Just because the foreign ministers of Russia, India and China have met, and President Vladimir Putin flew from Beijing to New Delhi, some armchair analysts are again touting the idea of an axis.

The strategy was first proposed by Yevgeny Primakov while he was prime minister on a visit to India. It was met with cold silence from the Indians, and, thankfully, Putin and his foreign-policy team have not shown any interest in the idea.

Primakov was driven by his Cold War communist instincts, which always saw America as the enemy, and his foreign-policy decisions were rooted in deep anti-Americanism. When he came up with the idea of forming an axis – obviously to counter the increasing U.S. influence worldwide – he did not take the facts of the new world into account. Putin recognized those realities very quickly, as India did nearly a decade ago.

First, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee coined the phrase "India and the United States are natural allies." Indians have been incensed at how the United States has been hypocritical in its support of successive dictatorial and terrorist regimes in Pakistan and turns a blind eye to the latter's nuclear program and, of late, active participation by Pakistani individuals in nearly all acts of terror worldwide. But Indians also know that those are tactical choices by Americans who have been given full co-operation by the current Pakistan dictator Pervez Musharraf. In the longer run, the United States will recognize, if it hasn't already done so, that India, the frontier democracy in the Eastern world, will be a firm partner in global trade, investment and the war against terror. U.S. corporations have made very long-term investments in India, and Indian intellectual power drives many growing companies in the United States. Indian democracy, having said its final good-byes to the post-independence romance with socialism, has a deeper connection with the United States, irrespective of bureaucratic spars that might complicate the relationship sometimes. The United States is using Pakistan as an ally in its war against terror – not at the expense of its relationship with India, which is based on longer-term economic interests. Indian political elite and intelligentsia have tremendous respect for the United States and at no cost will India do anything to alienate this "natural alliance."

Second, Indians, ever since the Chinese betrayal of 1962, occupation of Tibet and incursions into the Indian far east, have never trusted the Chinese completely. The Indian atomic and missile program is not so much aimed at countering a Pakistani threat – it is deterrence against the nuclear warheads aimed at New Delhi by Beijing. Indians can easily win a conventional war against Pakistan should it ever come to that, but nuclear deterrence was an absolute must because of Chinese nuclear power.

Third, India and China are competing economies. Both countries, bereft of natural resources, have tried to secure places in the global marketplace based on competitive labor costs and intellectual capital. Chinese still employ slave labor, while Indians have tried to outdo them in information technology. In the future, the two countries will continue to vie with each other for North American and European markets for their industrial, agricultural and IT products and services. To form an alliance against the United States would be as stupid as it would be unnecessary.

From the Russian perspective, too, any such alliance would be counterproductive, and for this reason Putin has never warmed up to it. Before his previous visit to India, I asked President Putin if he intended to play some kind of balancing role in the Asian region's angry emotions and conflicts. His answer was that Russia is focused on opportunities and collaboration with individual countries. China and India are the biggest markets for Russian industrial hardware and arms. Together, the two countries pay salaries for almost 60 percent of the labor force in Russian defense enterprises.

The potential of an armed and dangerous China one day posing a threat to Russia's mineral-rich East is not lost on some strategists. Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Center for Strategic Research, has repeatedly pointed to a potential danger from the East, telling the Russian political elite that it has less to fear from the West and Russians should bury their inferiority complexes against the United States and, with it, ideas of an alliance with the Chinese.

Russian strategy in dealing with China and India is based on economic interests, and there is precious little ideological nostalgia involved. Putin is not from Primakov's generation, even though he is from the same school, and he has shown his ability to look forward. Russians have always wanted be a part of Europe – not of some vague alliance with two Asian powers for undefined reasons. That might appeal to some communists, but Putin is no communist – he is a European with centrist ideas.

Indians and Chinese are helping Russian government pay the bills for now, but all this talk of "strategic relations" between India and Russia is just sound-bites. The truth of the matter is that Russians are making it increasingly difficult for Indians and Chinese to obtain visas to do business in Russia while going out of their way to attract Western investment. In the end, Russia, China and India are all economic bachelorettes vying for the attention of the most eligible of bachelors – the United States.

U.S. cultural and economic dominance creates a world order in which even the ruling left-wing Chinese, right-wing Indians and centrist Russians understand that axes and alliances are things of past – best confined to the dustbins of history.