SPECULUM VERUM
Die Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which starts this year's summit on Thursday in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, has sometimes been overestimated. He is a major counter-alliance against the West, the merger, the China and Russia 2001 founded together with four Central Asian states, with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, it was said sometimes. Occasionally there was even talk of an »Asian NATO«. Even if the SCO, especially in the name of counter-terrorism, always had a military dimension: So eng, the cooperation between its members has never been as intense as in the western military pact. if 2017 India and Pakistan were included, moreover, not a few asked themselves, how sustainable an alliance actually is, which now included not only these two solidly enemy states but also the inveterate rivals India and China. And then, finally, the Indian-Chinese border conflict in the heights of the Himalayas in spring 2020 escalated into bloody skirmishes, seemed to be confirmed: Deep internal conflicts inhibit the SCO.
The year 2022 could prove to be a turning point. is central, that New Delhi and Beijing have decided, to put their rivalry on the back burner; By Monday, troops from both sides had withdrawn from the line of conflict in the Himalayas. The cause: India, for all its serious differences with China, is little inclined, to be used by the western states in their great power struggle against Moscow and Beijing as a mere pawn against the People's Republic. Its ruling class does not see its future as a dependent appendage of the West, but as an independent power in a multipolar world. There is still plenty of conflict between India and China. However, cooperation within the SCO framework is helping New Delhi, to fend off attempts by the West, to use it against Beijing.
Another important milestone for the SCO is the accession of Iran, to be sealed in Samarkand this week. He opens up to the state, which the West has been trying to defeat for years with a brutal sanctions war, new perspectives and further reduces the chances of the transatlantic powers, to save their former dominance in the Middle East. All the more so, as well as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egypt want to become SCO »dialogue partners«; the United Arab Emirates are already toying with the idea of full membership. Perspective could for the Arab Gulf States, which for some time have been freeing themselves from their one-sided dependence on the West through closer cooperation with China and Russia, the SCO become a framework, in which they contain their violent conflict with Iran. Nun, that's still music of the future. However, the SCO is already emerging more and more as a potential reservoir for all kinds of efforts in Asia, to break western dominance.