July 5, 2024
Yesterday saw the conclusion of the two-day summit in Astana, Kazakhstan that brought together the heads of state and government of eight of the nine members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The only missing prime minister was Modi from India, but he will shortly make amends by paying a state visit in Moscow in the coming week. On the positive side of the ledger, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was present to witness the rise of his country from observer status to full membership. Among the several candidate states for entry into this club represented in Astana at the highest level, the most notable was President Erdogan of Turkey.
As for what may have been accomplished in Astana, we can say that at a minimum it provided its participants with the opportunity for confidential bilateral talks at a time that is fraught with risk, given the hearths of war in Ukraine, in Gaza and in the Straits of Taiwan. We know that Vladimir Putin made good use of the visit to line up a full day’s sequence of tête-à-têtes, the most important of which, surely, was with Chinese President Xi.
So far, the texts of official documents signed by the participants have not been published or even described. We may assume these are mostly of an economic nature. However, the news about Belarus gaining full membership and the announcement on the sidelines of the summit by President Xi that China will back SCO host Kazakhstan’s bid to join BRICS give us clear indications that this summit marks a turning point in the repurposing of the SCO from a regional club that ensures security in Central Asia, which was its founding mission in 2001, to become the security provider to the Eurasian continent, and also that it may ultimately, before 2030, merge with BRICS.
At the founding of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001, Islamic terror emanating from Afghanistan was a real threat to the Central Asian region which borders China in the East and Russia in the West and North. This region was central to American and British efforts to weaken the security and divert attention of these two Great Powers from their presence at the global level. Moreover, both terror and the intervention of Western powers complicated efforts of China and Russia to avoid conflict between their own competing political and economic ambitions in the region. Creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization made it possible to manage these challenges effectively.
The durability of this solution was proven most recently, when U.S. efforts by Tony Blinken in the past year and British efforts by Lord Cameron in the past several months to draw the various Central Asian states away from Russia and China and into the U.S.-led world order failed miserably. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan remain solidly embedded in the Russian-Chinese spheres of influence, and Russia’s clear victory in its military confrontation with the Collective West in and over Ukraine has brought to bear on the attractions of the regional status quo the luster of being on the winning side in the worldwide competition. One can put paid to the notion of a revival of the 19th century British-Russian Great Game in this part of the world.
The admission of India and Pakistan in 2017, then, in 2023, the admission of Iran to full membership in the SCO pointed to its repurposing to come. From that point on it represented the lion’s share of the population of Asia. The addition of Belarus now adds a distinctly European dimension to the membershjp, since Belarus, unlike Russia, is strictly a European geographic entity. This suits the new interest of both Russia and China to create a security architecture for the entire Eurasian land mass built upon the nation states residing there and excluding outside powers, most notably the United States.
We are moving on metaphorically from the Mercator Projection maps to a Eurasia-centric map of the word which has no tolerance for Atlanticism. In this new map, the outlying fringes of the world are not somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia: the outlying fringe is Europe, which is reduced to a peninsula at the western extreme of the Eurasian continent. Put in geopolitical terms, Russia and China are presently declaring their own version of the Monroe Doctrine and telling the United States to clear out.
This changed view of the world and of how security can be assured is a direct result of what Russia has experienced these past two years plus of the war in Ukraine.
Back in 2008, in the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been tasked with presenting and negotiating with NATO member states a revised security architecture for Europe that would bring Russia in from the cold. As we know, that initiative was haughtily snubbed by Angela Merkel and by the other decision makers in Europe and North America.
As recently as December 2021, President Putin had attempted to renew dialogue with the United States and with NATO over a revised security architecture for Europe that would move back NATO’s troops and installations from the easternmost member states to where they stood before the NATO expansion of the Clinton years.
The new concept of a Eurasian security architecture that we now see developing within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization marks a break from all those past Russian initiatives and presents the greatest challenge to the existence of NATO at the very time when a possible return of Donald Trump to the presidency puts that organization in jeopardy from withdrawal of support by its single biggest contributor.
In yesterday evening’s panel discussion on Iran’s Press TV, I was given the opportunity to set out key points from the foregoing.
See https://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/130005
Transcript below by a reader
PressTV: 0:01
Joining us now for the program is Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst out of Brussels; and John Bosnitch, journalist and activist and political analyst, joining us out of Fredericton. I’d like to welcome you both, gentlemen, to the program.
I guess we’ll start with you, Mr. Doctorow. Your initial thoughts, I mean the Shanghai Organization, Cooperation Organization, along with BRICS, started off with just a couple or handful of countries, and they’re quickly spreading and ballooning. Now I believe the SCO has nine permanent members and four observer members, but both the SCO and BRICS are rapidly growing. What is the attraction here?
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:42
The attraction is that, well, taking the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, that alone is 40 percent of the human population on Earth. It is 20 percent of the GNP. So, it is a very large part of human activity and a great opportunity for its members to increase their economic activity and the security arrangements with fellow members. Now, the expansion is not chaotic, the expansion is not chance, the expansion of the Shanghai Organization, just like the recent expansion of BRICS, has some logic to it. And the logic, if you project out several years, is that these two organizations will merge.
1:31
The Shanghai Organization was founded as a security organization primarily, with an economic and trade interest as a secondary field of activity. BRICS, on the other hand, was founded primarily as an economic and trading and finance organization. The BRICS has no institutional structure, whereas the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has traditional international type elements to its structure. So these two organizations are complementary, and it’s not at all accidental that Iran is a member of both.
The expansion this year of the Shanghai Organization by the addition of Belarus tells us that this organization is changing its purpose substantially, and that is of course of interest to Iran and the other members. It was created initially, going back to the Chinese and Russian start of it, to look after Central Asia and to provide security provisions for Central Asia in an age of rampant terrorism.
2:56
However, what we see now is a rewriting, a revision of the Shanghai Organization in keeping with what founding members, and particularly Russia, see as the new mission. Russia had been, since 2008, in the presidency of Mr. Medvedev, had been working to rewrite, to revise the security architecture of Europe. And it had proposed to Western Europe and to the States provisions for revising that security architecture.
What we see now is something very different. Russia has moved on as a result of what it has learned in the conflict with NATO over Ukraine, and Russia is now pressing for a pan-Eurasian security architecture. And that is a very interesting proposition, which I imagine will be developed in coming sessions.
PressTV: 3:59
Okay. Thank you, Mr. Doctorow. Mr. John Bosnitch out of New Brunswick, welcome to the conversation here. Now, John, how does the SCO promote a multi-polar world order, and how does that challenge the status quo?
John Bosnitch
Well, as we know, the American, and we basically call it the Anglo-American empire, is slowly collapsing. And in an effort to avoid a direct military confrontation, both China and Russia opted to create self-defensive mechanisms and bilateral trade organizations, which have now spread across, as my fellow commentator today has said, spread across the economic borders and are mixing economy and state security and started with the actions against terrorism.
4:55
But now that the West elevated their operations in Ukraine to the level of state terror, by taking over the government of Ukraine in a coup d’etat, then these organizations have to continue to expand. And it is not coincidental that Belarus– bordering directly on Ukraine and on the conflict region there– that Belarus has now been brought into the fold. This is a clear indication that China has a great interest in protecting Russia’s status in Ukraine and protecting the ethnic Russians of Ukraine.
These developments, done in typical Chinese and Russian fashion– in other words, well thought out, deliberately planned and executed in a calm manner– these developments pose a serious blockade against a continued Western aggression into the entire Eurasian region. And they come exactly in time as we see the West’s failure to take military control over the whole of Ukraine and perhaps they could lose the conflict there completely. So this is a critical parallel development in the interests of peace, and against the continuing military aggression that has been pushed from the West ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
PressTV: 6:19
Thank you, Mr. Bosnitch. And now, Mr Doctorow, back to you. Iran: how can Iran benefit from its SCO membership in a new light, especially with the heavy sanctions it has hanging over its head?
Doctorow:
Well, on the economic side, as we know, both BRICS and the Shanghai Organization are working for de-dollarisation. That is a matter of great interest to Iran. Both organisations are supportive of the North-South corridor, for which Iran is a major actor and beneficiary. This transport’s logistical hub position of Iran, it provides a great opportunity for expanded sales of hydrocarbons by Iran and for leveling out the supply domestically in Iran of hydrocarbons, which are not uniform across the country but are concentrated in various areas.
7:25
The cooperation with Russia, both as a fellow BRICS and SCO member, in the energy area is of paramount importance. We know that Russian hydrocarbon companies are investing heavily in facilitating exploration and production in Iran. So, Iran, I think, feels the comfort of the strong political support that both of the founding and most important members of both organizations, China and Russia, are giving it. And that moderates policy within Iran, to everyone’s benefit.
PressTV: 8:04
Right, and final thoughts with you Mr. John Bosnitch. This is a growing list of countries that find such an attraction and are gravitating toward this ideology of de-dollarization. Why are we witnessing this?
Bosnitch:
Pardon me, the last sentence?
PressTV:
De-dollarization. Why has it become such an attractive ideology?
Bosnitch:
Well, obviously, if you allow the Anglo-American empire to endlessly print dollars, and you accept those dollars as having an exchange value against real items such as gold, such as oil, such as other gas and similar products, then you’re actually allowing the empire to print unlimited toilet paper, which you are accepting as having some value.
8:56
So as soon as the countries that are gathered in these various broader economic organizations– that range all the way from the Pacific right into the center of Europe and down into Africa and across into South America– as soon as these countries accept the fact that they are providing the value to the U.S. dollar by exchanging it in return for their massive resources, as soon as they refuse to do that, then the U.S. dollar has nothing to stand on except the resources of the United States.
And as we know, the United States is the most indebted country in the history of the world. This is the end. If the American dollar is no longer accepted as being worth something in hydrocarbons and is no longer accepted as being worth something in terms of gold, it is the end of the empire. An empire is determined by– the power of an empire is determined by the buying power of its currency. If the US dollar fails to buy what it used to buy in the past, the empire is done, and it is done without firing a shot.
PressTV: 10:04
All right, gentlemen, thank you both for joining us on the program. Gilbert Doctorow there joining us from Brussels. And John Bosnitch is joining us from Fredericton, New Brunswick. That’s out there in Canada.
10:19
And, viewers, this brings us to the conclusion of this segment of your PressTV News Review program. Thank you for tuning in, and goodbye for now.
Emma Olive 