Xi and Putin try to bolster their Eurasian bloc as a counterweight to Nato
The west needs to take note as Russian and Chinese efforts to establish a Eurasian counter-weight to Nato gain (some) traction.
Ahead of Nato’s Washington summit July 9-11, 2024, much attention was rightly paid to Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine. Undoubtedly, this poses the most significant immediate challenge to the security of the alliance’s 32 member countries with a combined population of one billion people. Yet beyond the headlines of the war in Ukraine an even more significant challenge is looming—the reconfiguration of the existing international order with a China-Russia led alliance pitted directly against the collective west.
The latest manifestation of this shift was the Astana, Kazakhstan, summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) on July 3-4, 2024. With its origins in the 1996 Shanghai Five mechanism—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—the SCO was formally established five years later with the addition of Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan joined in 2017, Iran in 2023 and Belarus was admitted at the Astana summit last week. Afghanistan and Mongolia have observer status in the SCO. Nato member Turkey is one of 14 so-called dialogue partners across Asia, the Middle East, and the south Caucasus.
There are clear signs that China and Russia have ambitions to turn the SCO into a more formidable counterweight to the west. Rather than focusing on the range of some 25 documents and declarations adopted at the summit, most of which are at best statements of intent, the two key leaders’ speeches and press statements tell a better story of why the SCO should be taken more seriously.
Russian president Vladimir Putin used his opening comments at his meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to proclaim “that Russia-China relations, our comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation, are going through the best period in their history.” While not name-checking the “no-limits” partnership that Beijing and Moscow committed to in February 2022 just before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Xi gave Putin his strong backing, noting that Russia and China “should keep upholding the original aspiration of lasting friendship … and make tireless efforts to safeguard our legitimate rights and interests and safeguard the basic norms governing international relations.”
In his address at the SCO summit, Putin expressed his belief that a “multipolar world has become a reality” and “that the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS are the main pillars of this new world order. These associations are powerful drivers of global development processes and the establishment of genuine multipolarity.” This was echoed in Xi’s statement when the Chinese president commented that “under the new circumstances of the new era, the vision of our Organization is widely popular, and that SCO member states have friends across the world.” Xi went on to say that the SCO needs “to have a complete set of measures under the security cooperation mechanisms, because more lines of defence will give us more protection.” This is perhaps the clearest indication yet that Russian and Chinese views on the SCO as a future counterweight to Nato are beginning to converge.
There are also other (not so) subtle signs that Russia and China are using different tools to strengthen their relative position vis-à-vis the west by trying to weaken Nato and drive a wedge between the US and European members and promote relations with more Russia- and China-friendly member states, such as Hungary and Slovakia. Of even greater significance, especially for Nato, is the growing relationship between Türkiye and China: at the Astana summit, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met with Xi and expressed an interest in joining the SCO. At the same time Erdoğan and Xi emphasised how much their respective views of the world are aligned on issues from the war in Ukraine to the crisis in the Middle East.
Xi and Putin both emphasized the idea of Eurasia in their official statements, and for both of them this means reducing the role of the United States in the region. For Putin the main pathway there is “a new system of bilateral and multilateral guarantees of collective security in Eurasia” and “to gradually phase out the military presence of external powers in the Eurasian region.” For Xi, the route is more an economic one, focused on strengthening trade and infrastructure connections between China and the EU, primarily by promoting his Belt and Road Initiative and its transport corridors—as he did during his official state visit to Kazakhstan on the eve of the SOC summit.
Yet, it is not clear that Putin and Xi will succeed in their efforts to turn the SCO into a weightier security competitor to Nato. The SCO lacks the collective defence commitments of Nato’s Article 5. Its internal structures are weak, and the only institutionalized security task is fighting terrorism, assigned to the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (SCO RATS). The key concern for the SCO here remains Afghanistan, something also highlighted in remarks delivered by the UN Secretary General António Guterres at the SCO summit. However, it is also noteworthy that within a day of formally joining the SCO, Belarus hosted joint drills with Chinese soldiers in the SCO RATS framework.
The SCO is also plagued by internal discord between key members of the organization, such as between India and Pakistan, including over Kashmir, and between India and China over their border. That not all is well in the SCO was particularly evident in newly-elected Indian prime minister Narendra Modi only sending his foreign minister to Astana to deliver a thinly-veiled swipe at his two neighbours.
Yet, as Nato leaders were gathering in Washington for their summit, Modi went to Moscow to cement India’s political and economic ties with Russia. Modi’s bilateral meetings with Putin in the Kremlin rather than at the SCO summit in Astana also reflect likely Indian concerns over growing ties between Moscow and Beijing. India and the then Soviet Union had been allies during the Cold War and, while officially takin a neutral stance, Moscow supported India during its border dispute with China in 1959 and the subsequent Sino-Indian border war in 1962. With tensions along the Sino-Indian border far from resolved, Russia’s increasing dependence on China potentially weakens India’s position in the continuing stand-off.
These and other limitations notwithstanding, it would be a mistake for the west to dismiss the SCO as insignificant. By territorial expanse and population size far larger than Nato, the SCO is anchored in Asia, but with Russia and Belarus it also has a significant footprint in Europe. Its combined GDP, albeit mostly driven by China, is around 40% of the world’s.
Militarily and politically, to be sure, this is nowhere near similar yet to the situation in the heydays of the cold war when the west faced the Moscow-led Warsaw pact and a loose coalition of Kremlin-aligned proxies in what we would today refer to as the Global South. But as China and Russia become more closely aligned, their influence across Eurasia cannot but grow and expand—unless the west takes a page out of Moscow’s and Beijing’s playbook and actively seeks to divide them, rather than driving them ever closer together.
This is an updated and expanded version of an article for The Conversation.
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