{"id":1544799,"date":"2025-07-02T01:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-02T05:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1544799"},"modified":"2025-07-02T01:45:00","modified_gmt":"2025-07-02T05:45:00","slug":"why-couldnt-the-sco-defense-ministers-agree-on-a-joint-statement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/why-couldnt-the-sco-defense-ministers-agree-on-a-joint-statement\/1544799\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Couldn’t The SCO Defense Ministers Agree On A Joint Statement?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Couldn’t The SCO Defense Ministers Agree On A Joint Statement?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

India refused to sign the document since it didn\u2019t condemn late April\u2019s Pahalgam terrorist attack…<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

India found itself at odds with the SCO once again less than two weeks since it clarified that it\u00a0didn\u2019t participate<\/a>\u00a0in the group\u2019s joint statement on the\u00a0Iranian-Israeli War<\/a>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

This time its Defense Minister\u00a0refused to sign<\/a>\u00a0the joint statement that was supposed to conclude\u00a0last week\u2019s meeting<\/a>\u00a0with his peers in Qingdao ahead of the leaders\u2019 summit in Tianjin this autumn.<\/p>\n

The reason was that the document didn\u2019t condemn late April\u2019s\u00a0Pahalgam terrorist attack<\/a>\u00a0even though it condemned\u00a0terrorism in Balochistan<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As this year\u2019s chair, China has extra influence over the SCO\u2019s workings during the events that it hosts, so it therefore follows that this might have been a deliberate provocation meant to signal support for Pakistan while snubbing India<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

To add insult to injury, Pakistan blames India for terrorism in Balochistan, which is why it was even more unacceptable from Delhi\u2019s perspective for that issue to be mentioned while no mention was made of the Pahalgam terrorist attack to balance everything out.<\/p>\n

India\u2019s conventional retaliation against Pakistan in the aftermath sparked the\u00a0latest Indo-Pak Conflict<\/a>\u00a0between these two SCO members, however, so China or at least its supporters in the media might claim that omitting any mention of Pahalgam was meant to avoid further dividing the group. Be that as it may, it would have been predictable that this would result in India refusing to sign the SCO Defense Ministers\u2019 joint statement, but that might have actually been what China was aiming for all along.<\/p>\n

To explain, a perception has taken root among some members of the\u00a0Alt-Media Community<\/a>\u00a0and even some experts that India is the so-called \u201cweak link\u201d in the SCO, with the reason allegedly being its close economic and military ties with the US. Adherents ignore China\u2019s much closer economic ties to the US, the Central Asian Republics\u2019 growing military ones with the West in general (especially NATO member Turkiye), and the US\u2019\u00a0attempt to subordinate<\/a>\u00a0India, however. It\u2019s therefore an agenda-driven narrative.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, this analysis\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0from early June argued that it was precisely this perception that accounts for why Russia lent credence to Trump\u2019s claim that he personally stopped the latest Indo-Pak Conflict despite Delhi\u2019s repeated denials, which hyperlinks to related pieces over the preceding month. The gist is that a pro-BRI policymaking faction comprised of anti-Western \u201chardliners\u201d is rising in the Kremlin at the expense of the establishment\u2019s balancing\/pragmatist faction that currently calls the shots.<\/p>\n

Although the pro-BRI faction hasn\u2019t been able to effect any tangible shift in policy towards (or rather, away from) India due to Putin\u00a0being part<\/a>\u00a0of the balancing\/pragmatist faction, that scenario would be of grand strategic importance for China. <\/strong>Russia and India would no longer\u00a0jointly accelerate tri-multipolarity processes<\/a>, thus making it more likely that a form of\u00a0Sino-US bi-multipolarity<\/a>\u00a0could one day be restored. Russia would therefore become China\u2019s \u201cjunior partner\u201d while India would become the US\u2019 in that event.<\/p>\n

Thus, China might have sought to provoke India into refusing to sign the SCO Defense Ministers\u2019 joint statement so as to craft optics that could lend more credence to the claim of it being the SCO\u2019s \u201cweak link\u201d, hoping that this can strengthen the influence of Russia\u2019s pro-BRI faction. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov\u00a0effusively praised<\/a>\u00a0India during the summit though so no changes are expected under Putin, but if a member of the pro-BRI faction succeeds him, then this can\u2019t be ruled out in the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nTue, 07\/01\/2025 – 21:45<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/geopolitical\/why-couldnt-sco-defense-ministers-agree-joint-statement<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Couldn’t The SCO Defense Ministers Agree On A Joint Statement? Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack, India refused to sign the document since it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1544800,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1544799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1544799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1544800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1544799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1544799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1544799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}