But the exploratory 2+2 mechanism shows the same relationship now growing an explicit security channel alongside the economic one. Infrastructure finance, trade access, and technology standards are the tools; the objective is strategic influence. China supplies capital and infrastructure; India, geographic access and river management; the United States, export markets and investment. Since then it has had to manage Chinese financing obligations, Indian security concerns, and IMF conditionality all at once — a single financing decision generating overlapping constraints that persist years later. The Teesta project may improve water security, but it also invites strategic scrutiny of Chinese financing in a sensitive basin.