India, Sept. 27 -- India elites have been dealt with the most brutal geopolitical lesson in Trump's red carpet accommodation of Xi Jinping's China. Will this finally teach them the right lesson?

For the better part of the last nearly two decades, the Indian strategic establishment has operated under a comforting delusion: that the structural rivalry between the United States and China would serve as an escalator for India's geopolitical rise. The calculus was remarkably convenient. As Washington and Beijing engaged in a protracted trade and technological war, New Delhi believed it could simply position itself as the indispensable swing state, sweeping up the manufacturing exodus of the "China+1" strategy while leveraging Western anxietie...