China and Russia Are Quietly Building a NATO Rival

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization also had a summit this month, and the authoritarian leaders showed their geopolitical designs.

By Retired Admiral James Stavridis, Fletcher Dean Emeritus, and former supreme allied commander of NATO

This month, there was an important gathering of major geopolitical actors in the capital of a founding member of their alliance, which is also a powerful energy-producing nation. No, I’m not talking about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington.

The other major security alliance that held significant meetings is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which met in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, an energy giant and founding member of the SCO.

In the West, we don’t pay much attention to the SCO, which was established three decades ago by the so-called Shanghai Five: China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan soon joined as well. In 2017, India and Pakistan became members. Iran joined in 2023 and Belarus, a puppet of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, just signed on. There are also 14 “dialogue partners” across Asia and the Middle East — including Turkey, a NATO member.

This month, there was an important gathering of major geopolitical actors in the capital of a founding member of their alliance, which is also a powerful energy-producing nation. No, I’m not talking about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington.

The other major security alliance that held significant meetings is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which met in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, an energy giant and founding member of the SCO.

In the West, we don’t pay much attention to the SCO, which was established three decades ago by the so-called Shanghai Five: China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan soon joined as well. In 2017, India and Pakistan became members. Iran joined in 2023 and Belarus, a puppet of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, just signed on. There are also 14 “dialogue partners” across Asia and the Middle East — including Turkey, a NATO member.

In some ways, the SCO is an alternative version of NATO. In terms of population and geographic spread, the SCO is the largest security-defense organization in the world. Its land area encompasses 80% of the Eurasian continent; its members comprise 40% of the world’s population and over 30% of global GDP.

On paper, NATO looks stronger. Its 32 members represent more than half of the world’s GDP, and it has a land mass comparable to that of the SCO. The NATO nations’ total spending on defense is around of $1.2 trillion, while the SCO’s is half that size.

But the SCO has serious ambitions. At the Astana summit, Putin said the alliance is “designed to replace the outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models, which gave unilateral advantages only to certain states.” Chinese leader Xi Jinping returned the favor, saying Beijing and Moscow “should continue to uphold the original aspiration of friendship for generations to come.” The Moscow-Beijing axis is clearly the SCO’s beating heart.

Still, the organization has major weaknesses, particularly the lack of some of NATO’s central organizing features. Most obviously, the nations do not have a collective defense commitment similar to Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which holds that an attack on one member is attack on all. So far, the only articulated security position of the SCO is cooperation on fighting terrorism, an amorphous task at best, as the West has learned.

Additionally, there is hardly universal alignment among the SCO states on security issues. India and China have territorial disputes in the Himalayas, for example, and nuclear-armed India and Pakistan are permanently on the edge of war. Some members are clearly ambivalent about the group: In a significant snub, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not attend the Astana summit, but sent his foreign minister.

It’s true that NATO has cultural, historic and linguistic differences, but the dissonance among its members pales by comparison to the challenges the SCO faces.

So how worried should the democratic alliance be? Two things really stand out in the SCO’s geopolitical ambitions.

The first is the degree to which it becomes a stable platform for China and Russia to legitimize and spread their autocratic systems. With its series of multistate military exercises, cooperative agreements in technology and other ties, the SCO could help Beijing and Moscow flex their geopolitical muscles. An obvious example would be China, under the aegis of the SCO, openly giving military support to Russia for its war in Ukraine, which could tilt the table decisively Putin’s way.

The second main concern for the West is the degree to which Moscow and Beijing can use the SCO to pull important nations away from the US-led order. The two at the top of the list are Turkey and Saudi Arabia — the latter is now a dialogue partner, but is angling for full SCO membership. Allowing the dominant player in the Middle East and NATO’s second-largest military to fall further into the orbit of China and Russia could be disastrous.

NATO should be paying closer attention to the growing influence, economic and military capability, and ambition of the Shanghai group. It needs to undertake plenty of quiet diplomacy, high-level visits, joint military exercises and sharing of defense technology with the now-friendly countries China and Russia are targeting for membership. The SCO isn’t a legitimate rival to the transatlantic bloc yet, but if US and its allies aren’t careful, it could become one soon.

(This post is republished from Bloomberg Opinion.)