In a fit of pique Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany. He also said that he was considering pulling soldiers out of Italy and Spain.

Why these three countries? Because their leaders had the temerity to criticise the US president.

Trump is cutting off Uncle Sam’s face to spite his nose while shooting him in the foot. In short, it is a stupid move. America needs Europe. For a start. Europe is the largest financial pillar outside the United States supporting the US defense industry—it spends more than $100 billion a year. And the US defense industry is five percent of America’s GDP.

American bases in Europe also enable the US to project power throughout Eurasia, Africa, the Middle East and the western end of the Indo-Pacific region. It has bases in Britain, Germany, the Baltic countries, Poland, Spain, Italy and even Greenland.

The US bases enable the Pentagon to pre-position equipment and fuel for rapid deployments; provide some of the world’s finest hospitals; repair centres; intelligence; command centres and deployment infrastructure. Europe is the foundational stone that makes global power projection possible.

Trump’s recently published National Security Strategy focused on “civilisational decline” in Europe and the need to focus on the Western Hemisphere. But it also said that Europe would “remain as a platform for US global operations.”

Given the above, it should follow that the US president should learn to be nicer to the people he needs.

Trump is off to China next week. To be exact, he is in Beijing next Thursday and Friday for talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

At the moment the US and China are in the middle of a trade truce. That is because the trade war that Trump launched last April proved disastrous to both countries. Trump raised tariffs to over 100 percent. China immediately cut off America’s access to the rare earth minerals. Trump retaliated by reducing Chinese access to American technology and financial instruments. The result was a Mexican stand-off.

Both sides backed away, lowered tariffs and resumed access to products. But the spate left a bad taste in the mouths of both leaders. They think that Sino-American cooperation will only benefit the other. In fact, the only thing keeping Trump and Xi talking to each other is the fear of the economic damage each can inflict on each other’s country.

This will upset US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who has spent the first part of this year negotiated a set of trade deals which he hopes will be signed in Beijing. According to diplomatic sources, it is more likely that the best result will be a pair of fixed smiles and a handshake.

May should be an interesting diplomatic month for India. It will have to perform a delicate balancing act between the American-dominated West and the Chinese-dominated East and South.

Next week Prime Minister Narendra Modi plays host to foreign ministers from the 11-nation BRICS group of countries. The original members were – as the acronym suggests—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They are decidedly pro-Global South and anti-Western.

Then, in the last week of May, Modi hosts a meeting of the foreign ministers from the Quad Alliance. This is composed of the US, Australia, Japan and India. Its aim is to provide a security cordon to contain Chinese expansion.

India is no stranger to difficult diplomatic positions. During the Cold War era it was leader of the Non-Aligned Movement which aimed to keep countries out of either the Soviet or the American camp. But its current position is different. Now India has a foot in both camps.

The overlap reflects India’s foreign policy instinct in a fractured world: avoid camps, keep options open, and turn geopolitical competition into strategic space.

This balancing act becomes even harder given the current global geopolitical uncertainty. West Asia is in crisis after the U.S.-Israel attack on Iran in February and Tehran’s retaliation across the Gulf. Oil markets are unstable. The Strait of Hormuz remains under threat.

The United States and China are competing more sharply across trade, technology and security. Russia’s confrontation with the West continues. The global order is splitting into rival blocs, even if many countries refuse to admit it openly.

India now finds itself at the centre of these contradictions which it what makes the forthcoming meetings interesting.

The BRICS foreign minister’s gathering will be especially interesting because three of the countries—Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—are, if not formally at war, are one miscalculation away from it.

It will fall to India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, to ensure that the meeting does not descend into a brawl.

To that end, he is helped by the carefully choreographed structure of all BRICS meetings. Most of the meeting’s conclusions have already been hammered out by diplomats and it only remains for the foreign ministers to mouth a few platitudes, shake hands and smile for a group photograph.

Modi is also helped by the purpose of BRICS. The member states do not share any political values. They range from a one-party state to a theocracy to an absolute monarchy to troubled democracies. BRICS supporters like to refer to it as a “coalition of diversifiers.”

The Gulf Region is not the only area of tension between BRICS countries. Egypt and Ethiopia clash over control of the Nile and India and China are perpetually at loggerheads. There is no attempt by BRICS counties to agree on human rights, sanctions policies or responses to conflicts. They know that any attempt to force an agreement would fail so why court failure.

BRICS cannot become a military alliance; act as a unified geopolitical bloc; enforce norms or standards or respond collectively to crises. But then it was not created for that purpose. Its members are united by the belief that they are the losers in the American-dominated postwar world order, and they want to change that. By just existing BRICS has taken giant steps towards that goal, but that is unlikely to stop Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, at the very least, glaring at each other across the conference table.

* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”