Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a choice to make. He has just met Xi Jinping, the president of the People's Republic of China - a man so powerful The Economistthis week calls him "Xi who must be obeyed".
He is about to meet Barack Obama, the embattled president of the United States, a thoughtful, perhaps vacillating man who is distinctly uncomfortable with the mantle of Leader of the Free World.
Where Mr Xi has triumphed over his rivals to a degree that has not been seen in China since the 1970s, Mr Obama is increasingly a Manmohanesque figure, hamstrung by his Republican opponents.
Modi himself has domestic power somewhere in between these two; his massive mandate gives him considerable political capital that he has not yet spent on anything but buying time, but he is yet to deal with the many choke-points in the Indian system of government - not to mention the unfriendly Upper House.
The India-China-United States relationship is usually thought of in terms of Grand Strategy, whatever that is. Are we "too close" to one or another? Are we compromising on non-alignment, or multilateral autonomy, or strategic independence, or whatever we're calling it this week? Can we play one off the other, or use one to get concessions by making the other jealous? I have always been a little doubtful about this.
Perhaps Grand Strategy is a little like being a teenager at a dance, but one would think there would be more to it.
Certainly, the recent incursion into Ladakh by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) reminds us that the idea that China and the United States should be kept equidistant if our concerns are solely "strategic" is mildly ridiculous.
The United States has not recently tried to militarily pressure us over a disputed border, and it is my – admittedly controversial – contention that it never will.
Modi and his government deserve credit for responding to the PLA's shenanigans with more restraint than the prime minister's rabble-rousing as a candidate had led us to expect. It was almost as if Manmohan Singh and Shiv Shankar Menon were in charge.
It is possible that Modi's hand was forced. Mr Xi was in town, and he came with gifts - vast promises of investment. Modi, as a decade of Vibrant Gujarat summits has shown, has a weakness for foreigners bearing tribute. Among Mr Xi's offers: two big industial parks in Maharashtra and Gujarat. These were eagerly seized on and publicised.
The prime minister, like many others, believes that China will have to be dealt with on two registers: it can be used economically, while defied politically.
Among those who think this is unlikely to happen is the leadership of the People's Republic of China. As Nitin Pai has explained on these pages, China has of late chosen to use its economic heft to win political arguments with its neighbours, and is merely trying to do the same thing with India.
The incursion at the time of the Xi visit was merely a deliberate reminder of the price of doing business with the Middle Kingdom.
src:sify.com