Recently, the Stimson Institute has published a commentary by Daniel Markey, Asfandyar Mir, Peter Slezkine, Yun Sun, and Elizabeth Threlkeld, on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit 2025 (SCO25). Compared to articles on the same topic from American scholars and prestigious institutes in D.C., the article has some similarities and differences.
1. Like articles on the same topic, Stimson believes that SCO25 is a strategic success for China. Reasons include:
- The SCO25 was the largest ever in terms of the number of participating countries, including an unprecedented four-day visit to China by a Russian leader and the first visit to China by an Indian leader since 2018.
- The SCO is often seen as a "talking forum" but this year saw a lot of concrete cooperation with a development strategy for the next decade, including the New Development Bank, plans to set up four security centers and many other cooperation in infrastructure, non-traditional security or energy, etc.
- The SCO is an effective mechanism for China to "manage" relations with Russia. Russia previously wanted the SCO to focus on security but China wanted to expand the SCO. China had utilized Russia's diplomatic isolation situation to push the SCO25 in its preferred direction.
- The SCO25 also shows that China had been making use of the recent troubles in India-US relations (e.g., on the issue of tariffs) to promote its own ties with India.
2. However, the authors do not advocate the US seeking to counterbalance the SCO like some other articles. Stimson believes that the Trump 2.0 Administration is too concerned about the SCO because it sees SCO (and BRICS) as an effort to promote an alternative order to the US-led system, NATO or the G7, when the reality might not be so:
- The SCO is not nominally an anti-US bloc (despite Trump's criticism). SCO cooperation is also not directly aimed at the US.
- Russia-India-China have not and will hardly be able to resolve their conflicts with each other, and cannot become an "alliance". India-China cooperation was also not a response to US tariffs because this has been India's foreign policy tradition.
- US concerns may be exacerbated when the US is deeply divided internally by partisanship and faces challenges with some external alliance-partnership relationships.
Edited and translated by DHRead the original article in Vietnamese here
