By: Salman Rafi Sheikh‘Basket of deplorables’ no longerThe Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in China ended with a grand victory parade, but the real significance of the spectacle lay far beyond the military hardware on display. This shift was symbolized by Prime Minister Modi’s visit to China—his first since 2019—to attend the SCO summit. By leaving the war unmentioned, the SCO essentially declared: Ukraine may be your obsession, but it is not ours. For China and Russia, the refusal to frame Ukraine as the world’s defining conflict is an assertion of narrative power. Meanwhile, China is busy building the scaffolding of a post-American order—one bank, one bloc, one carefully staged summit at a time.