In Bishkek, the ‘new order’ gathers to see whether it can become real

Dr. Ahmed Moustafa, Director & Founder, Asia Center for Studies & Translation, Egypt

Ten heads of states and governments, a cast of partners spanning half of Eurasia meet in the Kyrgyz capital promising a world beyond Western dominance. The summit’s quiet battles  over money, media and the club’s own contradictions  will matter more than its communiqué.

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan: This is a city that understands great powers. Soviet engineers drew its street grid. Its economy runs substantially on money earned by Kyrgyz workers in Russia. And when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization holds its annual summit here Aug. 31st to Sept. 1st 2026 the mountain-ringed capital will become, for 48 hours, the seat of this era’s most consequential open question: What does the world look like after Western dominance?

What will the world look like beyond Western dominance?

The participant list alone is enough to illustrate the scale of the stakes. Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian will lead the SCO’s ten full members, representing roughly 40 percent of humanity. They include India and Pakistan, Belarus, and the four Central Asian republics, led by Kazakhstan and its President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, alongside dialogue partners whose presence stretches from Cairo to the Gulf and all the way to Ankara.

No Western institution has ever had to accommodate such a company under one roof. No American administration has had to watch it from the outside.

On paper, the agenda is deliberately unremarkable: counterterrorism cooperation through the organization’s Tashkent-based coordinating body, Afghanistan’s instability, trade facilitation, energy, digital development and the ritual invocation of the “Shanghai Spirit”  mutual trust, mutual benefit, respect among civilizations. The organizing principle, as ever, is consensus, which is another way of saying nothing said in the plenary hall will offend anyone.

The real summit will happen in the margins, in three conversations the final declaration will not be recorded.

The first is about money and how to move it where Washington cannot reach it

No communiqué will use the word “sanctions.” Yet diplomats from three member states, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe preparatory talks, said the financial file has consumed more negotiating time than any other: the long-delayed SCO Development Bank, given fresh impetus at last year’s Tianjin summit; the expansion of local-currency trade; the stitching together of national payment systems that would let members settle accounts without touching the Belgium-based SWIFT network  and therefore without touching U.S. financial law.

The urgency is not abstract. Russia’s central bank operates under sweeping penalties. Iran has been locked out of the dollar system for a generation. Even India, a Western partner, buys Russian oil in non-dollar currencies to keep its options open. Tariffs and secondary sanctions have turned “financial inclusiveness,” in the organization’s diplomatese, into the summer’s quiet rallying cry.

The obstacles are equally concrete. The development bank has been discussed for more than a decade without being built, partly because every founding member wants it capitalized, headquartered and denominated on its own terms. “Nobody in that room is against de-dollarization,” said one economist who advises a member-state government. “Everybody in that room is against a bank China controls.”

The second conversation is about the United States  absent, and everywhere

The months before the summit have seen a burst of American diplomacy conducted largely through intermediaries: reported contacts between the CIA director and Russian intelligence; a Pakistani army chief’s travels to Tehran; Gulf foreign ministers, and on one reading the Jordanian monarch, carrying messages to Beijing. Washington describes the traffic as routine management of a complicated world. In the capitals gathering in Bishkek, it is read as something more  evidence that the superpower wants deals.

“Diplomacy by intermediary is either sophistication or exhaustion,” said a European ambassador in Beijing, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The Americans say the first. This summit will spend two days staging the second.”

The calendar sharpens the drama. U.S. midterm elections fall ten weeks after the leaders leave Bishkek, and a president who has staked his brand on ending wars and winning trade disputes has delivered a durable settlement of neither. Advisors openly worry that losing the House would hand the opposition subpoena power  and the machinery of impeachment. Analysts expect the summit’s choreography to be calibrated accordingly: handshakes and family photos projecting an alternative order, measured carefully enough not to hand Washington an enemy at the worst possible moment.

Yet the “declining America” narrative has limits that the summit’s own design reveals. India attends in large part to ensure the organization does not become a Chinese-Russian instrument; it has blocked anti-Western language before and is expected to again. The Central Asian states hedge between Russian security, Chinese financing and Western markets. And every member’s sanctions-resistance project is, in the end, a measure of how much the dollar world still matters.

The third conversation is the one an Egyptian started

Among the more concrete proposals at Tianjin came not from a head of state but from Dr Ahmed Moustafa, an Egyptian scholar and specialist in Asian and Eurasian Affairs, who directs the Cairo-based Asia Center for Studies and Translation, attending as his country an SCO dialogue partner  continues testing the club’s outer circle. His argument: the organization’s deepest deficit is neither military nor financial but informational.

The West’s real advantage runs through its media platforms and professional networks, which shape the aspirations of the very youth the organization claims to speak for. His proposal, a standing, professionally sponsored mechanism binding member-state think tanks and media, and a professional social platform for the region’s young people, “similar to or stronger than LinkedIn”  circulated this summer in summit working groups.

The idea matters less as a business plan than as a diagnosis that Beijing and Moscow have reached by harder roads. For all its demographic weight, the information environment in which the organization’s citizens actually live is dominated by Western platforms and Western languages. Member states have answered with firewalls, copycat apps and an annual media forum. What they have not produced is a digital ecosystem anyone would choose.

Skeptics see a structural reason: professional networks create value through the free flow of information  precisely what several member governments are professionally committed to restricting. “You can build a LinkedIn for the Shanghai Spirit,” one diplomat joked. “Good luck making anyone network in it.”

The last conversation is with itself

The family photo will not show the feuds beneath it: India and China, India and Pakistan, Iran  which left Tianjin with expressions of sympathy and no security guarantees after its war with Israel  and a host government whose national strategy is to be courted by all sides at once. A quarter-century after the organization’s founding, its signature achievement remains the summit itself: proof that rivals can meet, not yet proof that they can build.

“Bishkek will be perfectly staged,” said a veteran analyst of Eurasian institutions. “The question is whether anything survives the motorcades.”

When the leaders fly home over Bishkek on the first of September, they will leave behind banners, a communiqué and a claim: that a new order is not merely desired but operational.

The quieter truth of this summit is that an order cannot be declared into existence. It has to be built  payment system by payment system, platform by platform, in the unphotographed rooms where the Shanghai Spirit is tested against arithmetic.