First of all Bremmer consistently overlooks the structure that promotes cooperation:

1. China does not trust the US plans in the Middle East and for sea route control in the Indian Ocean, the Straits of Malacca, and E. Asia - the regions through which Chinese oil imports travel. Land pipelines fro oil and gas - like the ones being built by Russia towards China, help ensure secure energy supplies. The element of energy prices to which Bremmer points is overestimated: Russia does not determine global oil prices (and hence gas prices), its is mostly done by OPEC and by the rising power hunger of China, India, and US. The price element is a non factor and will be determined by market speculation and OPEC reaction. But obviously Bremmer needs this myth to strengthen his case against the obvious.

2. While China and Russia are both status quo powers - and USSR had freely withdrawn from Central Europe, E. Asia, Africa, and then Soviet republics, it is in fact the US that has been opening bases everywhere, inc. Central Asia, invading countries - Somalia, Serbia, Iraq, destabilizing the strategic parity between US and Russia - ABM, withdrawal from arms control treaties - and financing and promoting domestic instability in other states - Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan. US has also demanded that the former Kyrgyz president Akaev allow AWACS on his territory - right near the Chinese border, which irked China. Before being booted out from Uzbekistan, US was also planning to expand the base. Finally besides US base expansionism - Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, US is also promoting NATO expansionism. That is not at all a status quo power. So China and Russia have joined to limit and squeeze US out of Central Asia.

3. US presence in Central Asia has done nothing to curb the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan. In fact it has greatly expanded under US auspices. It has done more harm than good in Iraq and Kosovo – the latter has continued to experienced ethnic cleansing, human rights abuses, sexual slavery, and large scale heroin smuggling into Europe - all under NATO occupation.

4. What Bremmer ignores is that Chinese and Russian foreign policy vectors are in different directions - Russia towards Europe and the Caucasus, China towards East and Southeast Asia. In both cases, Russia faces US fuelled NATO expansionism and bases (in the west), and China faces US presence in East and Southeast Asia as well as growing US patrols of the sea lanes and military presence in the Middle East - from where China gets most of it oil. If anybody - including Bremmer - cared to read Chinese analysts, they show strong suspicion and worry over US energy drive and plans to, when needed, cut off China from the Middle East oil. Hence the SCO has provided security to built Kazakh and Russian pipelines to China. China and E. Asia actually provide Russia with an opportunity to diversify its energy exports away from Europe/NATO and to rebuild the local infrastructure - the planned electricity exports to China from the Russian Far East, gas and oil exports, and the transportation projects utilizing the TransSib.

5. SCO has also helped institutionalize the growing political and trade relationship between Russia and China. The old and "boogeyman" of Chinese immigration into the Russian Far East is simply that - even the reports from the local paranoid nationalist administration in the Russian Far East show no more than 15,000-20,000 seasonal Chinese migrants in the main 3-4 Russian cities in the Far East. And as anybody vaguely familiar with the Russian Far East (not Bremmer apparently) knows, if they are not in the cities, then they are surely not hiding in the taiga forests! The biggest Chinese community is in Moscow.

6. Finally, a sign of the cohesion of any political-security organization are its military preparations and games: Russia and China have conducted extensive anti-terrorist games in 2005, 2006, and 2007...have any of them done this with USA to the same extent? Politically, neither state wants to see US turn Iran into another mess like it did in Iraq, most recently. The Chinese will lose another energy supplier to US invasion, Russia will lose a southern buffer against US expansion into CIS. Russia-Chinese concerns of course do not stop there - ABM, Weapons in Space, undermining the authority of the UN.