A Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit on 31 August and 1 September will be a chance for Xi Jinping to stand with his Russian and Indian counterparts and give the impression of order beyond chaos in Washington.

Xi, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi are among the 20 or so leaders, mainly from Asia and the Middle East, expected to attend the meeting in Tianjin, China. Western leaders will be conspicuously absent from the meeting of the SCO, an eclectic group of mainly autocratic countries that has grown in size and institutional complexity since its founding in 2001 by China, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

The heads of little-known Eurasian institutions, such as the Economic Cooperation Organization, will also be in Tianjin, alongside top officials from the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. However, institutions at the heart of the multilateral economic system that have been invited in the past, such as the International Monetary Fund, seem to have been left out this time.

The summit is a chance for participants to compare notes on topical issues, such as Palestinian statehood and the Ukrainian peace process, ahead of high-level meetings at the UN General Assembly in September. But the SCO claims to offer a vision for regional security and economic order greater than its backroom dealings and photo opportunities. It’s worth evaluating what those gathering in Tianjin hope to achieve.

Xi will no doubt use his speeches at the summit to bolster his image as a world leader with a coherent plan for global governance. The propaganda organs of China’s party-state will tightly control media coverage and try to shape SCO announcements to align with Xi Jinping Thought. For instance, the so-called Shanghai Spirit—a cluster of inoffensive abstract nouns posing as the foundational norms of the SCO—will probably appear as seamless extensions of Xi’s three global initiatives for development, security and civilisational harmony.

While Xi may avoid direct criticism of US President Donald Trump, he will likely present himself and China as forces for stability compared with US iconoclasm. Tapping the concerns that SCO members have about US tariffs and sanctions, Xi and his officials may, for instance, champion the wider use of payment systems and currencies that circumvent the US dollar and financial institutions. Ahead of a 3 September military parade in Beijing to mark Japan’s surrender in 1945, Xi may also exploit the SCO summit to promote the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘correct’ view of history—exaggerating the wartime contribution of the CCP while diminishing the United States’ role.

Putin will want to make it seem like those gathering for the summit—likely to include Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—support Russia’s ‘peace plan’ for Ukraine. Putin and his delegates will probably also depict the many Eurasian institutions gathering for the side meeting called SCO Plus as evidence that Russia continues to provide order and ideological leadership across its historical sphere of influence in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. In reality, the efficacy of these institutions is as dubious as Putin’s view of history. Russia is ceding regional influence to China, and Putin depends on Xi to sustain his war in Ukraine. But Putin can rely on the likes of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, one of the SCO’s newer members, to bolster the myth of Russian greatness.

Modi’s trip to Tianjin will be his first to China since a 2020 clash on the China-India border around Galwan in the Himalayas, but his decision to travel was taken well before the current phase of India-US tensions. Modi will likely seek to affirm India’s strategic autonomy at the summit, showing that it can work across geopolitical blocs, such as the SCO and the Quad, without committing itself to either camp. Despite dissatisfaction with the way India is being treated by the Trump administration, Modi will likely maintain some distance from efforts to drive the SCO in an anti-West direction. New Delhi remains alert to Chinese power and coercion and has also been pushing for stronger SCO condemnation of state-sponsored terrorism despite Beijing’s attempts to shield Pakistan from criticism.

The SCO’s agenda has grown with its membership, but it seems to have lost some of its capacity to focus. Amid lofty pledges of support for Afghanistan’s stability and reconstruction, the SCO’s members are divided on how to deal with the Taliban regime. Newer members are pushing their own agendas. For instance, Iran would like others to help it evade sanctions and blunt the sharp power of Israel and the US by supporting SCO efforts that masquerade as initiatives focused on sovereignty and countering hybrid threats. But most of the SCO’s members appreciate the risks of aligning too closely with strategic liabilities, such as the Islamist regime in Tehran. The group also has its own intramural points of friction to manage.

Fuzzy concepts—such as Eurasian values or a multipolar world order—may provide some illusion of consensus in Tianjin. But the SCO’s capacity to achieve anything will be limited while its members agree more about what they are against rather than what they are for. But that could change if the US walks further from the post-war liberal order that it established for its own enlightened self-interest. In that regard, Trump’s spectre will be felt in Tianjin, even though he isn’t invited to the feast.