The recent tension between Delhi and Beijing is not the only factor that is making the so-called strategic triangle — the grouping of Russia, India and China (RIC) whose foreign ministers met in Bangalore this week — increasingly irrelevant to the evolving great power relations. The uncomfortable truth is this: the faster the rise of China, the quicker the decline of RIC as a collective.

The concept of the RIC as a strategic triangle was invented by Moscow in the mid 1990s as it scrambled to prevent post-Soviet Russia’s marginalisation in the international system. While Delhi could not say ‘no’ to its old friends in Moscow, Russia and China saw the RIC as a potential forum to balance the sole superpower in the international system — the United States.

Meanwhile a powerful new trend began to undermine the RIC even as it struggled to find its feet. Since the first trilateral meeting of the three foreign ministers took place in 2002, the balance of power within RIC steadily evolved in favour of China. Although Russia and India have increased their weight in the international system over the last decade, the rise of China has been too spectacular for either of them to match.

Thanks to the financial crisis and the advent of the Obama Administration in Washington, the United States is now tempting China with the prospect of a global Sino-US condominium or a ‘Group of Two’ that makes an utter mockery of the ‘Strategic triangle’.

Japan’s Kabuki

If Moscow and Delhi find it hard to understand that a rising China does not need either of them to increase its leverage with the United States, Japan is poised to give them a big knock on the head. Last week’s public spat in Tokyo between the visiting US Defence Secretary Robert Gates and the new government in Japan led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama on alliance management has shaken the world’s assumptions about the US-Japan partnership that has been the one constant feature of Asian international relations since the end of the Second World War.

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