By Pepe Escobar* – The Cradle
Imagine a Brave New World with up-and-running new global routes that circumvent all western chokepoints. Now imagine that all business on these routes is paid for in local currencies, through regional transaction platforms, with Eurasian-only investments.
Asia is all about face-to-face meetings or “people-to-people exchanges,” as Chinese President Xi Jinping puts it. Politico-economic summits are treated as much for their value in channeling common policies as venues allowing no one to lose face. Consensus – and mutual respect – is essential. Which means, unlike in the collective west, real diplomacy is an absolute priority.
Back-to-back summits in Asia and across Eurasia are usually very consequential. Last year saw the 24th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) annual summit in Tianjin, hosted by China, followed swiftly by the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East. This year, the quarter-century SCO summit opened in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, followed by the Vladivostok meeting, and will be wrapped up next week with the annual BRICS summit in New Delhi, hosted by India.
The SCO finally came to the global limelight as a key multilateral body last year in Tianjin, when China fine-tuned its careful road map towards Global Governance. This year, as revealed by the final Bishkek Declaration, the specifics were as relevant as The Big Picture.
There were two standout decisions from the summit: First, SCO members unanimously condemned the US war on Iran. That means an overall Eurasian condemnation, including India.
Second, SCO members affirmed their total support for an “open, transparent, equal, inclusive, and non-discriminatory multilateral trade system,” based on international law, and including “special treatment for developing nations.”
Make trade, not war
Bishkek not only unanimously opposed “interference in the sovereignty of states” while reaffirming “the indivisibility of security,” but also started the regulation, in practice, of the Universal Center for Countering Security Challenges and Threats to SCO Member States.
That is, in effect, a mechanism to counteract the Hybrid and Hot Wars launched in rapid and endless succession by the western hegemon in its declining days.
Russian President Vladimir Putin remarked how, today, “The SCO is effectively the largest regional association not only on our common Eurasian continent, but in the world as a whole. Its member states are home to almost half of the world’s population and account for more than one-third of global GDP.”
Putin also emphasized that “Russia’s trade with SCO countries exceeded $400 billion in 2025, while our states are increasingly using national currencies in mutual settlements. In Russia’s transactions with SCO members, their share now exceeds 98 percent.”
That’s already a SCO super-trend: to keep increasing trade in mutual currencies. BRICS is following the same path.
Like Putin, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian also stressed the urgency of creating the proposed SCO Development Bank. The Russian president essentially said that this bank should be “as independent as possible” from those powers which use “economic instruments as weapons.”
In other words, the Eurasian powers are seeking an SCO Development Bank that is far more independent than the New Development Bank (NDB) – the BRICS bank, whose statutes are linked to the US dollar.
For six years now, the NDB has begun admitting states that are not BRICS members. Some later became partners. These now include, for instance, Algeria, Bangladesh, Colombia, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe. Yet the level of subscribed capital stands at a mere $53.6 billion – much too low for a Global South development bank.
The SCO is also advancing a SCO Energy Cooperation Strategy, which should be implemented in detail all the way to 2030. That includes an array of projects, such as the Power of Baikal gas pipeline – the former Power of Siberia II – from Russia to China via Mongolia (an SCO partner).
Build your road – with a financial system attached
Now let’s connect the SCO with the economic forum in Vladivostok.
There’s no way to understand the immense challenges involved in the development of Siberia, the Arctic, and the Russian Far East – a national security imperative, personally supervised by Putin – without following the key discussion sessions each year in Vladivostok.
Take, for instance, this debate on the architecture of transportation corridors detailing the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor (TATC): an integrated, multimodal system (sea, railway, roads, plus Siberia’s largest rivers).
In several aspects, the TATC mirrors the also multimodal BRICS-linked (Russia–Iran–India) International North–South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), as well as the multiple Chinese-built New Silk Road corridors from east to west.
Russia’s ambition spans everything from reorienting freight flows towards the east and south, to integrating the Far East into the emerging TATC. The strategic planning is already fleshed out in a “Unified Action Plan for the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation and the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor.”
And that brings us to the Arctic – and the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese poetically describe as the Polar Silk Road.
A key Vladivostok discussion featuring Vladimir Panov from nuclear powerhouse ROSATOM, also the special representative for the development of the Arctic, detailed how Russia’s Arctic policy involves not only the development of a strategic resource base 24/7 and 365 days a year, but also the drive to “preserve the traditions and way of life of the indigenous peoples of the North, and protect the environment.”
As part of its complex Far Eastern strategy, Russia is also opening an Eastern Financial Center, the largest institutional reform of the Russian financial market in the recent past, as detailed by Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Moiseev.
As connectivity corridors go, the Russian bet on the Northern Sea Route is in a class by itself. The complexity is mind-boggling: how to set up a brand new system, attractive to global customers, where shipping, icebreaker support, port infrastructure, and government regulation must interact seamlessly.
Putin in Vladivostok went straight to the point: the Far East and the Arctic are being built together as one physical system: power, data, rail, and a polar route that is totally independent from NATO checkpoints.
The star of the show is the TATC, running from St. Petersburg and Murmansk through the Northern Sea Route to Vladivostok and further to everyone across Asia-Pacific. In sum, almost from scratch, you build a land bridge in steel, ice, and power – and the accompanying financial system attached to your route.
Compare this with the INSTC, through which three BRICS/SCO nations can conduct all their trade without touching a single chokepoint that could be closed by Washington, with Iran serving as Russia’s southern gateway within a larger strategy of counteracting western containment.
Russia, China go max on productive investment
Taken together, Bishkek and Vladivostok offered an array of practical examples of how Eurasia is fine-tuning its “forget about the west” roadmap.
Professor Michael Hudson has a revolutionary proposal about what should be done on what is arguably the heart of the matter for the Global South: dollarized debt. The solution, he insists, must come from Eurasian powerhouses Russia and China, in the form of “providing the credit to enable trade and investment partners, including those in the Belt and Road Initiative.”
That would amount to no less than a new economic order financed largely by SCO/BRICS members China, Russia, and Iran, with “creditors taking an equity position in the economies of countries whose public infrastructure they will finance through such programs as China’s Belt and Road initiative,” and oil-dependent nations “taking on debts to Iran that may be guaranteed by China.”
As much as BRICS is essentially a reformist, not a revolutionary grouping, it remains, alongside the SCO, the multilateral nucleus of the drive towards multipolarity. There are no illusions about any breakthroughs to be achieved in New Delhi later this week. Yet Russia, China, and Iran – all on the table – can point to the sovereign progress determined in Bishkek and Vladivostok.
It’s a long and winding road, of course. The US dollar still makes up 57 percent of global foreign exchange reserves, 54 percent of global export invoicing, and 89 percent of foreign exchange transactions. Yet keep an eye on the non-stop increase in trade in local, mutual, regional currencies: Russia–China; Russia–India; inside and outside ASEAN; the growth of the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. The list multiplies.
BRICS may be on the brink of finally installing its own payment settlement mechanism in local currencies via a cross-border financial messaging system. They must finish building the infrastructure and muster the collective political will to go for broke, which means upending dollar dominance in trade and transactions. The lessons from Bishkek and Vladivostok could save the day, if finessed in New Delhi.
*Columnist at The Cradle, editor-at-large at Asia Times and an independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia. Since the mid-1980s he has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore and Bangkok.