Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – It was a round table of some of the most influential men in the world. Representing Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan – and when they extended to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Plus – Turkiye, as well as the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. Gathered here in Kyrgyzstan were countries at the centre of some of the world’s biggest geopolitical tensions.
What brings them together is not necessarily agreement on everything. It is the space to pursue their interests outside a Western-led framework. Moscow sees that space as evidence of a changing world.
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“Over the 25 years since its inception, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has evolved into one of the independent and influential centres of the emerging multipolar world,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told the summit.
The organisation, he said, had grown from six founding members in 2001 into what he described as the world’s largest regional association.
Kyrgyzstan is a small, mountainous, landlocked country with Russia to the north and China next door. The calculation is more immediate: how do you balance between giants?
As Europe and the United States are increasingly looking towards Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan needs to balance relations with all of them.
Shairbek Dzhuraev, president of the Crossroads Central Asia think tank, said the timing of the summit is particularly important.
“The members in the room are precisely heavyweights that are directly involved in key geopolitical conflicts of the day,” he said.
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 – operates by keeping Russia close and building 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 and being mountainous makes infrastructure more difficult. Dependence on imported energy and external markets leaves the economy exposed to shocks beyond its borders.
“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”, Dzhuraev puts it bluntly.
So diversification becomes more than an economic ambition. 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. But the 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, power networks and the periphery is becoming 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 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation 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 brings that to the centre stage – where geopolitical theory meets a much more immediate crisis. 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.
“I state explicitly that if the United States returns to its commitments under the aforementioned memorandum of understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take reciprocal action,” he said.
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. “In that case, everything can be put back on the right track,” he said.
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, “The declaration will most likely not match the reality,” he said. “China and other countries have already rejected what they describe as unilateral sanctions.”
The reality is that sanctions can hurt, as they have hurt Iran and Russia. Not as intended for economic collapse, but they brought pain for the masses and put a spanner in their economies. But enforcement across a region built around cross-border trade is another matter. For Central Asian economies, complete compliance is difficult because the economic relationships are too dense, which is quite different from Western compliance. Both with Iran and Russia, transport and trade links have been growing steadily, so countries are unlikely to simply switch them off overnight.
That makes the SCO summit an important political moment.
Not necessarily because its members can defeat the sanctions regime, but because they can collectively signal where they stand on unilateral pressure.
When you speak to delegates from the global south, there is also a broader message: that the SCO is becoming a forum where countries that do not necessarily agree on everything can nevertheless agree on one principle: they want room to manoeuvre.
Putin calls that the emergence of a multipolar world, Pezeshkian is using the forum to keep diplomacy with Washington alive on Iran’s terms, China is defending its economic relationships, India is pursuing its own strategic interests, and Kyrgyzstan is trying to make sure none of these relationships closes the door to another.
But there is a second question confronting Kyrgyzstan — and it is not sitting around the summit table. How much of its rise belongs to Kyrgyzstan itself?
As transit trade has risen, the economy has been growing rapidly, wages have increased, construction has accelerated and exports have increased.
There is visible momentum in Bishkek, with new roads and buildings appearing to fill the empty spaces. Extraordinary circumstances have generated a lot, such as the war in Ukraine, which has altered regional trade and expanded Chinese investment. When trade routes shifted, money and demand moved across borders. The government is proud that much of the recent development has been undertaken without the external borrowing that characterised earlier periods. But buildings alone do not create a productive economy. External momentum can be a dangerous foundation for long-term growth, as Dzhuraev points out. “Productivity is growing. Exports are rising. More goods are being produced domestically. But much of the momentum remains connected to external factors — particularly the Russia-Ukraine war and Chinese investment. One of the biggest drivers of poverty reduction has been rising salaries.”
The harder question is what comes next? Where are the productive sectors that will sustain those incomes? Agriculture could be an obvious answer as Kyrgyzstan is an agricultural country. But glaciers are melting and climate change is having an impact. Plus, its long-term capacity to generate higher-value growth remains uncertain. That may ultimately be the more important story behind this summit. Not the speeches, the flags, nor the declaration.
Kyrgyzstan wants to convert geography into leverage and its vulnerabilities into options. But the wider questions remain, whether Central Asia can move from being the space between Russia, China, Iran and Europe to becoming a centre of its own? As well as whether today’s economic growth can survive when the external forces driving it inevitably change?
Kyrgyzstan finds itself at the centre of a changing region that brings opportunity but also pressure. Between the giants, keeping every door open may be the most important strategy of all.
