Over the Labor Day weekend, as missiles rained down on Kyiv and war continued in Gaza, a vastly different drama unfolded in Tianjin, China. More than twenty heads of state gathered under the banner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Among them: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran.
Western readers may not recognize the SCO the way they recognize NATO or the G7. But they should. Once a regional talk shop, the SCO has become a powerful geopolitical platform, the world’s largest authoritarian-leaning bloc, a forum where adversaries of the free world confer legitimacy on one another.
A Stage for Putin
Think about the timing. Russia escalates missile barrages on Ukraine’s cities. Children die in their sleep as air raid sirens wail. And yet Vladimir Putin walks into Tianjin not as a pariah, but as a “partner.”
On stage, Putin reframed the Ukraine war not as an invasion but as a response to Western provocation: “We are responding to a coup, not waging an aggression.” With India, China, and even the UN Secretary-General in the room, that line gave Moscow’s false narrative an international platform.
Putin also held bilateral meetings with Modi, Erdoğan, and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian -- evidence that sanctions have not cut him off from global relevance. Each embrace from Xi, each staged photo-op, chipped away at the credibility of Western isolation strategies.
Xi’s Alternative World Order
For Xi Jinping, who set the meeting’s tone, the SCO is not just about keeping Russia afloat. It is about building a parallel world order. He urged members to resist “Cold War mentality” and “bullying states [a thinly veiled swipe at the U.S.].” Then he put money on the table: a SCO Development Bank, $1.4 billion in loans, 10 billion yuan for the Interbank Consortium, plus scholarships and training programs.
This is not rhetoric -- it is Beijing buying loyalty, binding Eurasia’s economies closer to China. The message to the Global South (developing nations across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania) was unmistakable: “The West does not run the world anymore. We do.”
Modi’s Balancing Act
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi struck a careful balance. For the first time in seven years, he visited China, signaling a tentative thaw. In Tianjin, he promoted India’s vision of the SCO on three pillars: “Security, Connectivity, and Opportunity.”
He condemned terrorism and warned against “double standards” after the Pahalgam attack, then pressed Putin directly for a peaceful resolution in Ukraine. Modi’s presence highlighted the SCO’s reach but also India’s cautious hedging -- neither fully with the West nor fully in Beijing’s camp, a posture reminiscent of its Cold War-era nonalignment.
Iran’s Push to Escape the Dollar
Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, urged the SCO to bypass the dollar. He proposed special SCO accounts, national currency settlements, and CBDC-based infrastructure to settle cross-border trade in central bank digital currencies, along with a multilateral currency swap fund. For Tehran, this is not theory, it is survival. For Beijing and Moscow, it is a prototype of an alternative financial architecture designed to blunt U.S. sanctions and reduce dollar dominance.
Tianjin Summit: The Authoritarians’ Answer to NATO - American Thinker
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