“Tectonic shifts are underway in global politics, economy, and other spheres of international relations. A fairer multipolar world order is being born.”
– Opening words of the SCO 2024 declaration, Astana, Kazakhstan.
“A fairer multipolar world order is being born”. Eight words that sum up what is being created at pace and yet is being largely ignored by the Western media. “Tectonic shifts” indeed are happening as the countries that represent the bulk of Eurasia’s landmass, economy, population and military might come together in an alliance that not only is linking the vast region that stretches from Europe to the Sea of Japan, but will transform global power dynamics for the coming century and push the demi-gods of the Western World out of the driver’s seat and back into the ranks of humanity.
What is the SCO – one of the key organisations now driving this change? Most people I ask have never even heard of it – the fault of our shallow and tunnel-visioned media – yet it is rapidly becoming bigger and more powerful than the G7, that mighty alliance of old and neo-colonial powers. The member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) are: India, China, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Tajikistan and, as of 2024, Belarus. Dialogue partners are numerous and include heavyweights like Türkiye and Saudi Arabia. Let’s crunch a few key stats:
Population: Member countries are home to over 3 billion people, 40% of the world’s population.
Land Area: 34 million square kilometres, over 60% of the Eurasian landmass.
GDP: Over 25% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product.
Energy: SCO member countries hold impressive natural resources, including natural gas reserves and proven oil reserves.
What is happening under the SCO is that these advantages are being coordinated and leveraged in a way and to an extent never done before. BRICS is a powerful global bloc whilst SCO represents a contiguous landmass; together they will more than match the West in the coming decades.
Napoleon Bonaparte, perhaps apocryphally, is quoted as saying: “Let China sleep … because when China awakes the world will shake.” We are living through this now. The civilizational renaissance of China is making possible other civilizational resurrections. Africa is steadily recovering from European and American exploitation; the Middle East and the Islamic world, so long divided and rudderless, victim of Western-engineered chaos and its own folly, is also slowly stabilising, despite the US-Israeli attacks across the region. The astonishing rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, brokered by China, is testament to this.
Iran, itself one of the great bases of civilization, is slowly re-emerging from centuries of colonial overlordship. If Iran can see off the threat posed by the US and Israel, unexpected growth and possibilities will emerge regardless of whether or not the Ayatollahs remain at the helm. Russia, once it shucks off the threat posed by the NATO bloc, will turn increasingly eastward and be one of the lynchpins of a dynamic Eurasian system. The SCO is on the rise – and along with BRICS – will be one of the engines of a new world order.
In the Western propaganda model, China is attempting to replace the US as global hegemon and must be put back in the box. Astute thinkers like US Ambassador (ret.) Chas Freeman demur.
“The assertion that the international system and its dynamics are now defined by great power rivalry will not withstand scrutiny. This is a peculiarly American reaction to the progressive loss of U.S. dominance in every global domain other than the military,” Freeman says.
The new world order coming into being, Freeman says, will be a “multi-nodal” one with many connections where “countries interact and connect with each other in a multidimensional – not just a bilateral – context, and in multiple, often inconsistent, ways.”
Freeman recently told an audience at the Cambridge Executive Leadership Program that countries across the globe, including Brazil, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Türkiye, “All seek to increase their strategic autonomy. None is willing to subordinate itself to China, the United States, or any other potential overlord.”
Former President of the UN Security Council Kishore Mahbubani appeared recently at the Asia Society, New York: “The Unipolar Moment that the United States enjoyed at the end of the Cold War is gone, but many people haven’t adjusted to the fact that it’s gone and that you now have to live in a world where you have to contend with peer powers and other significant powers who are not necessarily going to bend to the wishes of the great powers so easily,” he said.
Economic institutions, pipeline projects and transport highways don’t have the media grab of someone pinging the tip off Donald Trump’s ear or Joe Biden doing Crash Test dummy imitations on live TV but by Jingo they do lay the foundations for transformational changes to the geopolitical landscape. While the US struggles and fails to build a pier to get food to starving people in Gaza, Eurasia presses on with a blistering array of mega-projects that are ushering in a new cultural and economic future for the region, including, to name just a smattering, some overlapping:
“China’s” Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): gargantuan in scale, it aims to connect Asia, Europe and Africa in a network of rail, road and maritime infrastructure.
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Linking the two countries, it provides a sea-and-land-based corridor that gives China access to the new deep water port of Gwadar – thereby reducing China’s dependence on the Straits of Malacca, and Pakistan easy access to China.
Western Europe-Western China Expressway: While the West spends its imperial treasure on bombs, missiles and offshore military bases the Chinese have pumped $150 billion into one – adjectives defy me – very big transcontinental expressway linking China’s Yellow Sea coast with Western Europe.
Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (Middle Corridor): Kazakhstan alone has pumped tens of billions of dollars into this route linking China to Europe via Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.
North-South Transport Corridor: Faster, cheaper movement of goods and people will mean India, Iran, and Russia will have outstanding access to each other and the markets of Europe and Central Asia.
Zangezur Corridor: between Azerbaijan and Turkey which will build far greater connectivity with the Caucuses and wider Eurasian transport networks.
Moscow-Kazan High-Speed Railway which aims to cut travel times to 3.5 hours on the 770 km route.
Pipelines, digital hubs, interbank consortia, economic and diplomatic councils, educational programmes, you name it, are multiplying within the SCO at a rate partially driven by the West and its policies of containment, exclusion, sanctions, militarism, the flouting of international law whenever it suits, weaponization of the dollar and SWIFT trading system, and other coercive measures that make the emergence of a new world order an imperative for the global majority. It’s a classic case of imperial hubris.
It also has important implications for countries on the rim and neighbours like Australia and New Zealand. Traditional alliances, based on race solidarity and an assumption that allying with the US is a safe bet, will be less strategically sound and more economically consequential as Eurasia rises in power and influence.
The language of the Earth Sciences is appropriate. The world will shake as Eurasia awakes. Like plate tectonics, seismic forces are moving, often out of sight. To avoid volcanic eruptions, we need a smarter West that embraces dialogue, diplomacy and equality because, like it or not, “Tectonic shifts are underway in global politics, economy, and other spheres of international relations. A fairer multipolar world order is being born.”