Valdai Club

Enigma! This perhaps is the best way to describe the continued uncertainty over Iran’s full membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The Islamic republic first attended the SCO summit as an observer in June 2005 and in March 2008 it had applied for full membership. Nearly a decade later, certainties continue regarding its admission into the geographically contiguous political body that represents nearly 80 per cent of the Eurasian landmass.

The core problem of the Middle East is not the imperial-colonial Sykes-Picot cartography but the failure of all post-Ottoman states, including Turkey, to evolve an inclusive national identity that forges a sense of unity and common destiny.