India, May 11 -- Three days from today, US President Donald Trump will land in Beijing for a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. In the run-up to the summit, the US Treasury sanctioned five Chinese "teapot" refineries for processing Iranian oil, including the Hengli Petrochemical complex in Dalian. On May 2, Beijing invoked an anti-sanctions law ordering Chinese companies and banks to disregard the American measures which some called "unprecedented defiance". Will the friction lead to accommodation or more confrontation? Two of India's most consequential external relationships will be present at the table in Beijing, and whatever they decide will have implications for New Delhi. China - India's national security challenge, systemic challenger, adversary and another adversary's friend - has signalled warm relations with India, even as it does everything it can to pressure India from all directions. The US - indispensable for India when it comes to technology, capital, and the broader global architecture - imposed 50% tariffs on Indian goods over the country's purchases of Russian crude, twice deferred the Quad summit, criticised Delhi's policies from time to time, and rehabilitated Pakistan army chief Asim Munir to a degree unseen since the early years of Pervez Musharraf's stint in power. So, India has an adversary that is nice to it and a friend doing the opposite. India has been a quiet beneficiary, for most of the last decade, of a US-China relationship characterised by growing friction. The two countries' rivalry has been sharp enough that both had reason to court New Delhi, but the rivalry was never too sharp that the latter became forced to pick a side. Quad, the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, Indo-US tech partnerships, the US's chip restrictions architecture aimed at China, India's post-Galwan thaw with China, all function within this narrow band. If the Beijing summit ends in a "huge deal" of structural adjustment between them, the premium Washington and Beijing place on New Delhi will change, and it will become a smaller player in a more bilaterally settled order. On the other hand, if the sanctions standoff deepens into open confrontation, New Delhi faces choice-forcing pressure on energy, banking, and trade simultaneously. This takes me to a structural conclusion that many are reluctant to state plainly: A US-China friendship is bad for India. Their fighting too is bad for the country. What is good for India is a managed rivalry between the US and China. Put differently, a certain degree of competition between the two is a public good for Indian foreign policy. Whatever Trump and Xi say to each other on May 14, our deeper interest is in the rivalry that brought them to the table. New Delhi would want the continuation of that rivalry. Let's further unpack this preference structure from the Indian perspective. America's inability to contain China's rise is bad for India, despite its in-principle opposition to hegemonic (read America's) intervention in its neighbourhood. Clearly, conditions apply to India's in-principle opposition to hegemony: It wanted American pressure on Pakistan after Mumbai, wants US backing on the Line of Actual Control, and benefits from American capital and technology even when it resents Washington's demands. China offers a mirror paradox. Beijing's growing ability to push back against American hegemony decisively is bad for India, even if the two countries share anti-US-hegemony forums such as Brics and the SCO or the broader philosophy underpinning the Global South. India wants the Americans to push back the Chinese without itself getting involved; and, it wants the Chinese to be part of forums highlighting the limits of American hegemony, without having to do so itself even as it benefited from American power. Indian diplomacy has lived with these contradictions for at least two decades. The more India rises globally, the more it will need to deal with these. India marked the first anniversary of Operation Sindoor last week. Twelve months ago, in the immediate aftermath of the four-day conflict with Pakistan, Beijing was careful to avoid public confirmation of the assistance it had provided to Islamabad. That is no longer the case. Earlier this week, Chinese State television aired an interview with engineers from the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute, in which they described their on-ground operational role in Pakistan during the conflict, supporting J-10C operations. The decision to broadcast this on the anniversary of India's military operation, through a State-run channel and with the country's premier fighter design institute on camera, is a serious message: Unlike earlier, Beijing now sees no political cost in publicly endorsing what it once denied, that it arms Pakistan against India. In all honesty, India must recognise that its foreign policy has been free-riding on the structural contradiction between the US and China. The policy is now being exposed as inadequate. For two decades, China managed to keep India preoccupied on the LAC and Pakistan while it built its economic and geopolitical might elsewhere. That arrangement, which did not suit us, is now over. But what has replaced it is worse. China is now everywhere, while the LAC and Pakistan challenges have not gone away either. What New Delhi has to manage now is a great deal more of Beijing - a Beijing that is no longer pretending to be benign. What makes it worse is that the US has only added to India's difficulties. An honest stocktaking must, therefore, produce measures designed to meet the China challenge in its current shape, on the assumption that Washington's adversary track with Beijing is too intermittent and uncertain for New Delhi to build its own China policy around it. The work ahead is slower and less glamorous than the diplomacy of the last decade. The great power contradiction we have been free-riding will, in time, narrow further....