It was on the sidelines of the military exercise by the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) – codenamed Peace Mission 2007 – in Russia's Chelyabinsk region, that Russian president, Vladimir Putin, announced that on August 17, at midnight, 14 strategic missile-carrying aircraft took off from seven airfields in different parts of Russia, and that “this combat duty will be held on a regular basis”. Both Putin's statement and the SCO's war games were unprecedented. The Kremlin had stopped long-range nuclear bomber flights in 1992.  It was as yet another unmistakable sign of the Kremlin's growing confidence. Since its establishment in 1996, at Beijing's behest, chiefly to settle border problems between China and its post-Soviet neighbours – Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan – the SCO had come a long way.
This down-to-earth mission did not inhibit the SCO's co-leaders, China and Russia, from developing a conceptual doctrine to underscore the fledgling multi-national organisation. At its summit in August 1999 Chinese President Jiang Zemin and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin expressed their belief in a multi-polar world – a concept at variance with the “sole superpower” status of the United States. To widen its influence, in 2005, the SCO granted observer status not only to India and Pakistan (sharing frontiers with China), and Mongolia (adjoining both China and Russia) but also Iran.
At the same time the SCO snubbed the Bush administration by rejecting its application for an observer status for the United States, ostensibly due to America's lack of common borders with China or Russia. Along with India and Pakistan, Iran has applied for full membership of the SCO. Once their applications are accepted, the expanded organisation will represent half of the world's population.Given this, it is hard to dispute the claim made by Ednan Karabayev, the Kyrgyz foreign minister, that "The SCO is destined to play a vital role in ensuring international security."
Thus, despite America's strong disapproval, a multi-polar global order is emerging – slowly but surely.
- The Guardian