BISHKEK, September 10 — Kyrgyzstan has hosted a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in its capital, Bishkek, drawing together leaders from Russia, China, India, Iran and Pakistan, with the SCO Plus format extending the guest list to Turkiye and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The story begins with geography. Kyrgyzstan is small, mountainous and landlocked, with Russia to the north and China next door.
Its calculation is immediate: how to balance between giants. As Europe and the United States increasingly look towards Central Asia, Bishkek needs to balance relations with all of them.
A room full of heavyweights
Shairbek Dzhuraev, president of the Crossroads Central Asia think tank, said the timing of the summit is particularly important because the members in the room are precisely heavyweights directly involved in key geopolitical conflicts of the day. Russian President Vladimir Putin told the summit that over the 25 years since its inception, the SCO had evolved into one of the independent and influential centres of the emerging multipolar world.
He said the organisation had grown from six founding members in 2001 into what he described as the world’s largest regional association. That balancing act is not new.
Since independence in 1991, Central Asian states have largely operated through what is known as a multi-vector foreign policy. Bishkek, like other Central Asian nations, keeps Russia close and builds ties with China, while keeping open doors to Europe and maintaining healthy relations with Washington. For Kyrgyzstan, it is less about choosing sides than keeping options open, underscored by its geography.
Being landlocked means dependence on transport corridors; being mountainous makes infrastructure more difficult. Dependence on imported energy and external markets leaves the economy exposed to shocks beyond its borders.
Dzhuraev put it bluntly. The biggest weakness of Kyrgyzstan, geopolitically and geographically, is the dependence in terms of transport routes, in terms of energy, in terms of economic relationships. So diversification becomes more than an economic ambition.
Small member, shaping the language
Kyrgyzstan, being one of the smaller members, cannot dictate the SCO’s agenda, but it helped to shape the language. For decades, Central Asia was viewed largely through the prism of the powers surrounding it. Wars in the region and beyond have changed that.
Russia is under sanctions, so is Iran. China is looking west, Europe is looking east.
Suddenly the geography has acquired new value, with highways, railways, pipelines, trade corridors and power networks turning the periphery into a strategically important passageway. Dzhuraev said Kyrgyzstan wanted the summit declaration to recognise that transformation, Central Asia’s movement into the centre stage of international politics. The SCO is increasingly seen as a counterweight to US influence, a grouping through which China and Russia can advance a different vision of the global order.
But the SCO is too diverse for a simple East-versus-West confrontation. That description comes with a qualification that the SCO is not a unified anti-American bloc.
Its members have competing interests, different relationships with Washington and, in some cases, deep disagreements with one another. The question is not whether the SCO rejects the West, it is whether it can resist being defined entirely in opposition to it.
Iran puts the question on the table
Iran brought that to the centre stage. Tehran and Washington have returned to confrontation after more than a month of relative calm. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian used the SCO summit to put the diplomatic question directly on the table, stating explicitly that if the United States returns to its commitments under the memorandum of understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take reciprocal action.
The Islamabad MoU signed in June collapsed, with Tehran and Washington blaming each other for violating its terms. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, also called on Washington to return to what its president signed under the MoU, saying that in that case everything can be put back on the right track.
For the SCO, however, Iran is not simply a diplomatic issue, it is an economic one. Washington has renewed sanctions on Tehran and expanded the threat of penalties for those doing business with Iran. For Central Asia, that matters, particularly for countries whose economies are deeply intertwined with Russia and increasingly connected to Chinese trade networks.
Dzhuraev is sceptical whether countries such as Kyrgyzstan comply fully with sanctions, saying the declaration will most likely not match the reality. What to watch next is whether the summit declaration reflects the language Bishkek sought on Central Asia’s place in international politics, and whether the gap Dzhuraev describes between what the declaration says and what member states actually do on sanctions widens or narrows in the months ahead.
