How Beijing is neutralising Washington’s sanctions machine

Last week, the president of the United States stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and asked aloud whether he should “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly”. Donald Trump then turned to Venezuela’s oil and declared: “To the victor belong the spoils, you’ve all heard that …”He spoke as the Iran war neared its eighth month, a week after the UN Human Rights Council found “reasonable grounds to believe” that the US had committed war crimes. In the same speech, Trump said the United States would not join global regulation of AI and urged countries to abandon the International Criminal Court.Elsewhere this month, the picture looked very different. In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, all 10 member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) gathered to mark its 25th anniversary. The bloc began in 2001 as a club of six. This year’s summit produced 27 documents alongside the Bishkek Declaration, which condemned the military strikes on Iranian territory by the US and Israel as violations of international law.