The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) held its 24th annual meetup in Astana, Kazakhstan on July 4 – the same date the United States celebrates its declaration of independence, and also just one week before NATO’s annual summit from July 9-11. The SCO is widely viewed as an Asian counterweight to the West and the U.S. in particular, including its strategic military alliance NATO.
The rationale behind NATO and the SCO presents a contrast between the strategic character of Western- and China-led forums. While NATO is focused on military affairs, forging a strategic alliance against the “threat” of growing Sino-Russian ties, the SCO emphasizes advancing strategic interests through economic cooperation and what China tells the world is “a shared future.” The SCO was established on the principle of Eurasian integration and a collective security framework. However, it remains distant from NATO’s concept of security and is deemed to be more focused on economic integration of the Eurasian landmass than carving out a modern iron curtain.
Still, the SCO, despite having broader regional objectives, appears to be caught up on sending a message of Sino-Russian unity against the West. The organization, as its supporters often tout, covers 80 percent of the Eurasian landmass, 40 percent of the global population and nearly 30 percent of global GDP – yet it remains driven by Beijing and Moscow. In fact, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made this explicitly clear during the summit, when he explained his rationale for wanting Turkey to join: “We want to further develop our relations with Russia and China within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.” The emphasis on China and Russia remains of key importance for the SCO and is the main driver of the group.
Similarly, for quite some time the organization’s annual summits have been a showcase of the Sino-Russian alliance against the West rather than meaningfully addressing pressing regional issues such as terrorism, economic instability, and environmental challenges.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping met on the first day of the Astana summit to extend diplomatic support and strengthen strategic ties. Both leaders shared brotherly remarks, where Xi called Putin an “old friend.” The relationship between China and Russia has been growing lately, with Beijing’s full support for Moscow’s war on Ukraine, while Moscow returns the favor by backing Beijing in its strategic endeavors.
The SCO was founded on the “Shanghai Spirit” of “mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, non-alignment, non-targeting at other countries or regions, and the principle of openness.” However, it appears that the regional bloc has shifted its focus to serve as a geopolitical counterweight to Western institutions led by the U.S. and its allies, while becoming ambivalent to the SCO’s own core principles.
This year’s summit, which was titled “Strengthening Multilateral Dialogue: Striving Towards a Sustainable Peace and Prosperity,” was largely focused on security. It was conveyed beforehand that security and stability will be at the top of the agenda, for obvious reasons as Russia is confronting NATO in Ukraine.
It’s been over 20 years since the SCO was founded, but the fruits are yet to be seen. The organization’s hallmark remains animosity to the West. Likewise, the headline achievement from this year’s summit was accepting Belarus as a full member. Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko has been clear in his strategic trajectory, allowing Russian troops to confront Ukraine from within Belarus and adopting anti-West policies.
Beyond Belarus’ accession, around 25 agreements were signed at the Astana summit in the realms of energy, security, trade, finance, and information security, but the effectiveness would be told by time. Boosting trade in national currencies has been spoken of for years, but no financial structure has been formulated or even discussed in detail.
Counterterrorism and extremism, the key impetus for the grouping’s founding, still remains a core issue mainly because many countries within the SCO ambit have an ambivalent approach. There has been no concrete joint action against the growing threat of terrorism in the region. The presence of terrorist groups in Afghanistan remained a mere discussion point despite member countries sharing borders with the country.
The Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) of the SCO remains a mere monument of the organization’s objectives against combating terrorism, but it is toothless in practice. When a key SCO member, Russia, faced brutal attacks from the Islamic State, RATS remained tightlipped while only the SCO secretary-general issued condemnations.
Rivalry among the member countries is also a hindrance. India-Pakistan and China-India rivalries haven’t seen any progress toward reconciliation under the banner of SCO, even on the sidelines. Nor has the SCO attempted to mediate in or resolve the testy border dispute between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
The Astana summit emphasized enhancing cooperation, which was stressed by the Chinese representative to the United Nations as well. However, such statements are now becoming stale, as most of the previous summits echoed with similar words. The summit couldn’t underline the way forward in terms of agreeing on concrete and practical measures to be taken in pursuit of enhanced cooperation.
Despite the diplomatic spectacle, the summit remained focused on the China-Russia axis, and served little function except to pass on strategic messaging to the West. As part of that messaging, Xi urged SCO members to “resist external interference” and “safeguard the right to development.”
To some extent the hollowness of the SCO makes sense as an organization founded by authoritarian regimes would be authoritarian in nature as well. However, this recipe of running the organization will not ensure a long and productive life. Rather, the risk is high of the SCO ending up like the erstwhile Warsaw Pact. As a comparison, for better or for worse, NATO is clear in its objectives and has seen its rhetoric materialize in actions whose efficacy can be seen, particularly in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The SCO needs to be more democratic in nature. And foremost it needs to grow beyond the Sino-Russian partnership and focus on safeguarding its core objectives by ensuring inter- and intra-regional integration. That can only happen if issues are resolved rather than brushed under the diplomatic rug. While the partnership between China and Russia may provide a strong front, it risks sidelining the interests of other member states and undermining the SCO’s mission of fostering multilateral cooperation. Russia and China need to separate their partnership from the organization as all member states stand equal.
In terms of counterterrorism, the SCO’s RATS mechanism needs to be more than just joint anti-terrorist exercises. It needs to be more proactive in approach by carving out policies that may then be made effective through compliance. Moreover, Afghanistan needs to be addressed collectively by the SCO as the region’s stability banks on it.
In economics, regional integration projects may be carried through the SCO rather bilaterally. And foremost, all of the group’s members need to align or have stakes in the organization. Whether one likes it or not, the process to expand the ranks of organizations like the SCO necessarily involves the existing members in the new country’s foreign and economic policies. In that context, the SCO becomes a staging ground for political signaling, like the Indian prime minister’s decision to skip the summit. Such gestures may serve India’s foreign policy objectives well, but do not benefit the SCO as an organization. Instead, it seems that every member state’s actual foreign policy seems distant from the organization’s stated objectives.