Here are the main points of an important answer to that question by economist and former Wall Street honcho, Michael Hudson:
The six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It was joined recently by Brazil, for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China), all of which seek a multi-polar world.
If it's not a move to make US hegemony obsolete, then what's the purpose of this new organization? US diplomats may well wonder. After all, this is exactly what a multi-polar world means: no hegemony by any one country. Another clue as to what's about to happen: in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia.
It seems that the US has inadvertently driven Russia, China and their neighbors to find common ground by developing an alternative to the dollar as a dominant or reserve currency, and hence an end to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum.
Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to "build an increasingly multi-polar world order." What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States' military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate -- in exchange for paper money of questionable long-term worth!
"The artificially maintained unipolar system," Mr. Medvedev says, is based on "one big center of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks." At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is simply that the United States manufactures too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting to Russia is U.S. military spending, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and, to all the other BRIC and SCO members as well, the huge US military and commercial buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia.
The main worry of all these countries is America's ability to print unlimited amounts of dollars. Overspending by US consumers on imports (way in excess of US exports), US buy-outs of foreign companies and real estate, and the many billions of dollars that the Pentagon spends abroad . . all end up in foreign central banks. These central banks then face a hard choice: either recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the "free market" force up their currency relative to the dollar thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).