China’s paper-tiger alliance shows the US can’t isolate Iran

The conflict between the US and Iran is beginning to flare again and President Donald Trump says he couldn’t care less. He’s confident his new plan for an “Economic D-Day” that brings Iran to heel by collapsing its economy is a winner. Perhaps, but making it so will take a great deal of international cooperation. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it: “You’re either with us or against us.”

Bessent was echoing George W. Bush, when the then-president told Congress after 9/11 that every country in the world would have to choose to either be with the US, or against it on the side of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorists. Sadly for Bessent, his boss and a beleaguered Iranian people, this isn’t 2001. It’s 2026, a time a world away in which the appeal is set up to fail.

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That matters, because the difficulty with Trump’s economic strangulation, as I’ve argued before, is that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is more comfortable with continuing a state of low-level war. Accepting a peace that leaves the regime without the major financial and geopolitical gains it would need to placate a still deeply hostile population is more dangerous to its survival. Trump needs a near-total financial blockade to swiftly force Tehran to capitulate, because the IRGC commanders who now dominate decision-making there are unlikely to oblige otherwise.

Bush was able to command the rest of the world not just because there was genuine horror and sympathy at the carnage of 9/11, or because Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was a non-state actor whose only ally was the Taliban. He could do so also because the US was still the world’s undisputed hegemon, with NATO allies so eager to help out that they invoked the organization’s Article V collective defense clause on Washington’s behalf, so they could join the fight.

Back then, the only countries that didn’t accept US leadership were the so-called rogue states Bush listed in his January 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech: Iran, Iraq and North Korea (and even Iran at first cooperated against Al Qaeda). Moscow and Beijing had formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) just a few months before, with a major goal of managing competition between the two regional powers’ interests in central Asia. The BRICS alliance of emerging markets wouldn’t be conceived until five years later. The Global South wasn’t yet a thing.

So, Bush could be confident that the world would, indeed, be “with us.” It was only two years earlier, after all, that Washington had led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a much more divisive cause. Its pilots bombed Serbia for 78 days straight, much as the US and Israel have been bombing Iran. Despite profoundly opposing this attack on a traditional ally, Russia decided it had no choice but to acquiesce; it even helped negotiate Serbia’s surrender.

None of this is imaginable today. The SCO, which held its 26th annual summit this week, now has a much more global focus and at least as much (or as little, depending on your point of view) substance as the Group of Seven industrialized nations. It represents about 40% of the world’s people and a quarter of nominal gross domestic product. Much commentary focuses on the group’s limitations as a potential alliance, given that it includes NATO member Turkey, as well as India and that country’s bitter geopolitical rivals China and Pakistan. But this misses the point.

The SCO was not designed to be NATO-style military alliance. It can be a paper tiger and still serve its purpose, which at this point is to provide China and Russia with a forum and a toolkit for balancing US power and influence in Eurasia. In fact, judging by the comments of Western allies meeting in North Carolina for this week’s virtually simultaneous meeting of G20 finance ministers, the SCO is the more harmonious of the two blocs. In Ashville, Bessent boasted about US economic prowess, and defended measures — including a trade war with Canada and the sale of US reserves (using euros rather than dollars) to drive up the value of the yen — that damaged supposed allies. The SCO message was consensus driven by comparison: The common goal of that organization is to displace US hegemony, often now expressed in the form of sanctions, and India’s on board for that, too.

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So the SCO is not “with” the US, it is with Iran. It is not with Western Europe or Ukraine, it is with Russia. China’s President Xi Jinping may have downplayed the protocol for his meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, so as not to blow up his coming visit to Washington, but Russia’s Vladimir Putin did the heavy lifting of supporting a fellow SCO member against US aggression for him. This is a world in which there are no longer “rogue” states, because there’s a forum led by the world’s coming superpower that will embrace them.

The talk at the Aug. 31-Sept. 1 SCO summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan was of how to invest more in and trade more with Iran. Tehran’s friends will still be cautious when it comes to delivery, because America’s capacity to lash out and impose costs remains formidable. But they won’t be with the US. They’ll be against it, whenever and wherever they can.