From YaleGlobal Online:
In mid-August, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conducted a multi-state military exercise in Russia’s Volga-Urals region, code-named “Peace-Mission 2007.” The SCO allowed some 80 nations to observe rehearsal of the drill, but not the US, an omission that could command considerable outside attention, if not alarm.
The joint exercise has prompted some analysts to suggest that Moscow and Beijing are not merely creating their own “space,” separate from that of the West, but are poised to shape this regional security group into a military alliance. Such speculation would be rash.
Washington’s perspective about the SCO is divided: On one hand, both of the ongoing US anti-terror wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are fought close to SCO peripheries. But as the world’s only regional security group that does not include direct participation of the US, SCO is also a distant force for the world’s sole superpower, still in its “unipolar moment.” [Full Text]
Yu Bin (于滨) is senior fellow for the Shanghai Institute of American Studies and professor of political science at Wittenberg University, Ohio.
