The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Bishkek, held from 31 August to 1 September 2026, brings together the leaders of the organisation’s ten member states, among them China, Russia, India, Iran and Pakistan, alongside partners such as Türkiye. The principal session of the Council of Heads of State is scheduled for 1 September, when the organisation marks twenty-five years since its founding and Kyrgyzstan’s chairmanship comes to an end.
The political imagery may suggest the emergence of an increasingly coherent Eurasian pole. Read exclusively through that lens, however, the summit risks obscuring the mechanism by which the SCO actually operates.
At Bishkek, diplomacy is multilateral, yet a substantial share of the decisions involving power, risk and strategic cost continues to be negotiated bilaterally: Russia and China on energy, Russia and Iran on security and intelligence, China and Iran on economic cooperation, Türkiye and Russia on the Black Sea file, while India maintains its own strategic channels with Washington.
Seen in this light, the SCO does not resemble an alliance in the process of consolidation. It resembles rather an institutional roof beneath which an increasingly dense network of bilateral relationships coexists — at times complementary, at times competing.
The SCO Should Not Be Judged by Its Own Self-Description
Meeting on 24 July 2026, ahead of the summit, the foreign ministers of the member states reaffirmed that the organisation is not directed against other states or organisations, that it functions by consensus and that it respects the national interests of its members, according to the document published by the SCO Secretariat.
The statement is relevant to understanding the institutional framework, but it is not in itself proof that the organisation could not evolve into a geopolitical bloc. An organisation’s self-description tells us how it wishes to be perceived, not necessarily how power operates within it.
The more telling evidence is behavioural.
India is an SCO member, yet it remains within the Quad alongside the United States, Japan and Australia, and sustains its strategic rivalry with China. Türkiye attends the summit as an SCO dialogue partner while simultaneously being a NATO member. Russia and China proclaim a close strategic partnership, yet continue to negotiate over concrete economic interests and to compete for influence in Central Asia.
Iran, however, offers the clearest illustration of the difference between membership of the organisation and the actual distribution of power.
Iran: The SCO Provides the Framework, Russia Provides the Bilateral Channel
Iran is a full member of the SCO, but membership entails no collective obligation requiring the other states to enter into conflict in its defence.
That limitation has acquired added weight in the context of the war that began on 28 February 2026 with American and Israeli strikes on Iran, and which has now entered its seventh month, according to the assessment published by the Associated Press.
Nor should the bilateral relationship between Moscow and Tehran be oversimplified.
The comprehensive strategic partnership treaty signed in Moscow on 17 January 2025 broadens political, economic, military and intelligence cooperation, yet contains no mutual defence clause. The two states undertook that, should either come under attack, the other would refrain from providing assistance to the aggressor — an obligation materially different from a commitment to intervene militarily in a partner’s defence, as Reuters set out in a comparative analysis of Russia’s strategic treaties.
Formally, therefore, neither the SCO nor the Russian–Iranian treaty makes Russia an automatic military guarantor of Iran.
Operationally, the picture is more complicated.
American officials told RFE/RL that Russia had been supplying Iran with targeting information on American troops and military assets in the Middle East, confirming an earlier report by the Washington Post. The Kremlin has not publicly acknowledged any such operations.
This very distinction strengthens rather than weakens the case for the SCO’s particular character.
If the Russian support described by American officials does exist, it does not travel through any collective mechanism of the organisation, but through the bilateral Moscow–Tehran relationship, outside the consensus of the other members.
The SCO grants Iran political and institutional access to a table at which two major nuclear powers are seated. Sensitive strategic cooperation, however, continues to be negotiated through other channels.
The relationship with Beijing confirms the same separation. China and Iran launched implementation of their twenty-five-year cooperation plan in 2022, and the communiqué issued by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs lists such fields as energy, infrastructure, industrial capacity, science and technology, and agriculture. Beijing does not present the document as a mutual defence pact.
Larak, Kharg and a Contaminated Information Environment
The context in which Pezeshkian arrives in Bishkek shifted once again on the eve of the summit.
On Sunday, 30 August, American forces struck two Iranian launchers on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Captain Tim Hawkins, spokesman for United States Central Command, stated that members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had been observed preparing to launch rockets carrying naval mines into the strait, according to CNBC.
Iran responded with ballistic missile strikes on two bases hosting American forces in Jordan. Jordanian state television reported that the kingdom’s armed forces had intercepted eight missiles that entered national airspace, Reuters reports.
The resumption of exchanges of fire after several weeks of pause immediately altered market perceptions of risk in the Strait of Hormuz and pushed oil quotations higher. More significant than the precise level of Brent is the fact that the market has once again begun pricing in the possibility of a disruption to energy flows.
At the same time, the episode demonstrated how contaminated the information environment surrounding the conflict has become.
On Sunday, Donald Trump posted a video on Truth Social accompanied by the claim that Kharg Island, the principal hub of Iranian oil exports, had been blown apart. Using tools for detecting manipulated imagery, Reuters established that the material had most likely been synthetically generated, and several hours after the post there was no evidence that the island had been attacked. The White House and the United States Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.
For any analysis of the summit, the episode matters beyond the information war. It illustrates why the leaders’ group photograph and their political declarations must be kept separate from the verifiable decisions taken alongside them.
Russia and China: The Meeting Takes Place Within the SCO, the Gas Negotiation Remains Bilateral
The meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping was scheduled for 31 August, on the opening day of the Bishkek proceedings. The Kremlin had announced, according to Interfax, that one of the subjects of discussion would be Power of Siberia 2, the project through which Russia is seeking to expand its gas exports to China.
That the discussion takes place on the margins of the summit while the project itself is negotiated bilaterally illustrates the two-tier architecture of the relationship.
For Moscow, additional access to the Chinese market has become far more important following the loss of a large share of the European market. Beijing, however, negotiates from a different position, with access to multiple suppliers and routes. Memoranda and political declarations concerning Power of Siberia 2 have not removed the negotiations over the project’s commercial terms.
The SCO facilitates the Putin–Xi meeting. It does not set the price of gas.
The same distinction between cooperation and the pursuit of self-interest becomes visible in Central Asia.
According to Chinese customs data cited by Eurasianet, trade between China and the five Central Asian states reached 106.3 billion dollars in 2025, an increase of 12 per cent. The Foreign Policy Research Institute estimates Russia’s trade with Central Asia for the same year at 51 billion dollars, equivalent to some 19 per cent of the region’s external trade, while noting that the recovery of Russian trade after 2022 is bound up with the economy created by war and sanctions, and that any lifting of those sanctions could sharply reduce part of these flows.
Nor should the Chinese figure be read without reservation.
The same Eurasianet analysis notes that Beijing’s data indicate more than 22 billion dollars in Chinese exports to Kyrgyzstan in 2025, at a time when the country’s entire GDP for that year stood below 22 billion dollars. The discrepancy suggests that the statistics published by at least one of the parties do not faithfully reflect the final economic destination of the goods; one of the explanations considered is the transit of goods through Kyrgyzstan towards Russia and the use of the region for sanctions-circumvention circuits.
This detail alters the very interpretation of Sino-Russian economic competition. A portion of the trade flows attributed to the China–Central Asia relationship may in fact feed economic networks that continue on towards Russia. Beijing’s influence and Moscow’s economic connection to the region are not two wholly separate systems.
The SCO does not eliminate Sino-Russian competition for influence in Central Asia. What it creates is a space in which competition, dependence and cooperation can overlap.
India and Türkiye Expose the Limits of Bloc Logic
India presents a further difficulty for any reading of the SCO as an anti-Western alliance.
New Delhi participates simultaneously in the SCO and the Quad, maintains historic strategic ties with Russia, is developing cooperation with the United States, and remains locked in structural competition with China. For India, the value of the SCO lies precisely in the fact that participation entails no automatic alignment with Beijing or Moscow. The Associated Press notes that the organisation affords New Delhi diplomatic leverage, even as divergences among members constrain the grouping’s capacity to produce common policies.
Türkiye sharpens the same contradiction.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is in Bishkek from 31 August to 1 September as the leader of a state that is an SCO dialogue partner and, at the same time, a member of NATO. The Turkish presidency confirmed, according to Anadolu, his participation in the extended session and the holding of bilateral meetings on the margins of the summit.
Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov announced a Putin–Erdoğan meeting for 1 September, specifying that the subjects would include „the situation in the Black Sea and the Ukraine issue in general”, alongside the development of bilateral trade relations, according to Daily Sabah.
For Romania, this file is among the summit’s most consequential secondary threads. A matter bearing directly on the security of NATO’s eastern flank and on the Black Sea is being discussed within a Eurasian forum in which Türkiye takes part without suspending its Western strategic identity.
This kind of overlap is not an anomaly of the SCO. It is one of its defining features.
Pakistan Assumes the Chairmanship
Following the summit, Pakistan is to assume the SCO chairmanship for one year, with Islamabad hosting the 2027 Council of Heads of State summit, according to the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The rotation offers a further indication of how the organisation should be understood.
Pakistan maintains a deep strategic partnership with China, a difficult relationship with India, security and economic ties with the Gulf states, and a fluctuating but consequential relationship with the United States. Assuming the chairmanship requires neither the resolution of these contradictions nor the adoption of a foreign policy held in common with the other members.
The SCO administers them within the same structure.
Real Power Must Be Sought Outside the Family Photograph
The Putin–Pezeshkian meeting is scheduled for 1 September, after the SCO’s principal sessions. Ushakov indicated that the situation in the Middle East and the Iranian file would be among the central topics of discussion, according to TASS.
Also on 1 September, SCO leaders are to take part in the plenary session of the Council of Heads of State and adopt the summit’s final documents, including the Bishkek Declaration. Their content cannot be anticipated before the official texts are published.
The final declaration will show how much political consensus the SCO can generate among states with divergent interests. The bilateral meetings will show how much those same states are prepared to offer once the costs become real.
Twenty-five years after its founding, this may be the essential distinction for understanding the organisation: the SCO does not concentrate the full power of its members within a collective mechanism, but rather provides the framework in which bilateral relationships of security, energy and influence can continue without the obligation of complete alignment.
The stage is multilateral. Yet a great deal of the power that counts continues to travel bilaterally.
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