KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
A week ahead of the NATO summit in Washington, leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) gathered in Astana, Kazakhstan for the group’s annual meeting. Already one of the world’s largest regional organizations, the SCO added Belarus to the bloc at this year’s summit. Established by China and Russia in 2001, the SCO was originally focused on security and economic issues in Central Asia. But amid growing division and competition with the West, Beijing and Moscow increasingly position the growing bloc as a platform to promote an alternative to the U.S.-led order. Still, the organization’s expansion has been met with friction by some members.
Even as Russia’s war on Ukraine grinds on, the SCO summit saw little public discussion of the conflict, with no mention of it in the joint statement coming out of Astana. Meanwhile, at the NATO summit this week, the Ukraine war was front and center. China’s role in supplying moral and materiel support for Russia’s war received significant attention in Washington — with the alliance’s summit communique calling Beijing a “decisive enabler” of Moscow — further highlighting the growing divide between the West and China and Russia.
USIP’s Carla Freeman, Mary Glantz and Daniel Markey look at the takeaways from this year’s summit for China, Russia and India.
Freeman: Assessments of what this year’s SCO heads of state meeting mean for China have been mixed. Some observers see the SCO as diminished in importance for China given internal disagreements — not least India’s tense relationships with China and Pakistan — that limit opportunities for consensus within the grouping. However, Xi Jinping’s activities at the summit suggest that Beijing still sees the SCO as a valuable diplomatic platform, particularly for promoting Eurasian connectivity through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and using attention generated by the growing group to challenge the United States’ global influence.
China assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at this summit and will thus play the role of bringing on board Belarus, whose accession this year follows Iran’s in 2023 and strengthens the SCO’s Eurasian geographic identity. Both Belarus and Iran have aligned with China and Russia at the United Nations and helped amplify the Chinese and Russian critique of the U.S.-led international order.
For China, groups like the SCO and BRICS are a vehicle to further Xi’s vision of an international order guided by Chinese principles.
Despite friction over the group’s expansion — particularly among Central Asian states concerned that the SCO is moving beyond its traditional focus on the region — the SCO seems poised to expand. This could even include NATO member, Turkey, which has been a SCO dialogue partner since 2012. Future candidates could also include key Arab states like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Like the growing BRICS bloc, though, critics charge that these expanding blocs are more about size than substance. But for China, groups like the SCO and BRICS — despite Beijing’s professed “anti-bloc” position — are a vehicle to further Xi’s vision of an international order guided by Chinese principles.
Xi’s remarks in Astana suggest that China will make use of its SCO leadership to aggrandize this alternative vision encapsulated in his global frameworks like the Global Security Initiative. The SCO appears fertile ground. Last week’s SCO declaration condemned the "unilateral and unrestricted build-up" of missile defense systems in what is widely seen as a thinly veiled critique of the United States. The declaration also did not mention Russia's war in Ukraine.
Xi laid out an ambitious agenda for China’s SCO leadership and said the organization would expand activities in a number of areas, including convening a political parties forum and using the SCO to promote settling financial transaction in local currencies — thus reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar — and to develop a “financing platform” within the group. China also appears intent on developing what Xi called a “universal center” for security for the SCO with “branches” aimed at addressing “the challenges and threats” to the organization’s members through expanding intelligence sharing and counter-narcotics cooperation, among other things.
Amid disagreements within the SCO over permitting the Taliban government to observe SCO meetings, China has urged increasing engagement with Kabul. Xi laid the groundwork for greater engagement with Afghanistan, which he described as “indispensable” for regional security.
Xi also made state visits to Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, both important BRI partners and recipients of Chinese security exports. Traditionally, Central Asia has been one of Russia’s most stalwart spheres of influence. But with Moscow occupied with its war on Ukraine, China has become increasingly influential.
Glantz: While Russian press gave due coverage to the summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech, and the accession of newest SCO member Belarus, Moscow’s attention was clearly focused elsewhere.
In its approach to the SCO summit, the Kremlin focused on its big-picture foreign policy goal: creating a new world order. In a meeting with Xi in Astana, Putin called the SCO “one of the key pillars of a fair, multipolar world order.” The SCO was touted variously as either an emerging security counterweight to NATO or a representative of the new, multipolar world order the Kremlin so strongly desires. To that end, various analyses in the Russian press lumped together the SCO and the BRICs in their discussion.
But the summit also served Putin’s narrower foreign policy goals. Most importantly, it was his opportunity to show the West that despite being charged as a war criminal, he is still able to travel and meet with foreign leaders, including NATO-member Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who was at the summit). Beyond his own personal ability to engage with world leaders, Putin wants to show that Western efforts to isolate Russia diplomatically are failing.
Putin and the Kremlin also used the summit as an opportunity to address concerns that the Russian-Chinese relationship may falter over their relations with the former Soviet states of Central Asia. Russia’s war against Ukraine has arguably lessened Russia’s influence in the region, creating a vacuum China is ready to fill.
Indeed, the bilateral relationship between Russia and China was probably the most important element of the summit for the Russian side. Putin’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping was a focus and was treated largely as a follow-up to Putin’s successful visit to China in May. In the meeting with Xi, Putin said that bilateral ties are “experiencing the best period in their history.”
The bilateral relationship between Russia and China was probably the most important element of the summit for the Russian side.
The Russian newspaper Nezavisamaya Gazeta stressed that the summit was preceded by a joint Russian-Chinese exercise on their Amur River border and that conversations were largely a continuation of the Russian-Chinese conversations in May.
However, while Moscow’s attention at the summit was on global politics, Russia’s international image, and Russian-Chinese relations, Russia’s war against Ukraine was the real specter looming over it all. The same Nezavisamaya Gazeta article cited above speculated whether China and/or Turkey used their private meetings with Putin to offer solutions to the Ukraine war. Regardless of what happened in private, Putin’s public statement made it clear that some SCO countries had suggested resolutions to the Russians. Indeed, Putin’s press conference at the SCO summit with Russian journalists featured numerous questions on the topic.
Markey: India is the SCO’s most ambivalent member. Last summer, New Delhi hosted the annual SCO summit but at the last minute decided to downgrade it from an in-person gathering to a virtual affair. This year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to skip the meeting altogether and to send his foreign minister instead. The timing of this year’s summit, weeks after Modi’s re-election at a time of domestic political jockeying, offered a polite excuse for the prime minister’s absence, but it was hardly a convincing one.
New Delhi warily views the SCO as a China-dominated platform and, given the tensions that have defined China-India relations since their bloody border skirmishes of 2020, Modi has zero interest in lending Indian support or his own political capital to any China-led diplomatic initiatives. Still, India’s SCO membership offers New Delhi a degree of influence over the group’s statements and a means to block actions that would directly harm Indian interests.
India joined the SCO in 2017 at the same time as Pakistan, believing that to stand aloof would give Islamabad an uncontested platform to criticize India. That concern clearly held merit; if Modi had attended this year’s summit he would have endured Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s diatribe laced with indirect accusations of Indian state-sponsored terrorism.
Observers should not interpret Modi’s absence from the Astana summit as any critique of Russia.
India is also ambivalent about the SCO’s thinly veiled anti-Western posture championed by China, Russia and the SCO’s newest members, Belarus and Iran, if marginally less-so by the group’s Central Asian participants. India characterizes its own stance as “non-Western” rather than “anti-Western,” and over the past decade Modi’s government has busily cultivated closer strategic and economic ties with the United States, Japan and Western Europe.
Yet observers should not interpret Modi’s absence from the Astana summit as any critique of Russia, given that Modi flew to Moscow the very next week and greeted Putin with a warm bear hug just as NATO leaders met in Washington. More than anything, Modi’s snub of the Astana summit mirrors Xi’s snub of the G20 summit that India hosted last September. It is, above all, a reflection of the poor state of India-China relations and a reminder of how those tensions also shape a wider set of geopolitical developments.