THE Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjing, followed by the grand military parade in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, was all about optics and signaling. Looking at the reaction from the US and EU it would be safe to say that the messages hit bull’s eye.
But let’s first look closer to home. Before the summit, India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said India would be looking for a categorical condemnation of cross-border terrorism, which in common language means that India’s allegations against Pakistan are upheld.
You may recall in this column last week, there was a mention of the SCO principle of collective or indivisible security and once again that was upheld as both the Pahalgam terror incident and the Jaffar Express and the Khuzdar school bus terror attacks, in which many innocent lives were lost — with India blaming Pakistan for the first and Pakistan saying India was responsible for the second and third incidents — were condemned but neither country was named.
Despite lack of success on this issue, as in the SCO foreign ministers meeting in June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was triumphantly holding hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and laughing in videos captured of their stand-up chats with China’s strongman Xi Jinping.
China may still not be militarily as strong as the US but it seems to be catching up fast.
Knowledgeable sources suggested Mr Modi was keen to thumb his nose at the US and its ‘unreliable’ leader and his erstwhile friend President Donald J. Trump whom he has courted in the past, even raising the slogan, ahead of the US elections: Abki baar, Trump Sarkar (The next administration will be Trump’s).
India is smarting at the ‘unfair’ 25+25 per cent tariffs with the latter being punitive for continued purchases of Russian oil when China and many other countries have not been penalised for their bulk oil/ energy procurement from Russia. But the size of the rapidly growing Indian economy, its human capital and enormous market means that despite its current tribulations, India won’t be ignored by either the US and its allies or the Global South for long. That is a certainty.
Moving out of the region into the global arena, it was clear that the summit and the parade signalled what China sees as a return to a multipolar world and not the unipolar arrangement that evolved after the collapse of the Soviet Union and facilitated the massive eastward expansion of the Nato military alliance.
The Russian military assault and the war it triggered in Ukraine are attributed to that unipolar world, which meant initially that Moscow lacked the ability to stop the Western military alliance’s eastwards march. Later, however, after internal consolidation Russia started to flex its muscles first in Crimea and then in the Donbas region and made rapid advances in eastern Ukraine to pre-empt Nato’s further expansion.
President Joe Biden pumped billions of dollars into the ideological military campaign directly and via the Nato members and slowed the pace of the Russian advance. With Trump’s assumption of office, all that changed as the new US president announced he wanted to end the war and that his friend Vladimir Putin was on board. So far it appears he got played by the Russian leader.
It was not surprising then that looking at the SCO summit and the grand spectacle put on display by the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of the Chinese victory over the Japanese military, Trump wrote a congratulatory message on his Truth Social platform and then said words that could be likened to a child throwing his toys out of the pram: “Give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.”
China’s response was measured as its spokesperson underlined the fact that the commemoration was to mark the end to World War II and that foreign guests had been invited for it. China said its development of diplomatic relations with any country is never directed against a third party.
Trump’s political appointee as ambassador to Nato Matthew Whitaker seemed to have lost it in an interview with Fox News when, in a fit of rage, he accused China of putting on display lethal weaponry “in all likelihood stolen from us”.
EU foreign policy chief, the former right-wing Estonian politician, Kaja Kallas also criticised the parade and said that Xi, Putin and Kim appearing together was part of efforts to build an anti-Western “new world order” and was a direct challenge to the international rules-based system.
China described the remarks by a “certain EU official” as being full of ideological bias, lacking basic historical knowledge and a blatant attempt to stir up confrontation. Beijing found the remarks misguided, utterly irresponsible and arrogant.
It was laughable that the hawkish EU foreign policy chief referred to the rules-based international system when she and her grouping has supported the Gaza genocide and the shredding of any so-called rules-based order by the apartheid state on a daily basis by the mass murder of civilians by bombs, missiles, drones and starvation.
To many an impartial observer, China’s awesome military display translated into the introduction of a semblance of welcome balance in our unipolar world. China may still not be militarily as strong as the US but it seems to be catching up fast as its various arms and armaments including new hypersonic missiles, stealth fighter-bombers, lasers and microwave air defence and unmanned aerial and submarine military vehicles displayed.
One hopes this doesn’t unhinge Trump completely. He should realise that his desire of winning the Nobel Peace Prize was nearly non-existent, because he greenlit and enabled the Gaza genocide, a grave crime against humanity. Equally, no end to the Ukraine war on terms unfavourable to Russia is now likely. Trump’s threatened tariffs and sanctions can cause pain but not in any decisive way.
It will be interesting to watch the White House’s next move.
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2025
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