THE Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s forthcoming Summit will be significant due to the increasing rift among its permanent members.
Its members have been involved in the interstate wars and exposed to protracted intrastate conflicts. Therefore, it seems appropriate to assess whether the Organization has been able to operate by the Shanghai spirit or has inadvertently become a venue for binary rivalries. The 25th Heads of State Council meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is scheduled to take place from August 31 to September 1, 2025, in Tianjin, China. The SCO Tianjin Summit 2025 will be the fifth time China has hosted the annual SCO summit.
Since the beginning, China has strived to make the SCO a significant multilateral bloc. Many analysts observe that gradually, SCO could evolve into a strong Eurasian bloc capable of checking the North Atlantic Treaty’s Asian foray or eastward creep. Realistically, SCO has failed to emerge as a balancing bloc despite the immense strategic convergence between China and Russia in recent years. The Council of Foreign Ministers of the SCO member states met on July 15, 2025, in Tianjin. The ministers considered ways to strengthen foreign policy coordination among the members. They also held a joint meeting with President Xi Jinping of China. The primary focus of the Ministers’ meeting was to prepare for the upcoming SCO Summit.
The rapid transformation in the global strategic environment and increasing probability of state-on-state war and terrorism in the Euroasian region received serious attention from the Council of Foreign Ministers of the SCO member states. They debated the security challenges and reiterated the need to improve security mechanisms. All parties reaffirmed the need to fully implement the critical common understandings reached by the leaders of member states and continuously enhance the SCO’s ability to respond to security threats and challenges, including combating the ‘three forces’ of terrorism, separatism and extremism, which are considered the main threats to the stability and security of the region, transnational organized crime, drug trafficking and safeguarding information security.
The general impression is that the Tianjin Summit will be a routine meeting of the Heads of State of the SCO members. A critical review of the previous meetings reveals that the Organization’s membership has been increasing, but it is failing to accomplish its objectives. The impression that the SCO has become unproductive due to the rift between its members, divergence of regional and international outlooks and failure to constitute a consensual communique after the June 25 Council of Defense Ministers of the Organization.
The failure to produce a joint statement after the June 25, 2025, meeting of the SCO Defense Ministers suggests that the member states have not developed a consensual counterterrorism strategy to combat the menace of terrorism. It’s very clear in the SCO charter not to discuss the bilateral issue, but India attempted to include references to the April 22, 2025, Pahalgam attack in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu & Kashmir. Precisely, the failure to create a consensus in the SCO meetings generates pessimism about the SCO’s image and operability.
The alarming reality is that its two nuclear-armed members—India and Pakistan had a four-day devastating war in May 2025, one of its members—the nuclear-armed Israel invaded Iran with the connivance of the United States. The failure of Israel to destroy Iranian nuclear installations and Tehran’s successful damaging counterstrikes entailed the US deployment of the largest bomb in its conventional arsenal, the massive ordinance penetrator, to target the deeply buried Fordow uranium enrichment facility. Simultaneously, the US used Tomahawk cruise missiles to strike the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the Esfahan Complex. Ironically, the SCO has failed to issue a joint condemnation statement of Israeli military aggression in support of its permanent member, Iran, because India, a permanent member of SCO, opposed it. Moreover, Russia has been bogged down in a protracted asymmetrical warfare in Ukraine since February 2022.
Admittedly, the SCO focuses on the non-traditional challenges and distance from the traditional security challenges (military conflicts) and bilateral disputes between member states. However, the transforming dynamics of international politics and the increasing probability of state-on-state war compelled its members to revisit the charter of the Organization. The need of the hour is that they must examine India’s obstructionist attitude during the last month’s Council of Defense Ministers of the SCO member states meeting, and previously, it attempted to degrade the Organization by arranging the 2023 summit virtually instead of face-to-face. To conclude, currently, the SCO is at a crossroads. Therefore, its members need to chalk out a strategy to make the Organization vibrant despite rivalry between India and China and the continuing enmity between India and Pakistan and Russia and Iran in a state of war.
—The writer is Prof at the School of Politics and IR, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
