Shanghai spirit for new world order needs to be matched by the West

This time, it was not America’s Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin meeting in the Crimean city of Yalta to carve up a defeated Germany and reshape the post-war European order. Instead, it was China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and India’s Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in the Chinese city of Tianjin to consider the implications of a new and non-US-dominated global order.

It was a historic occasion but the gathering of Asia’s Big Three powers was not preceded (as the Yalta summit was) by a Bretton Woods-type multilateral agreement on how the international monetary and economic systems were to evolve from here on.

This omission was pivotal, something which not just Asian powers like China, Russia and India, but also Western nations, need to get to grips with.

Leaders can meet their counterparts and issue declarations of political and strategic cooperative intent, but the implementation of such pledges is something else. Putting in place new Bretton Woods-type monetary and economic development institutions as well as trade and tariff regimes of the complexity of the World Trade Organization is a huge task. Yet it will be needed if the world is not to fragment further into blocs.

What is needed is a new initiative by Western powers, led by the United States, to match the statesmanship that Xi and others are displaying, via the SCO and the Brics group of Global South nations, to bolster and improve upon the existing architecture of multilateral institutions.

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Xi Jinping urges SCO summit members’ cooperation and the setting up of a development bank

The SCO could certainly add weight to such an initiative. The SCO’s combined group of members, observer states and dialogue partners has reached 27, representing countries in Central and Southeast Asia, along with China, India, Russia, Iran and others.

South China Morning Post