The SCO Summit Shows How US Pressure Is Forging a Multipolar World

The Room Where It Happens

Twenty-five years after its founding as a border-management project among five post-Soviet states, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has become something far more consequential than anyone imagined in 1996. This week in Bishkek, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Vladimir Putin are sharing the same stage again — a sight that would have been almost unthinkable a decade ago.

What makes this gathering matter is not the photo opportunity itself but what it reveals about the architecture of the next international order. The SCO is no longer just a security forum. It is becoming a parallel system — one that offers alternative trade routes, alternative finance, and an alternative narrative about how the world should be governed. And the accelerant driving its growth is not Chinese soft power alone. It is American policy.

Trump’s Tariff War Did What Sanctions Could Not

Here is the uncomfortable truth for Washington: Donald Trump’s unilateral tariffs and the broader erosion of rules-based economic governance are pushing countries that might otherwise stay in the American orbit toward alternatives. Alejandro Reyes, a politics professor at the University of Hong Kong, put it plainly. “The significance this year is that current US policies, especially with regard to Iran and continuing US tariff and sanctions action, may be making that hedging more attractive and necessary.”

Last year, Trump imposed tariffs on Indian goods. New Delhi responded by doing what New Delhi has always done best — finding room to manoeuvre. Modi visited Beijing. Border tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, which had escalated after the deadly 2020 skirmish, began a slow thaw. The SCO summit in Bishkek is the latest visible test of whether that warming trend holds.

China and Russia want the SCO to become an instrument for building a less US-dominated order. India does not share that ambition outright. But India does want a world in which Washington cannot dictate its foreign-policy choices. That shared desire — however loosely defined — is what makes the grouping expanding faster than anyone expected.

India’s Double Game

Modi’s presence in Bishkek is not a signal that India is joining a China-Russia axis. It is a signal that India sees itself as a swing state in a fragmented system. New Delhi belongs to the Quad, the informal security dialogue with Japan, Australia and the United States designed to counter Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific. It also buys the bulk of its defence equipment from Russia. It recently resumed high-level border talks with China. It has refused to condemn Israel’s war on Iran at SCO gatherings, breaking with the bloc’s consensus.

India’s stated priorities within the SCO are “security, connectivity and opportunity” — a formulation that deliberately avoids any language of alignment. That is the point. India wants access to Central Asia, continued relations with Moscow, and a mechanism for managing its fractious relationship with Beijing. It wants those things while maintaining its partnership with Washington. The SCO gives it the platform to do so without seeming to choose sides.

This is strategic autonomy in practice, not theory. And it is a model that other Global South countries are watching closely.

The Infrastructure of an Alternative Order

While the rhetoric at the summit will focus on peace and development, the real work is happening in the details. Last year in Tianjin, members agreed to establish an SCO Development Bank. This year, Kyrgyz officials have made moving that bank forward a top priority, along with an SCO Investment Fund and an SCO Development Fund. None of these announcements are guaranteed, but the fact that they are being discussed at all marks a shift.

On connectivity, the group is pushing the International North-South Transport Corridor — a 7,200-kilometre route linking St Petersburg to Mumbai through Iran and the Gulf. With the Strait of Hormuz paralysed by the Iran war and attacks in the Red Sea disrupting shipping, that corridor is no longer speculative. It is urgent.

Russia and India are also expected to discuss India’s use of the Northern Sea Route through the Arctic. China recently announced its own shipping lane through the same passage. The SCO is meanwhile planning a network of Silk Road stations to support freight traffic across Eurasia. These are not symbolic gestures. They are the foundations of a trade architecture that operates outside Western control.

The Limits of Cohesion

It would be a mistake to read the SCO as a unified anti-Western bloc. The differences among its members are too deep. India and China still dispute their border. India and Pakistan blame each other for cross-border terrorism. Russia and China have a complicated relationship that Moscow resents becoming subordinated to Beijing. Turkey, a dialogue partner, is a NATO member.

On Ukraine, Russia has pulled most SCO members toward its position, but India has insisted on a balancer role — seeking peace while continuing to buy Russian oil. On Iran, the bloc condemned the US-Israel war in March, but India refused to endorse the joint statement last June. These are not minor disagreements. They reveal a group that can speak with one voice on broad principles but fractures on specifics.

That fragility is also its strength. The SCO has never claimed to be a military alliance like NATO. It is a venue where countries with competing interests demonstrate that alternatives exist. In a volatile order dominated by two great powers — China and the United States — that message has enormous appeal.

The American Blind Spot

Washington’s response to the SCO has been uneven. The Trump administration has called BRICS “anti-American” and dismissed Global South institutions as threats to US economic dominance. Yet it has also deepened engagement with Central Asian states through the C5 mechanism, hosting Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen and Uzbeks in Washington in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to visit the region later this year. Kazakhstan has joined the Abraham Accords, becoming the first Central Asian state to recognise Israel.

These moves matter. But they are defensive. They aim to keep Central Asian countries from fully aligning with Beijing and Moscow, not to offer a positive vision of cooperation. Meanwhile, the SCO is offering precisely that — an architecture for trade, finance and security that does not require alignment with Washington.

Manoj Kewalramani of the Takshashila Institution noted that Central Asian countries are adopting a diversified diplomatic approach, balancing between China, Russia and the United States. That diversification is a direct reflection of the limitations of American disruptive foreign policy. When the US applies tariffs unilaterally and treats alliances as transactional, other countries look elsewhere.

What Comes Next

The Bishkek summit will produce statements about sustainable peace and development. It may or may not deliver concrete agreements on the development bank or transport corridors. But the deeper story is already written. The SCO now represents 43 per cent of the world’s population and 23 per cent of global GDP. It has absorbed Iran and Belarus. It counts fourteen dialogue partners, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt.

For China, the SCO is institution-building on a civilisational scale — a way to convene Eurasia around an agenda of connectivity and development while promoting multipolarity. For Russia, it is proof that it is not isolated. For India, it is one of several overlapping platforms through which it maximises its agency. For the United States, it is a reminder that pressure without partnership produces convergence among countries that would rather not be classified as enemies.

Washington should not fear the SCO as a consolidated anti-American coalition. Reyes is right about that. But it should fear what the SCO represents — a world where American economic and geopolitical pressure creates the very alliances it claims to oppose. The summit in Bishkek is not the birth of a new Cold War bloc. It is the gradual construction of a new normal. And the ordinary countries of Eurasia are building it themselves.