for Indian partnerships. West Asia — UAE, Saudi Arabia, the GCC — is both a capital pool and a growing market. We now have a trade deal framework with the six GCC countries. And East Asia and Africa are also important emerging geographies. The Brazilian president’s recent visit is part of that same story — countries diversifying away from a mercurial United States. These three geographies — Europe, West Asia, and East Asia — are where I would focus if I were advising a young entrepreneur building for global markets today.
When redesigning supply chains, should companies prioritise cost efficiency or geopolitical alignment?
AMB. AJAY BISARIA
That is actually a question with a clear answer, and it is the central argument of everything I have been saying today. The most efficient supply chain is not the most effective supply chain for your business. The risks to an efficient supply chain are too great in the current environment. The world believed China could be made the permanent sweat shop of the global economy — the most efficient division of labour possible. Clearly that model is broken. A geopolitically aligned, friend-shored supply chain — even if it costs more — is more resilient, more sustainable, and ultimately better for long-term business performance. Build in optionality. No more than 25% dependency on any single geography for inputs or markets. Map your risks before your competitors force you to.
