While 28 documents on ports, data centers, and an anti-drug program through 2030 were being signed in Bishkek, shots were once again being fired in the Strait of Hormuz, with Azerbaijan emerging at the intersection of the two agendas
On the night of August 31, 2026, just hours before the leaders of ten countries were due to take their seats at Bishkek’s Yrys Ordo Congress Center for the official group photograph, U.S. drones struck two launchers on Iran’s Larak Island. U.S. Central Command in the Middle East said the strike was intended to prevent an attempt by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to mine the Strait of Hormuz. The Revolutionary Guard responded with missile strikes against U.S. facilities in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Farther south, in the strait itself, a supertanker struck a naval mine, while the number of vessels willing to transit Hormuz fell to roughly five a day. Brent crude jumped more than five percent within hours.
It was at precisely this moment that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was flying to Bishkek for an anniversary summit of an organization founded twenty-five years ago to reduce tensions along borders and now signing concepts for artificial intelligence development and plans for port construction. The contrast between the summit’s declared theme, “25 Years of the SCO: Together Toward Sustainable Peace, Development and Prosperity,” and what was unfolding in the Persian Gulf was so stark that it perhaps offered the most accurate illustration of what the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become today. Not an alternative to global disorder, but a space where states are trying to build long-term institutions without waiting for that disorder to end.
From a Border Club to a Continental System
The organization’s history is more prosaic than its current ambitions. In 1996, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan formed the Shanghai Five, a mechanism designed to reduce military tensions along China’s post-Soviet borders. Five years later, in June 2001, Uzbekistan joined the group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization itself was established, and a year later, on June 7, 2002, its Charter was adopted. For roughly its first decade and a half, the agenda centered on terrorism, separatism, and extremism, the three threats reflected in the mandate of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure, headquartered in Tashkent and the organization’s oldest permanent body.
Expansion transformed the architecture beyond recognition. India and Pakistan joined simultaneously in 2017, two states with several wars behind them and an unresolved territorial dispute over Kashmir. Iran became a full SCO member in 2023, giving the organization direct access to the Persian Gulf. Belarus joined in 2024. Today, the SCO comprises ten states, including three nuclear powers, Russia, China, and India, as well as nuclear-armed Pakistan, the world’s two most populous countries, and virtually the entire post-Soviet Caspian and Central Asian region. Comparing such a structure with an ordinary regional bloc is no longer meaningful. What stands before us is a political system of continental scale, extraordinarily diverse in composition and lacking any collective defense mechanism.
The scale of the Bishkek gathering underscored precisely that diversity. In addition to the organization’s ten members, leaders and representatives from Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mongolia, Togo, Turkey, and Laos arrived in the city, along with delegations from Vietnam and Egypt, representing a total of 17 foreign states, according to the Kyrgyz president’s press service. They were joined by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who arrived in Bishkek on August 31, Kyrgyzstan’s Independence Day, together with the secretaries-general of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the chairman of the Board of the Eurasian Economic Commission, and the secretary-general of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia. During his meeting with Japarov, Guterres noted that Kyrgyzstan, elected for the first time as a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council for 2027–2028, would find itself at the center of international efforts to promote peace and sustainable development, a statement that places relatively small Kyrgyzstan alongside powers that shape the global agenda.
28 Documents That Say More Than Any Speech
At the conclusion of the Council of Heads of State meeting, the twenty-sixth in the organization’s history, held on September 1 under the chairmanship of Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, 28 documents were signed. Formally, the centerpiece was the Bishkek Declaration marking the SCO’s 25th anniversary, along with a protocol amending the 2002 Charter. An organization that has grown to continental proportions has begun reshaping its own founding document to match its new scale.
Far more revealing is the list of the remaining documents. Regulations governing a Universal Center for Countering Security Challenges and Threats were approved. Programs to combat drug addiction and synthetic drugs through 2030 were adopted. An international information security cooperation plan for 2026–2028 was signed. A program to establish a Green Technology Corridor for 2026–2030 was approved. A concept for creating regional data centers and developing the artificial intelligence industry was adopted. Separate memoranda were signed on climate, artificial intelligence, and information cooperation, along with a protocol to the June 11, 2010 Agreement on Cooperation in Combating Crime. One symbolic item on the list was the decision to designate Lahore, Pakistan, as the SCO’s tourism and cultural capital for 2026–2027. Pakistan assumed the organization’s rotating chairmanship from Kyrgyzstan at the conclusion of the summit.
Drug trafficking, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data centers, climate, ports: an organization initially focused almost exclusively on border security is constructing a parallel twenty-first-century infrastructure around itself. The programs targeting synthetic drugs and opiates through 2030 did not emerge in a vacuum. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the last of which is not an SCO member, border Afghanistan, which for decades has been the primary source of heroin flowing into the post-Soviet region and Europe. Renewing these programs for another five-year cycle amounts to an acknowledgment that the change of power in Kabul did not stop the trafficking. It merely changed its logistics.
None of the documents in the Bishkek package, taken individually, changes the global balance of power. Taken together, however, they create an institutional framework that will outlast both today’s leaders and today’s crises.
Ports Instead of Declarations: Where Eurasia’s Future Is Being Decided
The most underestimated document in the Bishkek package is not a declaration but the action plan for developing ports and logistics centers in member states for 2026–2030. Work on it had been under way well in advance and in considerable detail. On February 25, 2026, experts from SCO countries discussed the draft under Kazakhstan’s chairmanship. A new round of online negotiations followed on March 10, producing a list of the organization’s largest ports and logistics centers.
Treating this plan as a technical paper would be a mistake. Transportation has once again become politics. What matters now is not merely price and distance, but sanctions exposure, the risk of military escalation, control over straits, and the ability to bypass territories affected by conflict. At the Council of Heads of State meeting, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev stated directly that economic connectivity within the SCO still falls short of the organization’s potential and proposed accelerating the creation of a unified Eurasian transportation and logistics system. Behind that formulation lies a concrete calculation. Kazakhstan currently handles an estimated 83 percent of overland freight traffic between China and Europe and has no intention of surrendering that position to emerging routes without a fight.
The Road West From Kashgar: China’s Calculation and Kyrgyzstan’s Opportunity
One of the projects for which such plans are written is being built right now. The 532.53-kilometer China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway is intended, for the first time, to connect the Chinese and Uzbek rail networks directly without transit through Kazakhstan, where the journey currently takes between 45 and 70 days. The Kyrgyz section will consist of 304.84 kilometers of single-track railway, with the possibility of later electrification, a design speed of 120 kilometers per hour, and twenty stations.
By the spring of 2026, construction had reached peak intensity. As of late March, more than five thousand people were working simultaneously at the sites, with roughly 5,600 pieces of equipment in operation. Uzbekistan’s Transport Minister Ilkhom Makhkamov suggested that the project’s original five-year construction schedule could be shortened by a year. Freight moving today from Kashgar through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan into Uzbekistan must then continue somewhere, northward, through Iran, or across the Caspian. It is precisely at this junction that the Azerbaijani dimension of the Bishkek summit emerges. The more actively the SCO develops logistics to the eastern shore of the Caspian, the greater the objective value of its western shore becomes.
Baku in Bishkek: The Guest That Became Part of the Transportation Equation
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev arrived in Bishkek on August 31 and the following day participated in the SCO Plus meeting, which brought together, depending on the count, representatives of 17 to 18 foreign states and six international organizations. The list of his bilateral contacts in Bishkek matters more than the official group photograph. Over two days, President Ilham Aliyev met with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. He was also photographed in an informal setting with the presidents of Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Iran, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, and Pezeshkian himself.
Plot those meetings on a map rather than reading them as routine diplomacy, and the picture changes. Kazakhstan represents the eastern shore of the Caspian and a pivotal point on the Middle Corridor. Iran represents the North–South axis and access to the Persian Gulf. Armenia represents the potential opening of new transportation links across the South Caucasus. Turkey represents the continuation of the western route into Europe. In Bishkek, President Ilham Aliyev was effectively surrounded by the leaders of states shaping the four principal transportation directions defined by Azerbaijan’s geography. A coincidence ceases to look accidental when it occurs for the third time in two days.
Aliyev and Pashinyan: From the Front Line to Railcars Carrying Petroleum Products
The most politically sensitive meeting of the summit was the August 31 talks between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. The two sides reaffirmed the significance of the August 8, 2025 Washington peace summit, where, with the participation of U.S. President Donald Trump, a joint declaration was signed and the agreed text of a peace agreement was initialed. The Bishkek meeting was no longer about war, but about its practical aftermath: the TRIPP route, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, deliveries of Azerbaijani petroleum products to Armenia, the transit of grain and other third-country goods through Azerbaijani territory, and the work of border commissions.
Not long ago, the central issues between Baku and Yerevan were the front line, minefields, and the status of enclaves. Today, the two leaders’ agenda includes railcars, fuel tankers, and grain shipments. This change in the vocabulary of negotiations is one of those rare cases in which a rhetorical shift genuinely reflects a change in political reality rather than disguising the absence of one.
The SCO Is Not an Anti-NATO Alliance, and That Is the Source of Its Strength
A persistent stereotype surrounds the organization: that China and Russia are building a Eurasian counterpart to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization directed against the West. The facts do not support that claim. The SCO has no collective defense mechanism, no obligation requiring one member to enter a war on behalf of another, and no unified military command. Sharp contradictions remain within the organization: the territorial dispute between China and India, three wars and the unresolved Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, and fundamentally different relationships with the West in countries such as Iran and Kazakhstan.
The organization’s strength is built not on discipline, but on the absence of it. India does not have to share Russia’s position on Ukraine in order to cooperate with Moscow on energy. Kazakhstan does not have to choose between Beijing and Washington in order to host an anniversary summit. This flexibility is precisely what makes the SCO attractive to states unwilling to grant anyone the exclusive right to determine their foreign policy, including Azerbaijan, which simultaneously develops relations with Turkey, Central Asia, Iran, Russia, and the West while formally remaining outside the organization.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko took this logic to its furthest point, saying on the sidelines of the summit that the SCO could serve as a catalyst for revitalizing the United Nations itself, an organization whose reform has been discussed in New York for years without success. Had such a statement been made within a military alliance, it would have sounded like a bid to replace the existing architecture of international security. Within the SCO, where no one is subordinate to anyone else, it sounded like one of many declarations of intent, no more and no less realistic than the other twenty-seven documents in the Bishkek package.
Modi in Bishkek: Strategic Autonomy in Practice
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin offered an almost textbook illustration of this logic. According to Reuters, Modi told Putin at the start of the meeting that the war in Ukraine must end, stressing that every day of war sets humanity back and that New Delhi would continue to support all peace efforts. Putin, according to Russian media reports, replied that Russia was moving along that path. At the same time, the Indian prime minister expressed confidence that Putin’s upcoming visit to the BRICS summit in New Delhi on September 12–13, 2026, would strengthen bilateral relations.
Within a military alliance, such ambivalence would create a political problem. In the SCO, it is normal. India continues large-scale purchases of Russian energy, publicly calls on Moscow to pursue peace, and simultaneously prepares to host Putin on its own territory two weeks later. Three positions that would be incompatible under the logic of bloc discipline coexist comfortably within an organization that does not demand unanimity.
Equally revealing is what Modi did not do. The Indian prime minister did not endorse any language calling for a united front against the West, did not sign anything resembling an anti-Western coalition declaration, and did not call into question New Delhi’s parallel contacts with Washington and Brussels. India’s strategic autonomy works precisely because the SCO does not require its members to choose a camp, and New Delhi exploits that freedom more methodically than most, using the same platform to speak with Moscow about peace while simultaneously preparing to welcome the Russian president on Indian soil.
Xi Jinping: Multipolarity Without a Single Master
Chinese President Xi Jinping, speaking in the SCO Plus format, described the emergence of a multipolar world as an irreversible historical process and called on the organization’s member states to play a more active role in reforming the system of global governance. Putin, for his part, said that over the past 25 years the SCO had evolved into an influential center of the multipolar world. During the meeting between Xi Jinping and Putin, the two sides also discussed the development of Eurasian transportation corridors, energy security, and settlements in national currencies.
For Beijing, the SCO is a convenient instrument. The organization does not demand ideological loyalty, does not turn its partners into vassals, and provides China with permanent access to Central Asia, Russia, India, Pakistan, and Iran simultaneously. Multipolarity in the Chinese model is being built not through declarations but through parallel infrastructure: the SCO, BRICS, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative, regional settlement mechanisms, and ports like those discussed in Bishkek.
While Papers Were Being Signed in Bishkek, the Strait of Hormuz Was Under Fire Again
The Iranian dimension of the summit unfolded in parallel with the diplomatic agenda and proved far less manageable. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian arrived in Bishkek together with Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi amid the first exchange of strikes between Tehran and Washington since late July. U.S. Central Command said the strike on Larak Island was intended to prevent an attempt by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Iran described the incident as an attack and reported retaliatory missile strikes against U.S. facilities in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. It is impossible to independently determine which account of the operation’s results is more accurate. Both versions come from parties to the conflict and differ in key details.
The consequences were measurable regardless of which version is closer to the truth. Shipping through the strait fell to roughly five vessels a day, a critically low figure for a route that, before the Iran-U.S. war erupted in late February 2026, carried an estimated one-fifth of global oil supplies. South of the strait, a supertanker was damaged by a mine, while oil futures climbed sharply. Brent gained more than five percent and rose above $90 a barrel, while WTI reached $85.80. During the same period, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that Washington would probably impose new secondary sanctions on Iran on a weekly basis, language that leaves little room for rapid de-escalation and makes the conflict part of the backdrop against which the entire Bishkek summit unfolded.
At the summit, Pezeshkian said Iran was prepared to fulfill its commitments under an interim agreement if the United States took corresponding steps, and he explicitly linked the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to Washington’s actions. The formulation was symmetrical and clearly intended for the international audience gathered in Bishkek on September 1.
Central Asia Is Ceasing to Be a Buffer Between Great Powers
One of the principal beneficiaries of the current transformation may be Central Asia itself. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan increasingly reject the idea of themselves as territory over which Moscow, Beijing, Washington, and Ankara compete. Instead, they are assuming increasingly functional roles within the organization. These roles are no longer decorative.
Astana chaired expert-level work on ports and logistics. Tashkent is becoming a key link in the railway architecture connecting China with western Eurasia while simultaneously expanding trade with other SCO partners. On the sidelines of the summit, the Indian prime minister and Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev agreed to raise bilateral trade from the current $1.3 billion to $5 billion by 2030. Dushanbe has acquired a functional role in the organization’s anti-drug infrastructure, a natural extension of the geography of the Tajik-Afghan border.
The institutionalization of the region is more significant than it may appear at first glance. Central Asia is ceasing to be a geopolitical object and is gradually becoming an actor in its own foreign policy, shaping the agenda alongside the major powers rather than under their direction.
The SCO’s Digital Sovereignty: The Dimension That Remained in the Shadows
The most underestimated element of the Bishkek package is the memorandum on cooperation in artificial intelligence and the concept for establishing regional data centers and computing capacity. The competition of the coming decade will not be fought only over oil, gas, and transportation corridors, but also over computing power, semiconductors, data centers, national language models, and the energy resources required to operate artificial intelligence infrastructure. By signing these documents, the SCO is creating an institutional framework long before the issue becomes the subject of broad public debate within the organization.
The logic is the same as with ports. A state excluded from regional data centers and computing capacity risks developing a new type of dependency, not on raw materials or transportation, but on computation itself. Formally, the document is only a framework and does not establish a supranational regulator. Yet the very fact that the issue reached the level of heads of state as early as 2026 shows how rapidly the organization’s agenda is shifting from the border security concerns of the 1990s toward technological sovereignty.
The World Replacing the Old Globalization
The previous model of globalization was built on universality: one global market, shared supply chains, and the declining importance of borders. It is now being replaced by a logic of regional and continental systems. Europe is building strategic autonomy. The United States is restoring protectionism as a central instrument of foreign policy. China is constructing Eurasian infrastructure. India is pursuing the role of an independent center of power. Russia is reorienting its economy toward the East and the Global South, while Central Asian states are diversifying their transportation corridors.
This is not the end of globalization. It is the fragmentation of globalization into several parallel systems, and the SCO is one of the institutions of this new, more fragmented world.
For Baku, What Matters Is Not Membership but Indispensability
This leads to a practical conclusion for Azerbaijani diplomacy. Full membership in every major international structure is a legal category. Geopolitical indispensability is a far more serious one.
If Chinese freight moves through Central Asia toward the Caspian, it needs a partner on the western shore. The expansion of Kazakhstan’s trans-Caspian transportation requires a receiving side across the sea. Turkey’s access to Central Asia naturally runs through Azerbaijani territory. The North-South route converges in the space between Russia and Iran, where Azerbaijan is located. The opening of communications through Armenia and Nakhchivan adds another transportation configuration alongside TRIPP.
All of these lines converge around one country. Baku’s achievement after Bishkek should not be measured by the number of summits to which Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is invited, but by the transformation of the country’s functional role. Before our eyes, Azerbaijan is evolving from a South Caucasus state into a hub within a much larger Eurasian system.
Formal status is secondary here. Full SCO membership would give Baku a vote in another international institution, but it would not alter any of these transportation junctions. Kazakhstan and China would still need the western shore of the Caspian. Turkey would still need an overland corridor to Central Asia. Armenia would still need transit through Azerbaijani territory if TRIPP is to function not merely on paper but through actual railcars and fuel tankers. Geography votes for Baku regardless of how many organizations Azerbaijan formally belongs to.
Conclusion: A Shift That Is Only Beginning
A few months from now, few people will remember all 28 documents signed in Bishkek. The port development road map through 2030 will remain a working document for transportation officials. The Kashgar-Torugart-Jalal-Abad-Andijan railway, which at the current pace is expected to be completed a year ahead of schedule, will continue to take shape. Pakistan will assume the SCO chairmanship and will most likely begin preparing its own cycle of events under its own slogan. Putin will arrive in New Delhi for the BRICS summit on September 12-13, something that will be verifiable within two weeks. Whether the Strait of Hormuz reopens to normal commercial shipping before the end of 2026 will become a far more reliable indicator of developments in the Middle East than any diplomatic statement.
Azerbaijan, meanwhile, will remain at the intersection of routes that neither China, nor Russia, nor India can construct while bypassing its territory.
The SCO has not become, and probably never will become, a unified political center with a common foreign policy. It does not need to. Its historical function may prove to be something different: a space in which several competing centers of power learn to coexist without a single master.
China does not command India. Russia does not dictate to Central Asia. Azerbaijan works simultaneously with Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and the West without choosing one against the others.
Perhaps the most precise definition of the multipolarity now taking shape is this: not a world of allies and not a world of a single ideology, but a world of states increasingly unwilling to surrender to anyone the exclusive right to speak on their behalf.