New Delhi, April 13 -- Donald Trump's return to the White House has once again reshaped the contours of global politics. In its second iteration, the Trump administration has embraced a more assertive - and often unpredictable - foreign policy, wielding tariffs and other economic instruments against both adversaries and allies, displaying open scepticism toward multilateral institutions, and privileging a highly transactional style of diplomacy. These shifts are unfolding against the backdrop of intensifying Great Power Competition and the continued erosion of the post-Cold War international order, contributing to a more fluid and uncertain global environment. For India, this evolving landscape raises a set of pressing questions about the durability of its foreign policy strategy. To what extent does "Trump 2.0" disrupt the underlying assumptions guiding India's engagement with the world, and where does it instead accelerate trends that were already underway? A new report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "India and a Changing Global Order: Foreign Policy in the Trump 2.0 Era," examines how the early phase of the second Trump administration has shaped India's foreign policy across key regions and issue areas. Three of the contributors to this report-Shoumitro Chatterjee, Sameer Lalwani, and Tanvi Madan-shared their insights on last week's episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment. Chatterjee is an assistant professor of international economics at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Lalwani is a non-resident senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund Indo-Pacific Program. And Madan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Host Milan Vaishnav spoke with this trio about Trump's volatile China policy, India's recent decisions to partially roll back restrictions on Chinese trade and investment, the country's sudden openness to new trade deals, and India's need to invest more in relations with the U.S. Congress. Lalwani called Trump's China policy inconsistent. "The administration came in with some fire and brimstone on China and were probably surprised by the leverage that China had with critical minerals," he noted. "In the last several months, there has been some back-pedalling on the threat assessment of China.China has been given a pass on Russian oil, even though India was punished for it. There have also been reversals on export controls." He also characterised the Trump policy on China as "unfocused." Madan said that the stabilisation of ties between China and India actually predated Trump's return to the White House. "It was evident by summer 2024 that India and China were both working toward some sort of stabilisation," she noted. "On the Indian side, one of the signs was that Prime Minister Modi had said that spring that China is an important country for India to engage with.The Chinese, after eighteen months, finally sent an ambassador who has been very forward-leaning in trying to shape the public debate in India about the relationship." Madan stated that these steps eventually culminated in October 2024, when Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi met and agreed to what had been discussed for years-"the final set of disengagements from the friction points involved in the 2020 crisis." While the India-China relationship is affected by the United States, she said that from an Indian perspective, the relationship follows a logic of its own. With regards to India's economic approach, Chatterjee worried that the adverse consequences of the Iran War could pose a real challenge to the Indian economy. "From an economic standpoint, the Iran war is unprecedented because it is a supply shock and a demand shock at the same time," Chatterjee noted....