TEHRAN – After a busy three-day visit to Uzbekistan, Iranian President Ayatollah Seyed Ebrahim Raisi returned to Tehran on Sunday night. His visit was the latest indication that a new axis is now taking shape on the world stage. 

Ayatollah Raisi visited Uzbekistan to participate in the 22nd summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The summit ended on Friday and inaugurated Iran’s membership in the Eurasian political, economic, and security bloc. The Uzbek president, whose country played host to the summit, announced Iran’s membership in the SCO. 

Iran started the process of joining the SCO immediately after Ayatollah Raisi assumed the presidency. The Iranian president launched extensive diplomatic efforts in this regard which resulted in Iran signing the memorandum of commitments at the Samarkand summit. Ayatollah Raisi described the move as an important step in the field of regional and international politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “Certainly, with the active and effective presence of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the activities of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, this membership will be recorded as one of the most important developments in the history of this organization,” he said in a speech delivered at the summit. 

In addition to SCO membership, Ayatollah Raisi also met with the leaders of China, Russia, and India among others. His meetings with the leaders of these global heavyweights grabbed global headlines as the world is moving toward a multi-polar system. 

Russia and China, along with other emerging powers such as Iran, have been subject to Western sanctions, something that created a common ground for an emerging axis comprising of countries suffering from Western unfair treatment. This has raised concerns in the West. 

“China is willing to make efforts with Russia to assume the role of great powers, and play a guiding role to inject stability and positive energy into a world rocked by social turmoil,” Chinese President Xi Jinping told Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Samarkand. 

President Putin, in turn, underlined Russia’s support for Beijing’s “One-China” policy and condemned “the attempts at provocations by the United States in and around Taiwan. Overall, I have to say that attempts at creating a unipolar world have been quite ugly and unacceptable as of late for the majority of the nations on this planet.”

The SCO has been at the center of efforts to break the unipolar world system. And it's growing. Turkey, a NATO ally of the U.S., is now targeting SCO membership. 

The reason for that is clear: the SCO is an emblem of multilateral cooperation, and not a single country within the organization is willing to dictate its agenda to other member states. 

President Putin praised this, saying, “The organization includes countries with different cultural and civilizational traditions, foreign policy guidelines and models of national development. However, building work on the principles of equality and mutual benefit, respect for each other's sovereignty and refusal to interfere in internal affairs made it possible to turn this organization into an effective mechanism for multilateral cooperation.”

Western media has dubbed the SCO summit as the dawn of a new bloc against the West. “A new Axis of Evil is forming which presents a much more terrifying threat to Western security and democracy, and its leaders are meeting today,” Daily Mail reported. “Russia, China and Iran are threatening a new 'world order', breaking up the West through cyber attacks, election interference, territorial landgrabs, bare-faced aggression, propaganda and nuclear stockpiling.”

Of course, the three countries are above such behaviors. However, their efforts to create a more balanced world order seem to have irritated the West.