The annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) broke in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on Thursday after several hours of photo-ops and grandstanding. On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao will attend military exercises in the Chelyabinsk region in Russia's Ural Mountains. Some 6,000 Russian and Chinese troops, dozens of aircraft and hundreds of armored vehicles and other heavy weapons will participate — the first such joint drills on Russian soil. Moscow is most certainly on the move. In the past few months, Russia has pushed against the Baltics and the Caucasus, and it is spinning up for a major effort to bring Ukraine firmly back into its orbit. The United States is distracted by Iraq and unable to act as a check on Russian ambition. The political battle lines along Russia's western frontier are hardening; the question there is, will the United States will be too distracted to push back? And will anyone in Europe dare move against Russia without the Americans at their back? Geopolitically, Russia is on the move. But looking eastward, as the cities of Europe give way to the steppes of Asia, the grand geopolitic of the Russian resurgence becomes less clearly defined. Unlike Europe, Russia's other border regions are not made up of relatively hostile alliances and economic groupings. The players are more opaque and resistance to Russia's whims is mushy. Enter the SCO. The grouping was originally formed between China, Russia and a handful of former-Soviet Central Asian autocracies in order to manage the tangle of new borders resulting from the Soviet Union's demise. That the SCO achieved peacefully and successfully. Since then, the organization has groped about for a reason to be. At times it seems a step away from becoming a framework for a Central Asian alliance; at other times it seems doomed to be reduced to a talk shop. Thursday's summit — at which bland promises about law enforcement cooperation and forming a common university were the main takeaways — seems to fall into the latter category. About the only thing that the SCO can reliably agree on — and this has become the SCO's perennial anchor point — is that it does not want the United States mucking around in Central Asia. China is Russia's key rival in Asia. Russia's problem in harnessing organizations such as the SCO to its needs are simple: There is another major power poking around in the region. That power, of course, is China. And as Moscow and Washington settle into dangerously familiar patterns, the question inevitably will be: which side is China on? Russia and China are hardly hostile to one another, but there is certainly an inbuilt tension. The Chinese consider part of the Russian Far East to be their territory, and many of the native Central Asian and Siberian cultures are far more closely tied to Beijing than to Moscow. China needs masses of resources in order to continue developing — resources that lie just across the border with Russia. It is in Central Asia — specifically under the aegis of the SCO — where these two Asian giants meet and compete. While Russia is clearly the more aggressive power, it has been coasting on its imperial and Soviet links to maintain influence in the region, while the Chinese have been steadily and unobtrusively asserting their influence in subtle but effective ways. Nearly all of the Central Asian road, rail and energy infrastructure built before 1991 accesses the outside world via Russia — nearly all built since then accesses the world via China. Central Asia has shifted from Russia's orbit to China's. The Russia-China disconnect is more than "simple" competition, and is both geopolitical and strategic in nature. Russia wants to push out and re-establish its empire; China wants to keep its head down and deal with its internal problems quietly. But ultimately, the two cannot form a functional alliance because of a fundamental difference in mindset: Russia feels it is destined for a conflict with the United States, while China wants to avoid one at all costs. So long as that remains the case, the United States maintains the freedom to play the two powers against each other as the politics of the day demand — just as it did for the last generation of the Cold War — and the SCO will remain a place where Russian and Chinese differences are peaceably compared, but never really resolved.