The SCO — what Andrew Small's reading of the China-Russia-Iran-India tensions shows
Andrew Small at the German Marshall Fund has been one of the most careful Western analysts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation since its post-Iran-accession expansion. The SCO is real, growing, and substantially less coherent than the anti-Western framing suggests.
Key fact
SCO member states by 2025: 10 (China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan); combined population: ~3.4 billion.
Andrew Small, senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund and a long-time China-Pakistan and China-Eurasia specialist, has been one of the few Western analysts to take the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation seriously without overstating it. His 2023-2024 work on the SCO's post-Iran-accession trajectory is the most cited Western reading.
Small's framing is that the SCO is a real organisation with real functions but with internal contradictions that structurally limit what it can become. Its regional anti-terrorism centre (RATS) in Tashkent operates and produces useful intelligence-sharing on Central Asian extremism. Its energy and infrastructure dialogues have produced bilateral deals that members might have struck anyway, but with additional political cover.
The internal contradictions are the analytically interesting part. India and Pakistan, both members since 2017, remain in an unresolved bilateral dispute. India and China have an unresolved border conflict that produced casualties as recently as 2020 and a continued Line of Actual Control deployment posture. Iran's June 2023 accession brought a state with active diplomatic-rapprochement-but-not-resolution with Saudi Arabia, which is not an SCO member but is a Chinese strategic partner. Belarus's July 2024 accession embeds a state under heavy Western sanctions that few SCO members want to be associated with on financial-system questions.
Small's empirical reading is that these contradictions show up in what the SCO will and will not do. SCO summits produce communiqués with non-binding language; SCO declarations on Ukraine, on Israel-Palestine, and on Taiwan are deliberately vague because no single language would survive Indian, Russian, Chinese, and Iranian editing. The organisation does not have a treaty-level mutual-defence clause and has not moved to acquire one.
His conclusion is that the SCO is best read as a non-Western diplomatic platform that provides legitimacy and limited coordination but is structurally incapable of becoming a coherent bloc. The press framing of the SCO as an emerging Eastern counter-alliance overstates its capacity by an order of magnitude.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation evolved from the Shanghai Five border-confidence-building grouping of 1996 (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) into the SCO proper with Uzbekistan's accession in 2001, and has subsequently expanded to include India and Pakistan as full members (2017), Iran (2023), and Belarus (2024), with Mongolia, Afghanistan, and others holding observer status. The institutional architecture combines a secretariat in Beijing, a Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure in Tashkent, and annual heads-of-state summits that produce communiqués covering security, economic, and cultural cooperation.
Andrew Small at the German Marshall Fund of the United States — author of *The China-Pakistan Axis* (Hurst, 2015) and *No Limits: The Inside Story of China's War with the West* (Brookings Institution Press, 2022) — has produced the most analytically careful Western reading of how the SCO actually functions versus how it is described in summit communiqués. His central observation is that the institution is not a coherent strategic bloc and was never designed to be one; it is a coordinated diplomatic platform that allows the participating states to manage their bilateral and multilateral irritants under a regularised cadence.
The India-Pakistan dimension within the SCO is the most obvious internal contradiction. The two countries have active border disputes, repeated periods of bilateral diplomatic suspension, and a history of armed confrontation. Their joint membership in the SCO, dating from 2017, has not displaced any of these dynamics; what it has done is provide a multilateral forum at which the two foreign ministers are obliged to attend the same meetings and to sign joint documents that, while not addressing the bilateral disputes directly, do produce baseline diplomatic civility. The 2024 Astana Summit saw the first meaningful India-Pakistan ministerial contact in several years, framed inside the SCO agenda rather than as a bilateral track.
The China-Russia dimension within the SCO has shifted markedly since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia is now the structurally weaker partner in the bilateral relationship (measured by GDP, by trade flow, by technology transfer direction), and the SCO has functioned as one of the institutional vehicles through which the asymmetry is managed. China provides Russia with diplomatic standing in the SCO's Central Asian core; Russia provides China with the political cover that prevents the SCO from being read as a Chinese-led institution. The institutional balance is the price both capitals pay to keep the framework operational.
The Iran accession in 2023 was the most politically charged expansion in the institution's history. Tehran had been a long-standing observer pursuing full membership, and Iranian accession was opposed in earlier rounds by both Russia and Tajikistan on various grounds. The accession's eventual approval reflected the changed Iranian strategic posture following the 2023 Iran-Saudi rapprochement and the broader Middle East realignment, plus the political-cover function that SCO membership provides Iran in its sanctions-resistance posture. The accession did not produce a unified SCO position on Iran's nuclear file or on its proxy networks in the region; it produced an institutional anchor for Tehran's broader Eurasian diplomatic posture.
The forward question — whether the SCO evolves toward operational alliance functions or remains a coordination forum — is answered, on Small's reading, by the structural ceiling that India's participation imposes. India will not accept SCO commitments that require it to align with Chinese or Russian positions on questions where Indian interests diverge. The institutional design that emerged at the 2017 and subsequent expansion summits explicitly preserves member-state strategic autonomy on bilateral relationships with non-SCO partners. The SCO is therefore best read as a multipolar-coordination platform rather than a Eurasian alternative to NATO — a forum that produces regularised contact and selective cooperation rather than a unified strategic line.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.