Einar Tangen and Glenn Diesen discuss the SCO Summit and the emerging multipolar world order
Glenn Diesen interviews analyst Einar Tangen on the significance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan.
Summary
Glenn Diesen hosts Einar Tangen, a senior fellow at the Taihe Institute and the Centre for International Governance Innovation, for a discussion recorded on September 1st, 2026, centred on the SCO summit taking place in Kyrgyzstan. Tangen argues that the sight of the leaders of China, Russia, India, and Iran meeting cordially represents a direct challenge to US hegemonic strategy, which depends on keeping these powers divided. He contends that the United States is behaving as a wounded and increasingly desperate hegemon — one whose domestic decline, growing debt, and loss of industrial capacity are driving erratic and aggressive foreign policy, including, he warns, Pentagon discussions about the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. Tangen also examines India's difficult position between Washington and the emerging multipolar bloc, arguing that New Delhi's attempt to play both sides is unlikely to succeed given Washington's binary "with us or against us" posture. A significant episode illustrating this dynamic is a recent glacier collapse on the Nepal-China border: Tangen describes how Indian television immediately blamed China, insisting the ice sheet fell from the Chinese side despite Reuters, AP, and other outlets reporting otherwise, and suggests the uniform talking points across channels point to coordinated messaging — evidence, he argues, that India is simultaneously pursuing diplomatic openings with China while stoking tensions for leverage. The conversation closes with a broader historical reflection on Western colonialism and extraction, with both speakers suggesting the current global transition away from hegemony, while slow and uneven, appears irreversible.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the SCO Summit
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today is September 1st, 2026, and we have the great privilege of being joined by Einar Tangen, a senior fellow at the Taihe Institute and also a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He also publishes excellent articles on his Substack, and I have left a link in the description. So thank you for coming back on.
Einar Tangen: Well, thank you for having me. I hope I don't scare anyone away from actually going to my Substack. We'll see if my efforts are worth it. But it is always a pleasure to be here — not always in terms of topics, but at least talking to somebody who's sane and cares about the future of mankind.
Glenn Diesen: Well, on the future of mankind, a lot of this used to be decided in Washington and to some extent Brussels, or at least in Europe through the past centuries. But we now see a new world emerging — a multipolar world where many of the new centres of power are in the east. There's always this question of how to organise this new economic connectivity and political cooperation. We tend to focus on BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — the SCO — gets much less attention, but again this is a key component of this emerging multipolar world. The reason why we're talking today is the SCO is now having a summit in Kyrgyzstan. For viewers not familiar with this organisation: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization began in 2001 with Russia, China, and four of the Central Asian states. They focused then primarily on security in Central Asia — that is, terrorism, secessionism — but also implicitly it was supposed to manage security competition between China and Russia in that region, to make sure it was a region of cooperation instead of competition. Then we saw a gradual transition from security towards geoeconomics. It took on more economic competencies, and by doing so it also took on more members. Today we see the SCO having many members — China, Russia, India, Iran, Pakistan, Belarus, and the original Central Asian states: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. So it's really become an important institution to facilitate this post-hegemonic world order and accommodate the many new centres of power. The SCO summit is now ongoing — it's supposed to finish today. What is significant for you about this summit?
The Significance of the Summit's Optics
Einar Tangen: Well, excellent synopsis. What's significant is a lot of it is the pictures coming out of it. Nothing gets Washington more upset than seeing the leaders of Russia, India, and China all laughing and exchanging words in a group, being very clear that their communications are strong and that they are very much interested in each other.
It goes back to what you were originally talking about — framing this kind of multipolar world. One of the things I always say is that multipolar doesn't mean good. Multipolar actually means there's a lot more room for disagreement. You can have conflicts and things like that. So how do you avoid them? You have to have some sort of shared values, and this is really important. I think this is something that China has been pushing a lot — this idea that there have to be some basics: that everyone is entitled to be secure, that no one's security can be purchased at the insecurity of another country, that every country has to have its own path to development which they determine — not determined in some other capital or by a group of bankers sitting in America or in Europe — and that there has to be basic respect for sovereignty and for the cultures involved.
In the old days, all you really needed to know was maybe Russia and the United States and a few of your neighbours, because no one else mattered. The currency system was in US dollars. Contracts were generally in English. Knowing about other countries, because you weren't doing that much trade with them unless they were your neighbours, just wasn't relevant. But in an interconnected world where supply chains run on resources that come from one end of the earth and go to the other, where value is added and then goods are sold, you have to have an understanding of who you're dealing with, especially if you want to do more business. So things have changed dramatically. Countries need to know each other — and it's not just for trade. If you're going to maintain peace, you have to understand where the other country is coming from. You have to understand their history. It's not just enough to know the language. There's too much that's lost in translation. If you don't know the Quran and you are dealing in the Middle East, you're going to have a problem. If you don't know the Bible and you're dealing in the United States, you're going to have a problem, because you're going to miss a lot of the inferences — the part of the language that goes unsaid but is implicit in what words people choose. And the same thing is true in China. If you don't understand its history, its poetry, everything down to its calligraphy, it is very hard sometimes to make sense of exactly what is going on.
The last part is this idea that you have to have some sort of governance system. There has to be a way in which, instead of throwing tanks at one another, you can sit across a table and figure out how to get things done. Implicit in this is that you don't have a hegemon. What it is, is countries come together either regionally or internationally and they reach consensus, because no more is there going to be this policeman who dictates what should or shouldn't be in the best interest of other countries while in fact taking as much as they possibly can. We're seeing a repeat of that right now in Venezuela. I'm sure the Venezuelans didn't happily all get together and decide as a democracy what a great idea it was to give their oil resources to the United States and to a private company that has nothing to do with their government or their people.
So those old ways — mercantilism, colonialism, domination, hegemony — are still very apparent in the approach of the United States. Meanwhile, in the area we're talking about, the SCO, what you see is a coming together of very powerful nations: Russia, China, India, and the others you mentioned. They're coming together because they need to figure out how they can work together. Regional blocs are forming, whether it's in Africa or South America. Their strength can go up and down, but the fact is they're protective. They want to know how they can continue to do business even in the face of a hostile country.
When I look at these three countries — and I'm not trying to ignore the other countries involved, that would be weightless — I'm just saying that the picture I saw and the impression I got was of Modi, Xi, and Putin laughing, shaking hands, being very cordial. As I said, this is the stuff of nightmares in Washington DC. The two most populous countries together with the country that has the most resources, coming together when the US desires them to be apart. They want India to be a doorstop against China. They want to split Russia and China apart because China is obviously a peer competitor — I shouldn't say peer anymore, it vastly outproduces the United States — and China needs resources, and Russia is a huge resource nation. Having this combination is exactly what Donald Trump fears.
Donald Trump is a bully. I don't think anybody — even those who like him — thinks that him being a bully is great. But the fact is he is a bully. And what do bullies fear? They fear a bigger bully, a bigger power. Donald Trump has made it perfectly clear — not so much just against the SCO, but against those members who are also part of the BRICS nations. I don't think it was a coincidence that every single one of the major BRICS five nations got 50% tariffs. What did South Africa do? What did Brazil do? Obviously India was shocked. Here they are, supposedly a stalwart ally of the United States standing against China. What happens? They get treated the same as if they were the worst enemy.
So you have a situation where much of the world is looking past the hegemonic period and saying, "Well, we're already here. When does America wake up? When does it realise you don't go to your neighbour Canada and threaten it with economic warfare and then arbitrarily start changing the names of lakes and things like this?" People think this is nonsense. It's a circus, and Donald Trump seems to be the chief clown.
In those kinds of circumstances, countries do not want a confrontation with the US. The US is stretched thin, and there is a real fear that desperation is going to drive them to actually use nukes. It is very unsettling to me that in the past few weeks the Pentagon has started talking about battlefield nukes — not in some sort of theoretical "what circumstances would we think about it" way, but in terms of using them in Iran as a way of subduing the Iranian people. These are the types of things that we should all be aware of, and they are nightmares.
So when I look at this coming together, I see optics. I see hope — the sense that there is regionalism. But I also see danger: the sense that an increasingly fragile America — and I mean economically, politically, and militarily — might feel itself pushed towards a line and start doing things that are unthinkable.
Russia, China, and the Shifting Nature of the SCO
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. Well, it's important also what you said — that it's trying to look away from hegemony — because often the rhetoric you get is that China is attempting to essentially replace the US as the global hegemon. I think in Moscow there were some concerns when the SCO initially shifted from a security institution to becoming more economic, because it meant that if it's security, it would implicitly be Russia being number one. But once it's economy, it transfers into China being the leading economy. It seemed that the Russians were comfortable with China being the leading economy as long as it wasn't dominant — as long as it couldn't dictate. And if it's only two major powers, it could become a competition. But if you enlarge the club and take in more large powers, then China will still be the leading economy but it won't be able to dominate. I think that's also something that made the Russians much more comfortable with the SCO when they brought in India, Pakistan, Iran, all of these countries. But as you said, to see the leaders of China, Russia, India, and Iran all standing together and cooperating — it kind of shows that the hegemonic system, which is very dependent on alliances that divide regions into dependent allies and balanced adversaries, is essentially breaking down. Peace is breaking out and the alliance systems begin to weaken.
Einar Tangen: Terrible. Yes. Peace. Who needs that?
Glenn Diesen: But it is, as you said, a messy construct because there are a lot of participants and relationships that have to be managed. To look at the two original members, Russia and China — what do you see being worked out between the two of them? What are the main objectives?
Einar Tangen: What's so interesting is that everybody who comes to the SCO this time, and then goes on to BRICS, has a slightly different agenda, and it reflects the needs of their country. China is continuing to push this idea that the best way to combat the US is not to confront it but to do well economically. So they're pushing economics as the key — especially for the SCO. As you mentioned, initially it was all about anti-terrorism, anti-extremism, anti-separatism. But then, because it was regulating things and it embraced these means by which you can lock a container in Europe and ship it to China without fear of something being lost — without any tax or bottlenecks along the way preventing your cargo from getting there — it made a huge difference not only at the destination ends but it became basically two-way traffic for the countries it was going through. You needed to have these protocols in place. Increasingly the economics became important, and I think this is where Russia said, "Well, this is good for us too. We trade with these countries as well. It is better to have countries that have more disposable income." Because at the same time as there's trade going through, there are also economic development zones and industrial zones being built. A lot of the industries going there are industries that are no longer profitable in China because of higher wages and higher costs in some instances. So they have naturally migrated to places where costs are lower, and that's good — it creates jobs, it creates disposable income, disposable income creates more trade, trade creates more jobs. It's a virtuous cycle, and this is what I think has made it easier for everybody involved to see this as a positive thing.
Now China continues to say, "Hey, guys, let's continue on that basis." Russia, on the other hand, has other fish to fry. They would very much like to conclude the Power of Siberia 2, which would be double the size of Power of Siberia 1 in terms of gas transportation. It makes sense — Siberian LNG is much more expensive because you have to compress it and everything like that, but pipelines themselves are not inexpensive either. It's basically mostly an upfront cost, but thereafter the price of gas goes down dramatically. China is taking it slowly. They don't want to be pressured into negotiating during a time of crisis when LNG prices are high. I think they're waiting for the right time, but they're not against it. We saw the last time Putin was in China this was mentioned, and instead of being "unless you sign this we're going to walk away," it was a very mature attitude: "We have differences. We're going to settle them at the negotiation table. This is important to both countries. It will probably happen." Ninety-nine percent sure it will happen. The question is the timing and terms.
So Russia is trying to solidify its economic outputs, especially to China, given that the rest of Europe has turned away from them and they need economies they can work with. Obviously China continues to do that. But they also want to make sure that the world knows very clearly that Russia does not stand alone. Years and years of attempts — first covertly through NATO and the slow salami-slicing approach to the previous Warsaw Pact countries, and then more recently with Ukraine, when Russia decided to openly fight back after sending many many warnings in Georgia and other places — everybody knew there would be a fight if NATO was expanding into Ukraine.
So they have a slightly different take on it. They also want to make sure that everyone sees that they have very powerful groupings — not just Iran but also India.
India's Strategic Dilemma
So coming to India — India is in a tough situation. They threw a lot of their eggs into the US basket. They were willing to be a proxy against China, basically a doorstop to Chinese expansion. But lately they've been treated, in their opinion, extremely poorly. There are suspicions that there was US involvement in the general election which cost Modi his majority, also in Nepal and Bangladesh, which have also turned from countries that were at one time neutral-friendly to somewhat neutral to unfriendly — or I should say, more friendly towards China. This has pushed a situation where China and India, whose economic relationship has been growing by leaps and bounds — China is now the number one trade partner — but it's unbalanced. So India has to figure out what to do about it.
I always like to remind people: this is not a decision by governments to do favours for other governments by buying their stuff. Indian consumers buy Chinese goods because it matches their idea of quality and price, and that's a competitive factor. So all this pearl-clutching being done in New Delhi saying, "Oh, China's overselling to us" — well, if they weren't buying from China they would be buying from somewhere else. This is the same thing with the United States. I often talk to trade representatives and I say, "Okay, so you have a problem with China. And then you have a problem with Vietnam. But you don't have a problem with the fact that you import $4.3 trillion worth of goods each year. And if you didn't buy from those countries, you'd have to buy it from some other countries, because you don't produce them." The idea that you're going to start producing these intermediate goods — chemicals, nuts, bolts, screws, plastics, all the things that are not practical in terms of cost in the United States — it's a pipe dream. No one's going to invest for 15 years to get a 3% return. No bank would lend them money. No one would say this is a good investment.
So there are very different ideas about profit and what is going to happen. A lot of what we see is the United States thrashing around — this talk about "make America great again." It's just that: thrashing. It's not attacking the problem. Certainly no one has come forward and said, "We have a real plan to deal with the $40 trillion in growing debt." Bessant coming forward and saying, "Well, we'll grow out of it" — okay, how are you going to grow out of it? Through your reindustrialisation plan, which isn't working. In fact, you've actually lost jobs in those areas.
So there's no realistic plan there. But that, as I said, is dangerous. You have a hegemon who thinks everyone else wants to be a hegemon. If I'm a thief, I believe everyone else is a thief or they're dumb, and I am just taking stuff from other people before they take stuff from me. This is the way the United States is. "We're a hegemon, and we know that anyone else who becomes a hegemon is going to do to us what we did to them." This is the real underlying fear. I've talked to people about that. They say, "Are you afraid that China might do to us what we did to many other countries?" And the response is, "Well, we were doing it for the right reasons. China won't — they just want power and money, and they want our power and money, and therefore we have the right to defend ourselves." Kind of interesting, coming from the most rich, most powerful country on earth with the largest military — somehow they have been cheated by the rest of the world, including countries that can't even feed themselves and don't have infrastructure.
But this is unfortunately the psychological reality of the United States. They feel cheated. Unfortunately, they don't reflect and realise that they have been cheated, but it's by their own political system. You've had Democrats and Republicans who've promised for years that they're going to make America better, and it didn't happen. Instead, the middle class has tumbled in terms of numbers. The number of people employed has gone up, but even illiteracy has gone up. Life expectancy has gone down. Child and infant mortality continues to rise. The US is still number one in the percentage of its citizens incarcerated. These are not the numbers of a proud nation. These are the numbers of a nation that is in deep inner turmoil, trying to figure out what's wrong. Unfortunately, kind of like a wild animal that has been wounded, it's tearing at itself as opposed to trying to find a way to fix it and be part of a world which it's not going to dominate but in which it's still going to be a major factor.
So I just want to end this particular segment by saying that we're in an era of profound change, exacerbated by a declining hegemon, and further exacerbated by the fact that we have a technological revolution which is equivalent in my mind to the industrial revolution — changing the way that people live, work, and achieve things. This is a time of great fragility for all nations. What I see when I look at the SCO are nations and leaders who are trying to come together and figure out how to work together, whereas in Washington I just see more of the same: how can we dominate or destroy.
The Technological Revolution and the Shift in Great Power Balance
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. Well, the technological aspect of this is, as you said, quite important. You said it's comparable to the industrial revolution, and there's the argument now that we're in this fourth industrial revolution as we see digital technologies being able to manipulate the physical world in various forms. It is quite important for the shift in the great powers, because in the first industrial revolution we know that the Russians and the Chinese fell behind, and they paid a heavy price. Both in the mid-19th centuries — the Russians were defeated in Crimea, and the Chinese were essentially broken and had their hundred years of —
Einar Tangen: Humiliation.
Glenn Diesen: Humiliation. So they kind of learned from this. But the industrial revolution is really when the Western powers further strengthened their asymmetrical power with the rest of the world. But this time around, in this new industrial revolution, a lot of other countries are leaping ahead and a lot of the Western countries are falling back — especially when the US tech bubble begins to burst, there are going to be some real problems. My question though was about what you mentioned — these four leaders of China, Russia, India, and Iran standing together. Obviously the Chinese, the Russians, and the Iranians are all being targeted heavily by the United States, while India is profoundly disappointed and doesn't care about this aggression by the US, like most of America's allies these days. But that being said, India still stands out. They're quite cautious. They don't want to join an anti-Western or anti-American club. And I guess the common ground could be: let's just make it anti-hegemonic. That is, we don't have to be against the US, but we should agree that we don't only use the dollar, we don't only use American banks, we can't only use American tech or only American transportation corridors. But do you see this being a key challenge for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — that they have different relationships with the United States?
Einar Tangen: Well, whether it's the United States or — let's say the United States is just one other member of the world — the fact is that the problems will still be there. Each country will have a slightly different take on what it sees as important depending on its economic situation. So that part never goes away. The question is how do you resolve it? The eastern way is you resolve it through consensus. You sit down and keep talking and keep talking until you reach at some point a means by which you say, "Okay, we agree — this is something I can live with. I don't necessarily like it 100%. Maybe the other party doesn't like it 100% either. But that's the nature of compromise." That as opposed to invading countries and taking their oil, or saying you want to annex another country and make it a 51st state, or just simply take Greenland and say it's mine, or Panama, or Cuba. Now they're even threatening the British over the Falkland Islands. It's almost unbelievable.
But let's come back to India. India's problem is that they have a very large trade surplus with the United States. A lot of it is based on job body shops — they provide services, phone callers from Mumbai, that type of thing. They don't want to give it up. There are also, even though it's down 20% overall in terms of foreign students in the United States this year, still a tremendous number of Indian students in the United States. It's still aspirational for many. But the door is closing very firmly in terms of their ability to actually stay in the US even if they complete a degree or an advanced degree. That's because it now costs $100,000 to the company that has to pay to bring you in, and then there are no guarantees — if you get fired, you basically have to leave, be rehired, and go through the lottery all over again. So the US is becoming extremely insular.
India is in the situation where they still feel they need the dollar. They want to have alternatives, but here's the problem: if they do not embrace 100% of what Washington is selling, they're the enemy. China has never said to any country, "If you trade with us, you can't trade with the US." All they've said is, "Look, if you trade with us, you cannot be part of a coalition that is trying to isolate us or go to war with us." I think that's pretty reasonable. But the US is absolutely adamant: you're either with us or against us. And if you're against us, we're going to hurt you. We're a bully. We're bigger than you are. You need to be afraid of us because we have things we can do to you that will be extremely painful.
Unfortunately, India thinks they have a middle line. Unfortunately, they don't. Right now Modi believes he's playing his cards very carefully — using Russia, China, and Iran as some sort of way of saying, "Hey, look here, I have big friends over here. Be careful. You should be nice to me." But it hasn't worked. He's tried this before. The same picture, minus Iran — it was just a year and a half ago. What happened? Nothing. They got more pressure from Washington. They didn't get any relief whatsoever.
Unfortunately, you're dealing with an increasingly fragile but absolutely rigid Washington elite who believe that everybody is out there to betray them, because these are the same people who've been cheating them for years. Once you have this victim mentality — and you can hear it, all you have to do is switch on CNN or Fox News and all you're going to hear is about who the victims are, not who they're victimising — it's a trap. You cannot get out of it because you're the one who's been aggrieved. You don't think about how other people are suffering. You only think that you have been wronged and therefore you have to get back whatever it is you want. The Washington elites have embraced this 100%.
You see the same shades of it in Europe. The German finance minister at the G20 meeting was just apoplectic that the US invited Russia, and he said there can be no relations until Russia is defeated. This kind of rigidity in the face of economic realities — Germany is not doing well. It needs cheap energy. It doesn't have to have Russian gas, but it certainly needs gas that isn't as expensive as the LNG coming from the US. They can go to alternative renewables, and they are putting in tons of solar and wind and anything they can to stabilise their energy system, but it may be too late. Once an industry leaves, it's not as simple as going back to the old factory and firing up the furnaces. New supply lines have been drawn. And then they have to look very closely at the difference between wages in Germany versus wages somewhere like Indonesia or Malaysia or India, and it becomes very difficult to justify a corporate decision to in essence take a loss or not make as much profit.
So we're heading in a difficult direction. I do think that these powers are doing the right thing by showing that there is a counterbalance to the bullying and the self-victimisation going on in the US, but it has to be done very carefully. Because as I said, it really worries me — and I know it worries you too — this idea that tactical nukes are now on the table.
Tactical Nuclear Weapons and Iran
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. I think Trump made a statement that we're no longer considering tactical nuclear weapons — something along those lines — but that means they were sitting there discussing it. And also, what he's saying today might not be what he's thinking tomorrow. So it's kind of been confirmed already to a large extent. But on the Indian issue — you mentioned that the Indians thought they could negotiate better relations with the US. But I think at the core of the problem is that the Indians want to establish themselves and act as an independent pole of power. And I think towards this end, this is the benefit of institutions like BRICS — because they can diversify their partnerships, they won't be beholden to anyone. And I think it was on this basis they want to try to improve relations with the US. But as you said, the US isn't accepting this. There will be no independent polar power, because that goes against the hegemonic policies of the United States. You can go back to 1992 when you had the Wolfowitz Doctrine come out, where they made it clear that even a strong Japan, even a strong Germany — this is unacceptable, because once they become too strong, the hegemon is over.
This is also why, when the Chinese mediated relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, this was a concern for the US — because if peace breaks out, would the Saudis be obedient to the United States? And how would Iran be weakened? The same in Europe: they were always concerned that if the two largest countries in Europe, Germany and Russia, came too close, why would Germany be obedient to the US? So you always need continuous tensions. This is also why whenever there's a border conflict between India and China, you can see the excitement between every line in every US media outlet. It makes sense if your goal is global primacy — some conflict is good, because then India will have to rely more on the United States, perhaps give up its dreams of acting as an independent polar power, and then the Americans can use the Indians as a powerful doorstop to try to weaken or balance off the Chinese. If you're a hegemon, peace breaking out really is a huge problem. You don't need outright war, but you do need tensions to continue.
But the question I was going to ask was about India and China — they've had all these tensions with the borders, but this seems to be improving now. Do you see any advancements in that area?
India-China Border Tensions and the Nepal Incident
Einar Tangen: Well, yeah, I did for a while. And then you had this situation in Nepal. I've spent the last four or five nights on Indian television with just unhinged ideas that somehow China created this or did it deliberately, and nothing rational gets through. I said, "Well, the ice sheet came down on the Nepal side." "No, it didn't. It came down on the China side." Well, how do you negate that? I said, "Look, you can look at Reuters, you can look at AP, you can look at Fox News — they all said it happened on the Chinese side." These aren't entities that are prone to either making stuff up or being nice to China. If it happened on the Chinese side and it could be verified, they would be showing that. But they don't. They show it happening on the Nepal side. And then it goes from "it happened on the Chinese side" to "it was deliberate — they should have known this was going to happen, so they slaughtered these Nepalese, and China has to take responsibility for everything that happened."
The fact is there are many projects on the Nepal side. This is a seismically unstable area. Scientists and geologists have said be very careful — not only do you have the regular seismic activity, but you also have these ice sheets which, because of global warming, are in danger of calving and doing exactly what happened. They just didn't know the extent. In fact, China had been trying to prepare for some sort of event like this, but they could not prepare for a cataclysmic event of this scale. And the question is, will it happen again?
I pointed out: the Nepalese have about six dam projects where they're trying to collect hydroelectric power — because they need it. They don't have easy access to oil or gas. Thirty percent of Nepal's imports and exports go through that town that was deluged. The inland port, as they called it — it was $2.7 billion, which may not sound like a lot to some, but this is a major part of the Nepalese economy. China put 8 billion renminbi into the infrastructure there. There were Chinese citizens there. There were foreign people there. This was not something that was planned.
But you cannot get over it. And why am I mentioning this? Because just prior to that, the same people were saying, "Well, it looks like there's going to be an icebreaker — we're going to get along better, we can work this out. The government is tamping down the tensions." But I can tell you that on many occasions, I can go on to different channels and the talking points are almost exactly the same — in the same order. This has always made me wonder: is it coincidence that this can happen ten or twenty times, or is there a kind of consensus about what questions need to be asked and who's pushing it? It is no secret that the press is owned mostly by very wealthy people who are very close to the government. I've had friends who said, "Well, we give them suggestions. They like us, we like them, and we get along very well" — indicating that the free press perhaps isn't as free as it appears. And that's a reality in India, Australia, England, and America. You had one dominant player who was in essence using the press to create power for himself, and he did very well by it. This has become a standard way of doing politics: keep them in power and they will keep you wealthy.
My point being that if there were a series of talking points being given to these stations, it means that India is playing both sides — on one side saying, "Oh, let's be friends, let's figure it out," but on the other hand playing up this particular incident to see if it creates some leverage. India likes leverage. They think they're very good at negotiations, and part of negotiations is throwing off your opponent. Are they doing this? I don't know. But to insist on something that is factually wrong — contrary to the physics of nature — and then use that to say that China wants to slaughter thousands of people, it just seemed unhinged. It seemed one step too far. And it's just hard to argue. You say the moon is made of green cheese. "Well, you haven't been there." "I haven't been there either." "Well, my opinion is just as good as yours." You know, it's the old philosophical thing — how do you disprove a negative? You can't, because it doesn't exist.
So India is, I think, trying to play what they think is a smart game and balance between the two sides. But as I said earlier, I don't think their efforts will amount to much unless they either give in completely to Washington or go completely independent. If they did go independent, there are concerns in India that they would be too reliant on Russia and China, and that's something that touches a psychological part of the Indian nature. They say, "No, India is strong. We're proud. We don't rely on anybody." Remember how Modi really got angry with the idea that Donald Trump kept saying, "We created the peace between Pakistan and India during the last war." Modi got very angry and said a number of things about how this wasn't true. It really hit a nerve — and it's not just him as a strongman politician. It really has to do with the psychology of India: that they're independent, unaligned, that they make their own rules, they follow their own path. So India is caught psychologically between the US and the rest of the world, and their place in it.
Iran, the SCO, and the Fear of US Power
Glenn Diesen: Well, irrespective of how the Indians feel towards China and their border issues, they should be cautious, because their hostility towards China makes them very vulnerable to being exploited by the United States as a frontline state. In Europe, I see that the European hostility towards Russia also made the Europeans very vulnerable. The Americans essentially set up what they were going to do — "we can destroy Nord Stream, we can do this and that" — and as soon as the conflict started, it's not just that they were thrown into a conflict with the Russians, but they became completely beholden to the US, where the US can do anything without any repercussions. So one should avoid being pulled into these things.
My last question though is about Iran. President Pezeshkian is obviously attending, but this is while the war between the US and Iran — well, the fighting is escalating, especially around the Strait of Hormuz. How does this affect the SCO, or does it affect the SCO in any way?
Einar Tangen: Well, I would argue that it strengthens it. All these countries can picture themselves in the same way as Iran. It's not just Iran — if that were it, you'd say, "Oh, there's long-standing enmity. They took over the embassy. Well, in '54 the CIA got the democratically elected government out." You can go back with a lot of history, a lot of water under that bridge. But you can't say the same thing about Cuba or Venezuela. These are not threats to the United States. Canada is not a threat to the United States. Greenland is not a threat to the United States. Panama is not a threat to the United States. The Falklands are not a threat to the United States.
So every country in the world — and I can confirm this, I talk to many ambassadors, I'm not going to say who — they're all of the opinion that they can see themselves under that heel of the American boot if they do something wrong. They're scared to death. They don't want to join any blocs. They just want to trade and do as well as they can for their country without attracting this big hammer — the US, which sees everything as a nail. They're petrified of that.
They say, "Well, how do you feel about China's approach?" "Oh, we like it. We have concerns — it's a big country, they seem to be doing a lot of things. We don't want to be swallowed up whole." They still think that any new big power is going to be like the old big power. People's mindset is that China is going to be the new hegemon and will just be a new policeman on the block who's taking things from them. They haven't quite got their head around the fact that China might be different. So they're still operating under the old normative thinking: big powers just do what they want. They're not thinking that there could actually be a civilised world where we say, "Okay, if we work together we can do more, it can be win-win, and we can have a shared future." When you say this to them, they say, "Well, it sounds great, but it sounds like pie in the sky. We all know big powers — they say stuff like this, and then when it comes down to it they just take things. We're the little guys, and we're the ones who always get taken." And they're used to that — over 500 or 600 years of this through colonialisation. It's very hard to change the mindset.
So they just want to stay as far away as possible. They want to keep their head down. They don't want to attract any attention if they can possibly avoid it. They just want these big powers to figure it out and at some point leave them alone. They still do want to trade with China, and China is at the heart of a vast economic machine that is not only buying resources from all parts of the world but also exporting value-added goods to them. And when I asked them what they think about China's willingness to share technology, they say, "Well, that's good." And I said, "Well, if they're a hegemon, don't you think they would just copy what Europe and America do — which is, we invent it, the factories stay here, and you have to buy it from us, we will extract everything we possibly can from you?" And they say, "Yeah, that's different. But who knows what China will do in the future?"
So once again, when you start looking at the world, you are actually trapped by your own worldview. If you believe nothing changes, unfortunately it's very hard to create change. If you believe that there are things that can change for the better — that the politics of plenty can in fact be a substitute for the politics of want — because remember, behind everything about America's position is the idea that we can extract more value if we create shortages. If everything's plentiful, well, that's no good — how are we going to get fair value for that? So for a long period of time, colonial attitudes have been about creating shortages and control. You want cloth? You buy it from Britain. Doesn't matter that the cotton was grown in your backyard. It has to be taken to Britain, and then you can buy cloth from Britain, and we take a tax on it. It was extraction. It's always been that way. But those were the days of empire. China is not an empire. It's not trying to be an empire. It sees the mistakes of empires — that empires start out great but in the end they fail, because the sheer inertia of everything they do to take things from groups ends up coming back to them. So hopefully China's lessons are something that other countries can take to heart, and maybe start believing that the future can in fact be better. It doesn't have to be about who's the biggest bully.
Historical Roots of Western Extraction
Glenn Diesen: Yeah. Well, I think the Americans learned this from the British. I forgot — it was in the beginning of the 19th century when the Americans were pushing this American system to industrialise. The British prime minister made a point that if the Americans so much as build their own horseshoe, "I will fill their ports with troops" — something along those lines. So it was a kind of — yeah, it's not a new thought.
Einar Tangen: Well, you can go to the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese — you can go back a long way with these things. And then you can talk about the Crusades. The fact is — and this is something that's very hard for Europeans to understand — we were the barbarians. We're not the civilised people. The civilised people were the ones we came in and took stuff from. The Persian Empire was a place of peace and prosperity where different religions were allowed to practise under their own terms. They all had to pay taxes, but they could live according to their own values. They had medicine, astronomy, libraries. What did we do? We burned them. Why? We didn't understand that stuff. We were the barbarians.
And now, unfortunately, the barbarian time period is running out. It doesn't work well anymore because the global economics have changed. Controlling trade is not possible unless you have the logistics, the efficiency, the energy, the resources, and the knowhow to create value. That wasn't the old way. The old way was just: can I get some spices, how long is it going to take, how much can I charge? The world changes. We need to change with it. The question is how long will it take the United States to realise that the old ways are not the new ways.
Glenn Diesen: Well, it was two years ago that President Putin, when he referred to the end of the Western-dominated international order, said that "the vampires' ball is coming to an end" — essentially referring to this era of exploitation. Anyway, I'll be watching the SCO summit finishing off. It's interesting — one shouldn't expect the world to change overnight, but there are these incremental steps which are quite important. It will always be two steps forward, one step back, but nonetheless a lot of these changes don't seem like they can be reversed. So thank you very much for taking the time. I appreciate it.
Einar Tangen: Thank you for having me, Glenn. Always a pleasure. Take care.