Photograph Source: President.az – CC BY 4.0

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s meetings in China last seek (September 2 and 3) took a remarkable step forward in defining how the world will be dividing into two great blocks as Global Majority countries seek to free their economies not only from Donald Trump’s tariff chaos, but from the U.S.-sponsored increasingly Hot War attempts to impose unipolar control on the entire world’s economy by isolating countries seeking to resist this control with trade and monetary chaos as well as direct military confrontation.

The SCO meetings became a pragmatic forum to define the basic principles that are to replace other countries’ trade, monetary and military independence from U.S. with mutual trade and investment among themselves, increasingly isolated from reliance on U.S. markets for their exports, U.S. credit for their domestic economies, and U.S. dollars for trade and investment transactions among themselves.

The principles announced by China’s President Xi, Russian President Putin and other SCO members set the stage for spelling out in detail the principle of a new international economic order along the lines that were promised 80 years ago at the end of World War II but have been twisted beyond all recognition into what Asian and other Global Majority countries hope will have been just a long detour in history away from the basic rules of civilization and its international diplomacy, trade and finance.

It really should not be surprising that not a word of these principles or their motivation has appeared in the mainstream Western press. The New York Times depicted the meetings in China as a plan of aggression against the United States, not as a response to U.S. acts. President Donald Trump summarized this attitude most succinctly in a Truth Social post: “President Xi, Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”

U.S. press coverage of the SCO meetings in China presents a foreshortened perspective that reminds me of the famous Hokusai etching of a close-up tree in the foreground completely overshadowing the distant city in the background. Whatever the international........

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