The twenty-fifth summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was convened in the coastal city of Tianjin, in northern China on the shores of the Bohai Sea, from August 31 to September 1, 2025. More than twenty heads of state and ten leaders of international organizations attended the gathering. This extraordinary assembly—held against the backdrop of China’s commemoration of the eightieth anniversary of its victory in World War II and accompanied by a military parade designed to impress and to project power—was widely interpreted as a signal that Beijing was setting aside Deng Xiaoping’s oft-cited dictum to “hide your strength and bide your time” (韬光养晦). Instead, China appeared ready to present itself openly, not only as an economic powerhouse but also as a global political and military force.
Reactions to the summit varied. Many observers focused on what seemed to be an emerging trilateral nuclear alignment—China, Russia, and North Korea—long warned against by American analysts. In the wake of the Alaska Summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, some speculated that Moscow might drift away from Beijing in favor of closer ties with Washington—an inversion of the 1970s American strategy, when Washington drew closer to Beijing at Moscow’s expense. Equally striking was the warm reception President Xi Jinping extended to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which fueled speculation that the world might be on the cusp of a genuinely multipolar order. Others, however, dismissed the gathering as little more than a carefully stage-managed performance, intended primarily to signal to Washington that other great powers must be reckoned with and that global politics can no longer remain hostage to the whims of U.S. policy marked by inconsistency and the absence of a clear strategic framework.
It is against this backdrop that the need arises for a strategic assessment of the summit’s significance and its implications for regional and global balances of power.
The Origins of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed in a manner that stunned the world. Suddenly, China found itself bordering three new states to the northwest—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—in addition to Russia to the north, where it had previously shared a single frontier of roughly 4,300 to 4,380 kilometers with the Soviet Union alone. At that moment, China was an emerging power, buoyed by the rapprochement with Washington that began formally in 1972 under President Richard Nixon, was consolidated in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, and opened the way for a shared effort to counter their common adversary, the Soviet Union. China’s rise was further propelled by the sweeping reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of the country’s modern economic transformation.
With its northern and northwestern frontiers now divided among four states instead of one, and as Afghanistan descended deeper into civil war with the Taliban on the verge of seizing Kabul, Beijing concluded that a regional organization was needed. Its purpose would be to reaffirm the border, security, and cooperation agreements that the People’s Republic of China had signed with the Soviet Union on May 16, 1991, and to bind the newly independent states to those commitments. The goal was to create a framework for regional security cooperation that would prevent China from bearing the security burden in this volatile neighborhood alone, thereby allowing it to focus on domestic development. Russia, as the recognized successor to the Soviet Union, shared this objective. Both Moscow and Beijing agreed to leverage their influence to establish a regional security grouping, which became known as the Shanghai Five on April 26, 1996, alongside Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
In March 2001, Vladimir Putin was formally elected president of Russia, after serving in an acting capacity. With a new leadership in Moscow—youthful, assertive, and ambitious—Beijing proposed expanding the group into a more effective regional organization. Putin agreed, and Uzbekistan joined, prompting the renaming of the grouping as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The organization held its first summit on June 15, 2001, in Shanghai. The following year, the six member states signed the SCO Charter. Together they spanned three-fifths of the Eurasian landmass and were home to some 1.5 billion people—a full quarter of humanity.
Over time, the SCO expanded beyond its founding six. India and Pakistan joined on June 9, 2017, followed by Iran and Belarus in 2023 and 2024, respectively, bringing the total membership to ten. Afghanistan and Mongolia became observer states, while fourteen countries—including Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bahrain, Egypt, Cambodia, Qatar, Kuwait, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Sri Lanka—joined as dialogue partners. Most recently, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced that Laos had acceded to the SCO as a partner, bringing the combined number of members, observers, and partners to twenty-seven.
The SCO has articulated its broad objectives as follows:
The SCO has also signed a series of cooperation agreements with other international and regional organizations: with the United Nations in 2004; the Commonwealth of Independent States in 2005; the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 2005; the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 2007; the Economic Cooperation Organization in 2007; the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia in 2014; and the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2017.
Since 2001, the SCO has convened annual summits hosted by its member states. Counting from its inaugural summit in Shanghai to the most recent in Tianjin, twenty-five summits have been held, with the sole exception of 2020, when the meeting took place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The SCO: A Security Umbrella Amid Regional Turmoil and Global Challenges
As the preceding account of its origins makes clear, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is, at its core, a regional institution. Its primary and explicitly stated purpose—and the rationale for its creation—was to shield China and Russia from the seismic geopolitical shocks that swept across Eurasia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this regard, the SCO has already recorded a number of notable achievements, including:
The organization’s subsequent expansions—bringing in India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus as full members; Afghanistan and Mongolia as observers; and fourteen dialogue partners—have all pursued the same underlying objective: broadening the scope of security cooperation among states increasingly attuned to shared risks, particularly terrorism and mass protest movements, and bound together by their geographical interconnectedness across Eurasia.
Conclusions
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was conceived as a regional framework whose foremost purpose was to provide a security umbrella in the face of regional turmoil and global challenges across Eurasia. It has succeeded in fulfilling its primary mission of serving China and Russia, while expanding in line with the shared interests of its members—most of whom are situated within Eurasia—to confront the threats of terrorism and mass protests, which they perceive as Western instruments designed to destabilize internal order.
The organization does not possess a clear vision of the global order, nor do its members share a common set of values, a collective defense treaty, or a unified economic market. Nor is there any indication, at least in the near to medium term, of pursuing such integration.
China, for its part—and seemingly well positioned to succeed—is seeking to expand its economic influence through the SCO by means of a series of development projects and loans. President Xi Jinping announced preliminary plans to establish a development bank under the organization’s auspices, launched a platform for cooperation in green industries and energy, and pledged $1.4 billion in loans to SCO members over the next three years. Xi also declared that he is paving the way for member states to adopt the BeiDou satellite navigation system as an alternative to the U.S.-controlled Global Positioning System (GPS). Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, voiced strong support for Xi’s initiatives, affirming his belief that the SCO “is capable of assuming a leading role in efforts to build a more just and equitable system of global governance.”
Yet the organization remains deeply divided. The disputes between India and Pakistan, tensions between China and India, the conflicts between Russia and the three South Caucasus states—Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia—the growing mistrust between Russia and the Central Asian republics, particularly in the wake of the Russia–Ukraine war, and the divergent positions of Turkey, Iran, and other members, observers, and dialogue partners, all render the SCO little more than a loose and fragile framework, reminiscent of BRICS. Moreover, China’s push for development projects, loans, and alternatives to U.S. navigation systems effectively consolidates its own dominance—a dynamic that many member states may resist, and that could expose others to problems with the United States they are ill-equipped to confront.
Despite these fissures, the SCO states were united at the recent summit in Tianjin by a shared factor: their strained relations with Washington. Against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s erratic policies, ongoing political turbulence in the U.S. capital, and the absence of a coherent American strategy, the organization’s diverse members sought to convey a single message to Washington: “Partnership with us is a path to stability and mutual benefit; confrontation is a reckless gamble, and betting on the absence of alternatives is a losing wager.”
President Donald Trump reinforced this narrative with a typically provocative remark: “It looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to China,” he said—seizing the moment to underscore what he framed as the failures of both the Biden and Obama administrations.
Contrary to the claims of some Arab commentators—eager to see the end of what they call “American hegemony” and “unipolarity,” and echoed by certain Russian and Chinese voices—neither Beijing nor Moscow seeks to dismantle the existing international order. China has benefited enormously from it, rising to become the world’s second-largest economy, while Russia aspires to return to the global order that took shape after World War II. Moscow contends that it was Washington that overturned this order in the euphoria of the Soviet collapse, advancing triumphalist narratives such as “the end of history” and treating the American model as an unchallenged global norm.
Both Beijing and Moscow now seek a return to the rules of the international order institutionalized at the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which apportioned spheres of influence among the principal victors—the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. With Britain sidelined, seen by both Beijing and Moscow as a power that has lost its great-power stature militarily, geopolitically, and economically, China aspires to take its place. This ambition explains London’s deep anxiety over any potential U.S.–Russia rapprochement that might extend to Beijing, paving the way for a new tripartite order of Washington–Beijing–Moscow—an arrangement that would exclude the United Kingdom from global power calculations altogether. This perspective helps explain Britain’s unprecedented decision, since the Cold War, to openly diverge from Washington’s policies, even defying them by reactivating coordination with Europe despite Brexit, spearheading the creation of a “coalition of the willing” intended as an alternative framework to U.S. policy on Ukraine, and forging a European bloc opposed to any Trump-driven settlement of the conflict on terms favorable to Moscow.
Some in the Arab world and in other major regional states of the so-called Global South believe that a multipolar order would serve their interests. In reality, however, such an order—if it were to materialize—would be grounded in the division of influence among three major powers: the United States, China, and Russia, with Europe playing only a subsidiary role. In that scenario, these states would find themselves tethered to one pole or another. The Arab world in particular would likely remain within the Western sphere, as Moscow and Beijing’s overriding priority is to consolidate control over their immediate neighborhoods. Influence in the Arab region is, for them, an ancillary gain: desirable if achievable, but dispensable if not. The alternative view—that today’s disorder provides rising middle powers with valuable room for maneuver—may have tactical merit, but it carries enormous strategic risk. Entrenching such disorder could institutionalize a world defined by “the right of conquest” and a weaponized global economy. As Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman recently warned in the pages of ==Foreign Affairs==, these trends threaten to revive the brutal practices that scarred the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Despite its flaws, the rules-based order (RBO) remains the best option for humanity at large—and especially for the Arab world and the Global South. It requires genuine structural reforms, which should become the focus of sustained efforts by major, middle, and rising regional powers such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf, Turkey, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, and indeed Europe itself. The rules-based order offers a lifeline: a safer path compared to the medieval logic of raw power or the multipolarity of divided hegemons.
Russia is more likely to embrace this order if its security anxieties are understood apart from Cold War stereotypes or the ideological lenses propagated by Soviet defectors and their intellectual heirs in the West. Today, Russia feels vulnerable—caught between the demographic, military, and economic weight of China on one side, and the cohesive military-economic bloc of the European Union and NATO on the other—leaving it exposed to a dual threat. These conditions drive Moscow to seek a security buffer beyond its borders. China, by contrast, appears more resistant to accommodating the rules-based order. Yet should the Arab world and other Global South actors forge a consensus with Russia, and should Europe and the United States demonstrate a more humane approach—eschewing the condescension embodied in former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell’s notorious “garden versus jungle” metaphor, and moving beyond Trump-era transactionalism—Beijing would be hard-pressed to stand in opposition to a broad international consensus. Most likely, it would eventually comply with security and arms-control agreements akin to those once negotiated between Washington and Moscow, while preserving free trade as humanity’s greatest economic achievement. But this freedom should not be mistaken for unregulated liberalization; rather, it must rest on fairer terms that acknowledge the transition of some states from developing to advanced industrial economies and distinguish between high-income and low-income countries.
The struggle for a reformed rules-based order—correcting its deficiencies, compelling the West led by the United States to abandon illusions of exceptionalism and unchallenged dominance, and curbing double standards in addressing crises, where Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is denounced as a brutal invasion while Israeli actions in Gaza are tacitly supported despite international warnings of famine—will not produce a utopia. Yet it may still spare humanity from descending into a brutal order governed by raw power, where the fates of nations and peoples are held hostage to the rivalries of great powers.
