Dragon The Elephant and The Emerging World Order

The twenty-first century's most consequential bilateral relationship is being rebuilt across the Himalayas. India and China are civilisational neighbours whose exchange of thought, faith and commerce long predates the modern state system, and who together account for nearly three billion people and two of the world's fastest-growing major economies. After a difficult passage, they are again enlarging their common ground - managing differences with maturity, restoring dialogue, travel and trade, and converging on the understanding that one nation's rise need not come at the other's expense. Their engagement will do much to determine whether the emerging world order proves genuinely multipolar. The book takes up the questions that matter most to that engagement. It follows the bilateral trajectory since 2014 - from early outreach through the border crisis to disengagement at Depsang and Demchok and the leaders' meeting at Kazan - and asks what the present stabilisation rests upon. It examines the trade relationship and the pathways to a more balanced one; the stake both countries hold in multilateralism, the Global South and open trade at a moment when tariff-driven statecraft is unsettling the system; and the paradoxical effect of American transactional unilateralism.