Is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) the new counter to NATO? Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov fielded that question today, as reported by TASS, explaining: The SCO will not be the military-political counter to NATO. Rather, it is friendship for the sake of certain goals, and not for antagonizing others. “Actually, all relations within the SCO are built on the basis of mutual respect for each other’s interests and mutual benefit. It is rather friendship for the sake of something, and not against someone. Therefore, there is a completely different philosophy here.”
Peskov did acknowledge the difficulty posed in building such a cooperative approach, with some in the West trying to undermine it. He discussed the US’s attempts to counter-organize countries in the region. “No one is going to have any delusions on this score.” But the attempts to drive a wedge between the SCO countries does cause problems. The basis for a solution is that, as Peskov put it, the SCO economies share “a fairly high degree of interdependence.”
