Manish Tewari | What The ‘Forever Wars’ Today Will Leave Behind

The recently concluded Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Summit (SCO) summit in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, brought together a very interesting cast of characters.

As an aside the city of Bishkek or Pishpek was called Frunze between 1926-1991 when Kyrgyzstan was a part of the erstwhile Soviet Union. It was named after General Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze (1885–1925), a brilliant Soviet army officer and military theorist, who is revered to this day as one of the founding fathers of the Red Army. I had the occasion of visiting this picturesque city way back in 1986-87 at the invitation of the Students Council of the USSR (SCSU).

Coming back to the SCO summit, beyond the platitudes and homilies contained in the ritualistic Bishkek declaration and the 27 other documents it adopted, it assembled an interesting cast of characters some of whom very actively engaged in creating a new order of things through physical and technological wars. Collectively, these trends will have a profound impact on the remaining 74 years of the 21st century.

First and foremost, there is Russia and its President Vladimir Putin who launched an unnecessary transgression into sovereign Ukrainian territory in the February of 2022 after first occupying Luhansk, three quarters of Donetsk and Crimean regions of Ukraine over the previous seven years. Russia today occupies close to 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory that translates into 1,26,000 square kilometres of land area.

However, Ukrainian mastery over elements of asymmetric warfare has effectively checkmated the Russian advance after initial gains in the first year of the invasion. The frontline has not moved beyond an exchange of mere metres of territory with both the Russian and Ukrainian bogged down in a battle of attrition more representative or reminiscent of the bloody trench warfare of World War-1.

The sobering reality for Russia is the casualty rate in this Ukrainian misadventure. According to an estimate by the Centre of Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released on July 1, 2026, “Russian battlefield costs continue to mount, with as many as 4,50,000 battlefield deaths and 1.4 million casualties between February 2022 and June 2026. These rates are astounding. Russian fatalities in Ukraine are more than four times greater than all US fatalities in all wars combined since World War-2, and more than nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War-2. In addition, Russia’s monthly casualty rates of over 30,000 per month in 2026 have likely exceeded Russia’s recruitment rates of roughly 27,000 new recruits per month.”

Despite being actively aided and abetted by Nato and incrementally now once again by the US, Ukraine is also absorbing a lot of punishment. The same report states: “Ukrainian forces have suffered somewhere between 5,25,000 and 6,25,000 casualties (killed, wounded and missing) and between 1,25,000 and 1,50,000 fatalities between February 2022 and June 2026. Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties have exceeded two million.” The same report further summarises Russian battlefield casualties and fatalities are significantly greater than Ukrainian casualties and fatalities. “For much of the war, the Russia-Ukraine casualty ratio was between 2:1 and 3:1 (between two and three Russian casualties for every one Ukrainian casualty), though the rate has likely risen to nearly 8:1 in the first half of 2026…” The outcome of this conflict either as a battlefield victory or as a ceasefire agreement or even a broader armistice will determine the reconfigured European Security Architecture in the decades ahead.

Then there is Iran represented by its President Masoud Pezeshkian though the real power lies with an ‘invisible person’ Supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei not seen in public since his father’s assassination who acts through the Supreme National Security Council whose current secretary Mohsen Rezaei, in turn, was recently appointed in August 2026. Iran has absorbed over six months of US-Israeli strikes but still stands defiant backed in part by both Russia and China. It has by certain independent estimates lost over 6,000 people so far, including civilians, with another 26,500 wounded.

In Lebanon, which is an extension of the Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian battlefield, Israel has killed 8,920 people and injured 30,559 others from October 8, 2023, until September 1, 2026, according to a report published by the Lebanese health ministry.

In the Gaza Strip, according to the website Statista, till June 2026, 72,945 people were killed and 172,484 wounded in Israeli operations. Countless others are still unaccounted for as they lie buried under millions of tons of rubble. Then there is the endless civil war in Yemen between the Iranian-backed Houthis and the Saudi-backed Presidential Leadership Council, its internationally recognised government. How the Iran-US/Israel conflict ends or gets stalemated would determine the contours of Middle Eastern geostrategic paradigm in the years ahead.

Then there is China led by Xi Jinping since 2012 who has broken the two-term informal limit imposed by Deng Xiaoping and respected by his successors to consolidate power much in the mould of Mao Zedong who remained as the numero uno of the Communist state from its inception in 1949 till his death in September 1976.

Mr Xi has leveraged the economic consolidation of China over the past two and a half decades not only to project power but also to try and slip into the void that the United States is creating as a consequence of the self-defeating trajectory of the Trump Administration. Mr Xi understands that for China to play the ‘big game’ it has to move from being a manufacturing hub to an innovation platform. Herein lies the rub in the strategic competition between the US and China.

China, a very diverse production hub, now wants to make the great leap forward and become a technological giant. The US, with a robust scientific and technological base, wants to become a manufacturing frontier once again. China is chary of dependence on American technical know-how while the US wants to shake of its reliance on Made in China.

Were China to succeed given that it leads the field in 67 of the 75 critical technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it will reshape not only the Asian power dynamic but more critically the “age of monsters”, the epoch between a collapsed world order and the one yet to be incubated, as Antonio Gramchi put it very eloquently way back in the 1930s.

While the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation may be a platform to articulate a global vision to the US, the heterogenous agendas of its membership make India seem almost like an outlier to this template.