On: What to know about the SCO, the summit billed as a counterweight to US influence

31 August 2026

Twenty-five years, and they have gathered in the mountains to celebrate a building that was never finished. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was founded as a roof over Central Asia; it has become a façade behind which three very different tenants pretend to share a house.

Consider the masonry. China supplies the capital, Russia the grievance, India the doubt. A counterweight to American influence, the announcement says - but a counterweight is a mechanism, and mechanisms require that all parts move together. India does not move with China. It borders it, distrusts it, and attends the summit the way one attends a rival’s wedding: to be seen, to count the guests, to note who bows to whom. The alliance is not a foundation. It is scaffolding, and scaffolding tells you the structure beneath is weak.

The historian recognises the type. The Holy Alliance of 1815 also proclaimed a new order of concord among unequal powers; it lasted as long as their common enemy, and not a season longer. Coalitions assembled against a hegemon are held together by the hegemon. Remove him - or merely watch him wobble - and the members begin to measure each other instead. That measuring has already begun.

Who answers for this organisation? That is the question its founders never built into the design. There is no court, no charter with teeth, no mechanism by which a member may be called to account before the others. Institutions without accountability do not balance power; they accumulate it quietly, for whoever is strongest in the room. Beijing is strongest in the room.

The summit will produce communiqués, photographs, a declaration of multipolarity. I have read such declarations before, in archives yellowed and forgotten. They are the mortar of buildings that were never meant to stand.

Shared enemies make alliances. Shared accountability makes institutions. Only one of these was on the agenda.