Significance of the latest Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Astana, Kazakhstan
Yesterday saw the conclusion of the two-day summit in Astana, Kazakhstan that brought together the heads of state and government of eight of the nine members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The only missing prime minister was Modi from India, but he will shortly make amends by paying a state visit in Moscow in the coming week. On the positive side of the ledger, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was present to witness the rise of his country from observer status to full membership. Among the several candidate states for entry into this club represented in Astana at the highest level, the most notable was President Erdogan of Turkey.
As for what may have been accomplished in Astana, we can say that at a minimum it provided its participants with the opportunity for confidential bilateral talks at a time that is fraught with risk, given the hearths of war in Ukraine, in Gaza and in the Straits of Taiwan. We know that Vladimir Putin made good use of the visit to line up a full day’s sequence of tête-à-têtes, the most important of which, surely, was with Chinese President Xi.
So far, the texts of official documents signed by the participants have not been published or even described. We may assume these are mostly of an economic nature. However, the news about Belarus gaining full membership and the announcement on the sidelines of the summit by President Xi that China will back SCO host Kazakhstan’s bid to join BRICS give us clear indications that this summit marks a turning point in the repurposing of the SCO from a regional club that ensures security in Central Asia, which was its founding mission in 2001, to become the security provider to the Eurasian continent, and also that it may ultimately, before 2030, merge with BRICS.
At the founding of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001, Islamic terror emanating from Afghanistan was a real threat to the Central Asian region which borders China in the East and Russia in the West and North. This region was central to American and British efforts to weaken the security and divert attention of these two Great Powers from their presence at the global level. Moreover, both terror and the intervention of Western powers complicated efforts of China and Russia to avoid conflict between their own competing political and economic ambitions in the region. Creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization made it possible to manage these challenges effectively.
The durability of this solution was proven most recently, when U.S. efforts by Tony Blinken in the past year and British efforts by Lord Cameron in the past several months to draw the various Central Asian states away from Russia and China and into the U.S.-led world order failed miserably. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan remain solidly embedded in the Russian-Chinese spheres of influence, and Russia’s clear victory in its military confrontation with the Collective West in and over Ukraine has brought to bear on the attractions of the regional status quo the luster of being on the winning side in the worldwide competition. One can put paid to the notion of a revival of the 19th century British-Russian Great Game in this part of the world.
The admission of India and Pakistan in 2017, then, in 2023, the admission of Iran to full membership in the SCO pointed to its repurposing to come. From that point on it represented the lion’s share of the population of Asia. The addition of Belarus now adds a distinctly European dimension to the membershjp, since Belarus, unlike Russia, is strictly a European geographic entity. This suits the new interest of both Russia and China to create a security architecture for the entire Eurasian land mass built upon the nation states residing there and excluding outside powers, most notably the United States.
We are moving on metaphorically from the Mercator Projection maps to a Eurasia-centric map of the word which has no tolerance for Atlanticism. In this new map, the outlying fringes of the world are not somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia: the outlying fringe is Europe, which is reduced to a peninsula at the western extreme of the Eurasian continent. Put in geopolitical terms, Russia and China are presently declaring their own version of the Monroe Doctrine and telling the United States to clear out.
This changed view of the world and of how security can be assured is a direct result of what Russia has experienced these past two years plus of the war in Ukraine.
Back in 2008, in the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been tasked with presenting and negotiating with NATO member states a revised security architecture for Europe that would bring Russia in from the cold. As we know, that initiative was haughtily snubbed by Angela Merkel and by the other decision makers in Europe and North America.
As recently as December 2021, President Putin had attempted to renew dialogue with the United States and with NATO over a revised security architecture for Europe that would move back NATO’s troops and installations from the easternmost member states to where they stood before the NATO expansion of the Clinton years.
The new concept of a Eurasian security architecture that we now see developing within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization marks a break from all those past Russian initiatives and presents the greatest challenge to the existence of NATO at the very time when a possible return of Donald Trump to the presidency puts that organization in jeopardy from withdrawal of support by its single biggest contributor.
In yesterday evening’s panel discussion on Iran’s Press TV, I was given the opportunity to set out key points from the foregoing.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024