TEHRAN, Iran — Uzbekistan hosted the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) on June 23-24. As expected, Iran’s accession was one of the main topics on the agenda. However, according to Russia's special presidential envoy, Bakhtier Khakimov, SCO members failed to reach an agreement on initiating the accession process for Iran despite Moscow’s support for the idea, once again triggering debate over the reasons behind the rejection of Iran. However, a more important and fundamental question is whether Iran really needs to join the SCO at all.

Having been an observer state in the organization since 2005, Iran presented its request for full membership in 2008 under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad’s attempts to join the SCO were part of his grand foreign policy approach called "Look to the East," the main basis of which was strengthening relations with Asian and Latin American powers to offset Iran’s deteriorating ties with the West. However, SCO members — above all Russia — rejected Iran’s request. They argued that SCO regulations disqualify countries under international sanctions for full membership status.

Over the past year, in the wake of the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers and the lifting of sanctions, discussion of the possibility of Iran’s accession to the SCO was once again seriously raised. Interestingly, Russia has this time presented itself as the idea's main supporter. However, the fact of the matter is that the Russian policy shift is more closely related to Moscow’s own situation following the 2014 Ukraine crisis than to post-sanctions Iran. The Ukraine crisis, which led to the most serious confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cold War, prompted Moscow to develop its relations with key regional players in its neighborhood and strengthen multilateral regional structures to offset the pressure from NATO and the United States. Russia’s expanding bilateral relations with China and Iran, its plans to develop the Eurasian Economic Union and its attempts to play a more active role within the SCO are just a few of the indications of this trend. Indeed, for the Russians, pursuit of this approach is so important that on June 24 — just one day after the failure to initiate Iran’s admission process — President Vladimir Putin once again said that there is no obstacle to Iran's accession to the SCO.

China, as the other great power in the SCO, has a somewhat similar approach to the need to strengthen the organization. Over the past two years, China has entered a cycle of increasing tensions with the United States over a range of issues, especially its sovereignty over the South China Sea. Thus, Beijing shares Moscow’s view of the necessity of balancing US actions through the expansion of regional cooperation.