In the wake of a summit between America’s foremost global adversaries, China, Russia, and Iran, experts are noting that the united front the group attempted to display as a counterweight to U.S. global influence is not as united as it seems.

From August 31 to September 1, the 26th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit took place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The SCO is a Eurasian alliance originally organized by Beijing, currently composed of China, Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. With the Iran and Russia-Ukraine conflicts still raging, outlets have noted that this year’s summit was billed as “a counterweight to U.S. global influence,” with Iran and Russia desperate to shore up support for their protracted wars and China eager to wrest power and influence away from the West.

“China has been trying to use it as an anti-U.S. organization, like they’ve tried to use the BRICS grouping for that purpose,” explained Gordon Chang, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, during “Washington Watch” Wednesday. But as he went on to point out, one powerful country was not so easily cowed toward allegiance to Xi Jinping’s communist regime.

“[N]ormally SCO summits are snooze affairs … [but] this one was a little bit different, and the reason is because it comes at the time of the Iran war,” he observed. “The Bishkek Declaration, which concluded this summit, was very anti-U.S., very pro-Iran. … Now India signed on to that anti-U.S. declaration, but Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi gave the one speech, the only speech at the summit that didn’t pledge allegiance to Beijing. And so really, what you’ve got is India very much a counterweight to China in … the SCO [and] the BRICS grouping.”

Still, Chang went on to detail how China is using the SCO to undermine the U.S.

“Iran is basically China’s proxy, so the declaration after the summit talked about condemning the U.S. attacks on Iran, declaring support for Iranian sovereignty, declaring support for Iran’s ‘peaceful’ nuclear weapons program,” he described. “They [also] supported [a] ‘multi-polar world,’ which is China’s code term for a world dominated by China, where the U.S. is no longer a factor. … [T]hese are Chinese narratives, and China uses these organizations to propagate them. Most of the time people don’t listen, but this summit was different. This was an important one because it comes at a critical moment in this decade.”

Chang went on to emphasize China’s outsized role in the Iran and Russia conflicts. “[N]either Iran nor Russia would be able to fight were it not for China’s backing. In terms of the Ukraine war, China’s support is across the board. … [They have] supplied everything but combat personnel [to Iran]. But this is serious because these two wars threaten peace and stability … in a moment where we could see other wars start. So this is really, I think, a critical turning point of our era.”

At the same time, Russia is currently hosting the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok, in which almost 80 countries with 5,000 representatives are attending, with an eye toward bolstering foreign investment into the regime as its war on Ukraine has dragged on for four and a half years. But Chang highlighted that a conflict appears to be brewing with China in Russia’s eastern region.

“China’s state media is starting to propagate the narrative that Vladivostok and a good portion of that far east of Siberia should be China’s,” he shared. “Now, China has been the main investor in the Russian Far East, whe[re] you have a lot of Chinese people crossing the border [and] setting up homes. The Russians are apoplectic about this, but they don’t have a choice because they cannot provide any sort of funds and support for the Far East beyond just minimal support. So … the Russians are sort of in an impossible situation. They need Chinese money, but they know that with Chinese money they could lose their hold over Siberia.”

Nevertheless, Chang concluded by voicing “extreme concern” over the developing relationship between Moscow and Beijing. “Russia is called the junior partner, but Russia is more important than we think in this partnership, because the Russians go out and do what Xi Jinping would like to do, knows he must do, but feels he can’t do, and that is to go out and disrupt the world directly. … Putin is very much an important part in that enduring ‘no limits’ partnership, as they call it.”