Pepe Escobar: Rise of a Post-Western World at the SCO Summit

Welcome back everyone. We are joined today by Pepe Escobar, our journalist and the political analyst to discuss the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit. Uh so thank you for coming back on. >> Always a pleasure with you Glenn. Yes, this was a heavy heavy day. Lovely Bishkek Kyistan. [laughter] Yeah. No, I was going to say the the

Shanghai Cooperation Organization, it's uh well, he has well definitely changed over the past 25 years. Uh you know, as as we all know, it began as this um organization only with Russia, China and four of these central Asian states to manage security in the in the central Asian region also manage any possible

competition between Russia and China. But now they've grown to be, you know, an economic entity. it's taken in all these new members. Uh yeah, India, Iran, Bellarus, it's uh it's quite um it has it has changed uh to to a large extent. So what are your takeaways from this summit though in terms of where the SEO

that is the Shanghai Corporation organization has moved? I mean is it now an actual Eurasian you know security institution or geoeconomic institution? How how do you see what was all effectively achieved as this summit? >> Yeah. Well, um I am particularly fond of the the SEO gland because uh um I've been following it from the beginning,

which is a long time ago. There was in June 2001, three months before 911. It was in a very simple meeting in Shanghai by a garden, by the way. And the Shanghai love to say it out. This organization it's so big it started in a garden in Shanghai. True. And at the start there were three major uh targets

against uh separatism, against terrorism and against religious extremism which we could define at the time essentially al-Qaeda and the ramifications of al-Qaeda across the Central Asian stance, something that we could already see at the time uh especially in Afghanistan And in this particular year uh it was a concourse of circumstances was crazy when they when they founded