Over Sunday night and Monday, as the US and Iran traded military strikes for the first time in a month and Donald Trump vowed retaliation, leaders from across Eurasia and beyond gathered in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, for the 25th anniversary summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
The symbolism was coincidental, but it was significant nonetheless. The China-led bloc, established in 2001, now spans a broad swathe of nations beyond the traditional Western sphere, several of them locked in conflict, whether open or by proxy, with Washington.
Among those present were Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian and Russian president Vladimir Putin. At a bilateral meeting with Putin on the opening day, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi urged dialogue to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, while affirming the durability of New Delhi’s partnership with Moscow, a relationship sustained by India’s continuing appetite for discounted Russian oil.
Barely a week ago, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent warned of an economic “D-Day” for any country still trading with Tehran. On Monday he told G20 finance ministers in North Carolina that Iran’s economy could collapse “within weeks or months”. These claims are now treated with the scepticism they deserve.
At the centre of it all sits Chinese president Xi Jinping, whose influence continues to grow while American authority wanes. His strategy is one of patient opportunism. He profits from Washington’s addiction to foreign entanglement while pointedly declining to repeat the error, calling for talks rather than committing Chinese forces to anyone’s war. He grasps that endless overseas adventures have hastened America’s relative decline, and has no wish to follow suit.
As the largest buyer of both Russian and Iranian crude, he holds the one lever that could make US pressure bite. Without Beijing’s cooperation the newest sanctions are a paper tiger, the latest in eighteen months of threats that have proved empty.
Nobody, though, should mistake this assembly of strongmen and autocrats for a wholesome alternative to Trumpian recklessness. Beijing’s methods may be less capricious but their long-term geopolitical and economic consequences ought to unsettle other governments every bit as deeply. A world reordered around Chinese leverage, where trade, technology and access are conditional on political obedience, is not a world of expanded freedom for anyone else.
This week’s gathering sets the stage for Xi’s coming visit to Washington, where he will seek to preserve a fragile trade truce even as Trump presses him for help on Iran. That encounter will offer a further measure of the profound shifts in power now under way, and a sharper sense of what they portend for the years ahead.