Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst

The photograph that Western agencies distributed from Bishkek arrived with its meaning already fixed. Above an image of the Kyrgyz president escorting China’s Xi Jinping past an honor guard, the caption read COUNTER US POWER. The image itself showed a familiar diplomatic ritual, two heads of state walking a red carpet. The caption supplied what the image did not: an adversary, a purpose, and the direction in which a Western audience was meant to orient its concern. The gap between the neutral picture and the loaded words is a useful place to begin, because it is where the framing of the entire summit was decided before a single line of analysis was written.

On Sept. 1 the Shanghai Cooperation Organization marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in the Kyrgyz capital, with ten member states, more than a dozen heads of government, and the secretary-general of the United Nations among the guests. Most European and North American outlets carried a single Agence France-Presse dispatch, which described the bloc as one that seeks to be a counterinfluence to the West. France 24 reported that the Russian and Chinese leaders had traveled to Central Asia to counter Western influence. British coverage of an earlier session of the same body called it a secretive summit of an “axis of upheaval.” In each formulation the West occupies the grammatical center of a meeting it did not attend. The organization is assigned no purpose that can be stated without reference to Washington and Brussels. It is defined entirely as a reaction to them.

Türkiye is the hole in the caption

The framing meets its first and largest obstacle in the guest list, and specifically in the presence of a NATO member at the table. Türkiye holds the status of dialogue partner in the organization, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has attended its summits in person. A Western reader told that the SCO is an axis assembled against his alliance is not encouraged to ask why a founding member of that alliance keeps a seat in it. The same AFP dispatch that calls the bloc a counterinfluence to the West records, several paragraphs below its lead, that the organization now counts fifteen dialogue partners including Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Türkiye belongs to NATO. Saudi Arabia and Qatar host the forward headquarters of United States Central Command and the largest American air base in the region. An organization built to oppose the West does not assemble this membership, and a caption that calls it one survives only for readers who do not reach the paragraph that contradicts it.

Türkiye’s position is the part of the picture that Western coverage is least equipped to interpret, because the prevailing map allows for only two teams. Ankara is not choosing the SCO over NATO. It is doing something the two-team model cannot represent, treating the organization as a venue to be worked, neither joining it nor shunning it. A state that keeps its treaty commitments in the Atlantic while cultivating standing in a Eurasian security forum is hedging against a future in which the Atlantic order no longer sets the terms alone. That behavior is legible from Istanbul and largely illegible from the outlets that produced the Bishkek caption, which is why their account of the summit reads, from this vantage, as a description of a world that has already begun to pass.

The vocabulary and its tell

The language of the coverage repays close attention. The recurring terms are “counter,” “against,” “anti-Western,” and “axis,” a vocabulary of opposition that grants the bloc no content of its own. The word “axis” carries the heaviest freight. It imports the moral architecture of the Second World War, and more recently of the “axis of evil,” and lays it over a trade-and-security forum whose membership includes a NATO government. The transfer is performed a few lines from the facts that make it untenable, and the proximity is the tell.

There is a structural habit worth naming as well. The AFP copy notes that the organization’s founding declaration describes it as not an alliance directed against other states, and then, in the following sentence, observes that the Russian and Chinese leaders have delivered anti-Western speeches at past summits. The self-description is admitted and immediately withdrawn. The skepticism applied here is selective. When a NATO communiqué describes the alliance as defensive, the same wire services do not append a reminder of its record of offensive operations. The doubt switches on for adversaries and off for partners, a selection that rests on assumption and not on evidence. Coverage outside the Western agency system handles the same material with a cooler hand. Al Jazeera quoted a regional analyst describing the SCO simply as not a coherent anti-Western alliance, a plain and accurate line that appears in no Western headline, because it does not fit the caption.

A bloc that grew in proportion to the pressure

The organization’s history explains more than its rhetoric does. It began in 1996 as a border-demarcation arrangement among China, Russia and three Central Asian republics, a technical body concerned with the settlement of frontier lines. It gained momentum in close proportion to the pressure applied to its members from the West. India and Pakistan acceded in 2017. Iran was admitted after years of sanctions had made membership useful to Tehran and to the bloc alike. The roster of dialogue partners expanded toward fifteen as American secondary sanctions and tariffs demonstrated to a widening circle of governments the value of a forum beyond Washington’s reach. At Bishkek the rotating chairmanship passed to Pakistan, another long-standing American security partner. The pattern is consistent: the organization has grown less by recruitment than by the steady conversion of states that Western policy has pressed toward the exits.

Iran offers the sharpest illustration. President Masoud Pezeshkian took his seat in Bishkek six months into a war with the United States. A week before the summit, the U.S. Treasury announced a sanctions campaign it named Operation Economic Outcast, extending secondary sanctions to five further sectors of the Iranian economy, aviation, digital assets, gold, shipping and technology, and warning in a separate alert that any party of any nationality paying Iran for passage through the Strait of Hormuz risked U.S. penalty. Secondary sanctions do not fall on the target alone. They fall on any government or firm that trades with the target, which makes them an instruction directed at the sovereign decisions of other states, enforced by the threat of exclusion from the dollar system. China, the largest purchaser of Iranian oil, responded that it would firmly defend its interests. A measure aimed at Tehran functions as a demand issued to Beijing, and Beijing traveled to Bishkek. India provides a second instance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a scheduled bilateral with President Vladimir Putin days after Washington imposed a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods over New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil. The instrument intended to discipline India accompanied it to the very table it was meant to keep it from.

The divisions are real, and they are the point

An accurate account of the summit requires equal candor about the organization’s limits, and candor here is what separates analysis from a mirror image of the framing under examination. The SCO is not a unified bloc. Russia and China compete for influence across the same Central Asian ground. India and China share a contested and periodically violent border, which is why Modi and Xi appeared on the same platform but arranged no formal bilateral. India and Pakistan hold membership in the same body while remaining adversaries. A proposed development bank has been discussed for years without becoming a functioning institution. The 40 percent of humanity the organization claims to encompass is a measure of scale, not of common purpose.

These divisions do not rescue the Western frame. They sharpen the judgment it obscures. Agreement among these governments does not exist, and it is not what makes the summit notable. What makes it notable is the preference of states that distrust one another to manage their disputes inside a structure the United States does not control. The arbitration of one it does control is the option they declined. That preference is a heavier comment on the standing of the American-led order than any declaration could produce. It requires no alliance and no shared ideology. It requires only that a critical mass of states has concluded that the Western order is something to work around, and that the working-around now proceeds openly, at the level of heads of state, beneath a caption instructing Western readers to see a hostile axis where a hedging one stands.

The shrinking center

The phrase that recurs whenever Western officials describe global opinion is “the international community.” Bishkek is a reminder of how much that phrase conceals. The community it invokes is a specific and diminishing set of capitals that grew accustomed, during the brief period of unchallenged American primacy after 1991, to mistaking its own consensus for the consensus of humanity. The summit in the Kyrgyz capital assembled a NATO member, a Western-courted partner in India, the Gulf security clients of the United States, and the two most heavily sanctioned states on earth, and it did so under the observation of the United Nations secretary-general. No description of that room as an anti-Western axis can be reconciled with its composition. The description persists because it serves the audience it is written for, offering a shrinking center the reassurance that it remains the fixed point around which the world still turns.

From Ankara, and from the wider vantage of states that have watched the post-1991 order lose its monopoly, the reassurance reads as a lagging indicator. The two men in the photograph were walking to lunch. The power that could not prevent the lunch, could not hold its Indian partner at a distance from Moscow, could not isolate the state it is fighting, and could not keep the head of the United Nations from attending, is nonetheless assured by its own press that the summit was organized around opposition to it. The more accurate reading is the one Türkiye’s own conduct already reflects. The world is not arranging itself against the West so much as arranging itself without waiting for it, and the caption over the photograph is the last place that development will be admitted.

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.

Following Israel’s strike on the Abu al-Duhur Airbase in Syria on August 18, relations between Damascus and Tel Aviv have reportedly broken down. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan Sheybani announced in the wake of the attack that all communication with Israel had been severed. “We anticipate that talks regarding a security agreement with Israel will resume in the near future. At present, we do not trust Israel. Our priority is the cessation of attacks against our sovereign territory,” he stated.

The minister’s utter helplessness reverberates through his words.

The post-Assad regime in Damascus ascended to power on the back of American and Israeli support. Consequently, the United States and Israel stand as the primary arbiters of Syria’s destiny. It is precisely for this reason that the Damascus administration has abandoned all claims to its rights over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights—virtually resigning itself to the occupation and striking it from the agenda. Upon seizing power, it pledged immediate fealty to Washington: “We will pose no security threat to Israel, and we shall thwart anyone who attempts to do so.” It operated under the delusion that it could forge a functional relationship with Israel—led by Netanyahu, a perpetrator of genocide and a convicted war criminal—by appeasing it through concessions. It was gravely mistaken.

For Israel currently holds sway over a substantial portion of Syrian territory. It establishes military outposts across the country, carries out airstrikes at will, and deploys its armor unimpeded.

Similarly, the Israeli-backed PYD-YPG terrorist organization exercises control over an expanse of land vastly disproportionate to its actual strength—territory exceptionally rich in energy resources—solely through the patronage of the US and Israel. Leveraging that very support, it wrenches outsized political, military, and administrative concessions from the Damascus government.

Evidently, the displacement of Iranian and Russian influence in Syria by that of the United States and Israel has brought profound satisfaction to certain circles in our country. Yet what these quarters fail to see, refuse to see, or cannot bring themselves to acknowledge even when confronted with it, is this fundamental reality: Washington envisions a Middle Eastern order wherein Israel commands supremacy, projects expanding power, and dictates terms, while Türkiye raises no objection whatsoever and instead accommodates itself to this architecture. To compel Türkiye’s acquiescence, the US is actively deploying its vast and varied arsenal of leverage.

Lest we forget, the United States had already brought several Arab states to the desired threshold through the Abraham Accords. That process was ultimately intended to culminate in the open, formal consecration of the de facto rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. That trajectory has not been abandoned; it has merely been placed on ice for the time being. Behind the scenes, Washington maintains an intense flurry of diplomacy with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. Once the wider Middle East, the Islamic world, and the Arab sphere have been fully conditioned to accept the ongoing reality in Gaza—and once the oppressed, grieving, and beleaguered Palestinian people have been driven entirely from their ancestral homeland—this shelved agenda will be revived.

We know that the Zionist establishment in Israel, aligned with American imperialism, chose not to strike Iran first before confronting the Iranian-backed Axis of Resistance, the Shia Crescent, and Tehran’s proxy forces. It executed the exact inverse: it struck first at Syria, at Hamas in Palestine, and at Hezbollah in Lebanon. Only after eroding their efficacy did it turn its sights directly upon Iran. In Syria, the previous regime held out far longer than anticipated—enduring for 13 years and 8 months. As a consequence of the civil war that erupted in March 2011, Assad was ultimately overthrown, finding refuge in Moscow.

When 61 years of Baathist rule, including 53 years of the Assad dynasty, came to a close in December 2024, the emergent regime in Damascus wasted no time in pledging its allegiance to the United States, to Israel, and to the Arab states that backed it, chief among them Saudi Arabia. It proclaimed that it would erect a bulwark against Iran, raise not the slightest objection to Israel, and execute Washington’s directives to the letter.

A broad demographic in Türkiye that welcomed this turn of events swiftly began asserting—under the banner of religious and sectarian fraternity—that this transition worked entirely in Türkiye’s favor. The sheer fallacy of this premise was exposed in short order.

And how was it exposed?

It was exposed by Israel immediately laying the groundwork for a Syria partitioned into four enclaves (Druze, Kurdish, Alawite, and Arab). It was exposed by the renewed revelation that the US-Israel axis intends, sooner or later, to carve up Syria along sectarian and ethnic fault lines—mirroring the precedents of Lebanon and Iraq—in a country roughly composed of 70 percent Sunni Arabs, 10 percent Alawites, 10 percent Kurds, 5 percent Christians, and 5 percent Druze and Turkmens.

It was exposed by the fact that the PYD-YPG terrorist organization, even if denied the entirety of its territorial ambitions, has managed to secure a portion of its political, military, and administrative demands through US–Israeli patronage, thereby being permitted to preserve its existence by settling for a reduced perimeter.

And it was exposed by the resilience of Iran, which, despite suffering immense exhaustion and attrition in the face of American and Israeli aggression, refused to capitulate and maintained its resistance. It was exposed by the failure of the US-Israel tandem to achieve its overarching political and military objectives in Iran, bringing to the fore once again the undeniable truth that Iran possesses an institutionalized state tradition, a national consciousness, and an armed force of a depth and resilience that defy any comparison to Libya, Iraq, or Syria.