Russia, they name as a threat. China they call a strategic competitor. The question at Évian was how far the language for China had travelled, and where India now stands within it.
For more than twenty years India has been the most constant guest of the G7, a summit of the world’s richest democracies, and in the Modi era the invitation has hardened into a fixture. At Évian this June, Narendra Modi attended his seventh successive summit, the most experienced head of government in the room. He came endorsing the group›s critical-minerals plan, pressing the claims of the Global South, and staking out India›s place in the emerging geo-economic disorder and weaponization of interdependence. The contrast with the other Asian giant could not be starker. China, the world›s second-largest economy and the subject of more G7 deliberation than any other state, has never once been invited. The G7 talks about China; it talks to India. That asymmetry is where an honest reading of the summit begins, showing how the West regards two powers it can neither ignore nor seat as equals.
A summit like this is best read through its diplomatese, the words these Western democracies choose for the powers they fear, and they have never used the same word for both. Russia, more proximate though it is, they name as a threat, a military danger to be contained by sanction and deterrence. China they call a strategic competitor, an economic and systemic rival to be managed rather than defeated, even in the Pacific and the South China Sea. The question at Évian was not whether that distinction held. It was how far the language for China had travelled, and where India now stands within it.
I have watched that language shift across three summits, and written about each as it came. Reading the communiqué of Puglia in 2024, I found the West›s posture towards China a paradox, a frenemy across some twenty-eight paragraphs, a Cold War 2.0 in which Beijing was a malign force. Russia, by contrast, was named without equivocation as a real and present threat to be countered by every available means. A year later at Kananaskis, it produced no joint communiqué and, as I argued at the time, exposed an absence deeper than the missing text, of G7 and the Western liberal democratic coherence, coordination and conviction; the conductor had lost the orchestra, and the statements that survived named China nowhere, retreating only to non-market practices in critical minerals. At Évian the communiqué returned, nine declarations and a common statement on geopolitics, and China reappeared in two guises: opposed where it coerces and welcomed where it converges, at the growth summit Macron had convened with Beijing a week before. In three years the West moved from naming China a frenemy, to not naming it at all, to naming it on its own carefully schizophrenic terms.
This is the pivot, one of method rather than direction. It has stopped denouncing China and started building around it. The de-risking doctrine that Japan wrote into G7 thinking at Hiroshima in 2023 has hardened from slogan into architecture. Kananaskis launched a Critical Minerals Action Plan, which India endorsed. Évian founded a Critical Minerals Resilience and Production Alliance, targeting reliance on no outside supplier for over 60% of rare earths and magnets by 2030. The declaration declined to name China, though the subject was unmistakable: a country that refines over 80% of the world›s rare earths and is willing to wield it as leverage. Economic weaponisation, once a warning, has become a planning assumption.
Russia drew no such ambivalence. Where China is competed with, Russia is confronted. At Kananaskis the allies could not agree on Ukraine against American resistance, and Canada and the EU acted alone, pledging billions and sanctions while condemning Russian barbarism. At Évian the breach closed. With President Zelenskyy attending and Putin not amenable to Trump›s peace ministrations, the leaders agreed to step up air defence and long-range support, to license Ukrainian arms production, and to tighten sanctions on Russian oil and gas. President Trump, who had walked out a year before, this time signed, though EU-Trump divergences on Ukraine remain.
Nowhere is the older strategy clearer than in the Indo-Pacific. At Évian the leaders restated their opposition to any change of the status quo by force in the South and East China Seas and across the Taiwan Strait. Yet even as they met, the United States quietly renamed its Indo-Pacific Command the Pacific Command once more, stripping from its title the word that had honoured India›s centrality since 2018. The Pentagon insisted nothing had changed. But Delhi›s strategic circles read the signal at once, with questions about the Quad and India›s place in American security thinking, until reassurance came in a bilateral: Trump told Modi the United States would defend India if attacked. The Indo-Pacific as a free, open and rule-based strategic concept persists, in the war plans and the alliances, and at the Évian G7 it was reiterated.
On energy security, with the Strait of Hormuz only lately reopened, the leaders pledged to diversify routes, reduce vulnerability and build stocks, and welcomed Canada›s spare capacity. On development they made their sharpest turn, trading the language of aid and development cooperation for that of transaction and investment, and proposing economic corridors to connect resource-rich Global South nations to their markets. The summit made no commitment to WTO reform, stressing instead the need for interoperability to keep the global economy from fracturing into rival blocs.
Modi›s interventions caught the moment. A year before, at Kananaskis, post Operation Sindoor, he had forced terrorism onto the G7›s agenda, demanding no double standards and that its sponsors pay a price. At Évian his subject was trust—the most important strategic asset, he argued was no longer minerals or technology or markets; but trust sustained only when technology and supply chains serve the common good rather than debilitate others. Set against the danger India knows best, the breakdown of the MFN and rule based international trading system under the unilateralism and predatory practices of the major economies, he asserted India›s faith that salvation for the world and the Global South lay «not in protectionism but in partnership, not in uncertainty but in shared prosperity.» He welcomed the fragile peace in West Asia, reminding the room that the war had cost Indian lives and hit the trade and energy security of the world and Global South. And he urged responsible governance of artificial intelligence, frontier technologies and critical minerals, with India ready to contribute.
Managing China rather than confronting it requires an alternative, and the G7 has settled on India: the democracy with the scale and technological base to be its de-risking partner and, through its G20 stewardship and its standing in the Global South, its bridge to the order it is unsettling. The same members who diverge over who will defend whom converge in courting a trade agreement with Delhi; the summit that hedged against one Asian giant built its development design around the other. The G7 needs India in the room for its decisions to carry beyond it.
The deeper movement is the one India has long named. The world is not lurching towards multipolarity as towards a new frontier; it is returning to it, after a brief interval in which one power believed itself the sole author of order. A G7 that no longer denounces its largest competitor in capital letters, that widens its table and builds alliances where it once issued condemnations, is adjusting, slowly, to a world of many centres. For India, the lesson is neither Western triumph over China nor Western capitulation to it; it is that the West has begun, haltingly, to build the multipolar constellation it once resisted. India›s task is to shape the terms on which the great powers learn to compete without rupturing, rather than wait upon the West›s favour or follow Beijing›s lead. The diplomatese of Évian suggests the powers are beginning to learn that language. India should make certain the words are chosen with its own voice in them.
*Lakshmi Puri is former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and former Deputy Executive Director of UN Women.
