What did Xi, Modi and Putin really discuss in Tianjin?

Here are Xi Jinping’s concluding words to the speech he just gave in front of Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin and some 24 other heads of states representing almost half the world’s population: "Where will prevails, no boundary holds" (basically the Chinese version of “when there’s a will, there’s a way”).

This couldn't be a better summary of what just transpired at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin.

Some rather condescending Western media, like Sky News, describe it as a meeting of an “axis of upheaval” seeking to bring chaos to the world. It very much feels like what one probably used to read in some media outlets in the early 20th century, when newspapers owned by industrialists characterized striking workers demanding basic rights as dangerous agitators. Or when some European newspapers in the 1950s and 60s described independence movements as destabilizing forces bringing chaos to “civilized” colonial administration.

Unbelievable but true: people eventually stop accepting systems that are designed to exploit them, or to otherwise take advantage of them. That’s not them seeking “upheaval” or “chaos”, it’s simply them doing what any rational actor does when existing arrangements consistently work against their interests.

That’s the source of the “will” that Xi Jinping references: it’s not an axis of “upheaval” but a meeting of minds between very different countries that are fed up to live in a world where they're expected to follow ever-changing arbitrary rules decided according to the interests of a handful of Western capitals, Washington first and foremost. And the SCO is them trying to find a way.

As a matter of fact, when one reads the various documents and speeches made at the SCO summit, their aspirations are anything BUT upheaval. What they’re rather trying to organize is an end to the very upheaval they argue the West has been sowing for decades through unilateral military interventions, economic sanctions, regime change operations, and the weaponization of just about anything against countries that refuse to subordinate their sovereignty.

If you were asked to describe in one sentence the principal objective deriving from the documents, it would be: “We’re trying to organize a predictable international order where countries can trade, develop, and cooperate without facing warfare every time their policies diverge from Western expectations.”

They have a point: who in their right mind could be looking at the past 30 years and not conclude that the principal agents of chaos have been precisely those powers that lecture others about stability while leaving a trail of failed states from Libya to Afghanistan in their wake? Heck, as I write these lines those same powers are facilitating an atrocious genocide in Gaza and are imposing thousands of unilateral sanctions specifically designed to hurt hundreds of millions of civilians in countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea or Russia.

One needs to suffer from an extremely severe case of Western exceptionalism and moral blindness to believe that bombing Belgrade, Baghdad, Tripoli, Gaza, Damascus, Beirut and Tehran somehow upholds “order,” while countries meeting in Tianjin to discuss multilateral governance constitutes a threat to it. I believe there’s a biblical passage about precisely this, something around having a beam in one's eye while hunting for specks in others’ (Matthew 7:3-5)…

Don't take my word for all this - let's go through the key speeches and documents from Tianjin in details.