Much is said these days about the BRICS, but perhaps few are aware that the current group is the independently evolved fruit of a 2001 document entitled “Build Better Global Economic BRICs ” published by Goldman Sachs, the large U.S. investment bank that first used the acronym BRIC to refer to a pool of four developing economies that had, according to analysts in the Global Investment Research Division of Goldman Sachs led by Jim O’Neill, the potential needed not only to attract substantial investment, but even to reshape the new world economy-and not only that.
As expected, between 2000 and 2009 the pace of growth in emerging economies outpaced that of developed countries for the first time thanks primarily to the four engines of future global growth identified by Goldman Sachs Economic Research in 2001. The first formal summit of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) leaders was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 2009; South Africa joined the BRIC, mutating it into BRICS as recently as 2011.
Interestingly enough, the document drafted under the leadership of Jim O’Neill not only predicted that within 10 years the weight of the “BRICs”-particularly China-on world GDP would grow significantly, and consequently so would the overall economic impact of the four countries’ fiscal and monetary policies, but also that-as O’Neill himself expressly suggested-it would be exceedingly appropriate to modify the G7 in such a way as to incorporate representatives of the BRICs into it.
Unfortunately, although the average annual growth rates recorded by India and China in the period 2000-2009 were 6.89 percent and 10.35 percent, respectively, the suggestion had no effect because of the short-sightedness of U.S. and Western policy in general.
The opulent West merely looked at the BRICs (and since 2011 the BRICS) solely from the perspective of investment opportunities, leaving them to coordinate with each other in full autonomy both in terms of the most appropriate choices to be made on common policy issues and challenges and in terms of what operational choices culminated in the establishment of the BRICS Development Bank, a financial Trojan horse aimed at mobilizing the resources needed to support infrastructure and sustainable development projects in both BRICS countries and other emerging and developing markets of strategic interest.
In a way, the BRICs, first, and the BRICS, later, for a long time were able to benefit, almost away from prying eyes, from the little attention paid to them by the world of global politics and the Western world in particular, which, having given way to the world of global finance, meant that these countries were considered only from the point of view of economic potential, i.e., only as geographic areas to be exploited – in accordance with the usual and still entrenched neo-colonialist mentality – either: for relocations of productive activities in order to benefit from less stringent labor disciplines, less oppressive tax regimes as well as significantly lower labor costs (wages): all of which promised to maximize profits from direct investments, and to plan purely speculative activities that were highly profitable.
Little or no attention was, in this context, paid to the possible effect of the BRICS on world governance, which with too much confidence the West almost until the beginning of the third decade of the new century assumed was and would remain firmly in its own hands, so that for long years the warnings of those who had long turned their attention to how it was all developing were worth little, urging a change in the framework of global economic governance, as done, among others, by the aforementioned Jim O’Neill, who had entrusted such assessments, in unsuspected times, to one of his important, though little-known articles of Nov. 30, 2001, entitled “The World Needs Better Economic BRICs” that appeared in No. 66 of Goldman Sachs’ Global Economics Paper.
Jim O’Neill’s merit, unheeded like any self-respecting Cassandra, was that he was among the first in the world to have understood the enormous potential -also and above all political- for the development of the BRICS (potential defined and consequently evaluated using, as he himself stated in subsequent papers, the standard methodology of macroeconomics, according to which real economic growth is determined by two variables: the size of a nation’s labor force and the productivity of the economy).
Be that as it may, the BRICS have represented, in the vast global landscape, a rather important autonomous development phenomenon for hundreds of millions of people who, thanks in part to them, have emerged from absolute poverty benefiting from the growth trend that without the pandemic in the last decade would have been around +3.6 percent, despite all the challenges, significantly higher than in the 1980s and 1990s, which had registered an interesting +3.3 percent.
From a certain point of view it comes to say that what is happening today has in fact been triggered by Western political short-sightedness, which with the introduction of the “BRIC” concept triggered that process of cooperation and collaboration among policy makers of these different countries on issues ranging from agriculture, trade, environmental policies, national security and international finance, which nowadays has translated into something, into an alternative economic alliance capable of challenging, with very good chances of success, Western hegemony.
The real problem that needs to be addressed at this point consists of trying to understand whether what is on the horizon, whether near or far, will really be ameliorative of the current situation or will consist of the usual changing of the guard to which history has all too often accustomed us. The present paper, while objectively impossible to be exhaustive, aims to frame the recent history of this something we call BRICS in order, if nothing else, to take stock of the situation and identify the key questions that await dutiful and necessary answers.
Personally, I believe that talking about the BRICS, their projects, their challenges to the Western system all under the banner of fashionable Third Worldism is just a ploy for the use and consumption of those who, the dispossessed in the exploited areas of the planet, will have to shoulder the greatest burden, the greatest sacrifices that the establishment of the alleged polycentric New World Order will entail globally if it ever comes into being.
Mind you, the geopolitical project pursued by BRICS and the words to describe and convey it are beautiful, but this exactly traces the first phase of the classic revolution described by Orwell in “Animal Farm,” all under the slogan “All animals are equal!”
Once the USD has been undermined or, even more likely, once the USD has been reduced to the rank of one of the reference currencies-something the latter which I think more likely the BRICS may be able to achieve, albeit in the undefinable future, because of U.S. shortsightedness (which I stigmatize not out of anti-Americanism, but because it is a leading country although it has lost its capacity ) generating something that will bring serious problems to all the economies of the West, but not only-all will pass to the second phase of the Orwellian revolution, the one, just to make a point, all under the banner of the slogan “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others!” even though the phrase, at that point, will appear written in Chinese: 所有动物都是平等的，但有些动物比其他动物更平等.
In Chinese because that will be the time of China’s monocentric monetary leadership coming after transiting through a short-lived BRICS oligarchic monetary system.
Why do I assert this? It is very simple: only China has the strength to do so, the culture, the experience, the diplomatic capacity and shortly the military and financial means necessary for the purpose.
Russia could play a comprimario role, but due to objective conditions it is bound hand and foot -and will remain so for a long time- to Beijing’s wishes with which it will not have the opportunity to compete in toto: it certainly has the raw materials, but to whom could it sell them directly and, above all, how? It could play the African card, but it is not and never will be the factory of the world and this penalizes it in no small measure and not as of now.
From being a feudal country without an industrial plant worthy of the name, it came to Communism without going through entrepreneurial liberalism and became a feudal-type industrial reality under the leadership of the PCUS and Stalin. When the Stalinist era closed, it became something that from feudal tried to mutate into an undefined and definable liberal-communist reality, but it failed completely, imploded and in its present state is what we see: a bad imitation of liberalism in a state-like form vitiated by the lingering feudalism that changed from bureaucratic-Marxist to oligarchic: too little to express a RUB capable of competing with the Chinese currency.
Of India I do not even waste time talking: it is a great country, with a great tradition, history and culture capable of doing egregious things in every field, but unfortunately it is a country in the grip of contradictions stemming from an absurd religious tradition: India is the India of castes, India is the India of Inter-religious conflict and as such at most destined for a role as a Regional Power that cannot in the least change quickly into something modern to the point where it can compete with China or even with present-day Russia. Then we have Brazil and South Africa, which we can safely leave alone in this summary examination.
The real problem is that I believe a fundamental concept has not been grasped: what China is carrying out, relying on the support of good-hearted deluded visionaries such as the many who in various capacities have written and still write on the issue at hand with much love and faith disaminations tainted by a romantic as well as inconclusive third-worldism, is an act of outright war against the United States of America, which Beijing and Xi Jinping surely thank in their hearts for taking away from them the only real possible competitor: the dead and buried, even before it was born, United States of Europe.
Having managed all European policy from a neo-colonialist perspective for the sole purpose of using its geostrategic potential, derived primarily from its geographical centrality, to obviate the contingent problem posed by its position on Planet Earth (that of the United States being a kind of large island separated from the rest of the world by no less than two Oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific), has meant that an autonomous entity could not be born, yes, but at the same time culturally and strategically allied in the foreseeable dispute with China.
Not to mention the mistake of having thrust into Beijing’s arms that Russia which on several occasions the far-sighted Henry Kissinger wanted to be welcomed by the West as an integral part of it-and the more far-sighted pro-Europeans sought to bind it to the Old Continent by adopting policies capable of creating the economic interdependence that would not only have secured Peace in Europe, but would have enabled an enlarged West to contain Chinese expansionism westward, including militarily, by exploiting the Russian-Chinese frontier that would in no small measure even reduce the cost of NATO’s entire defense program by helping to contain relative spending and the related budget deficit.
It corroborates this thesis what can be gleaned from an article by Daryl Guppy, published by the China Daily on August 30, 2023 under the title “Beyond militarization,” which, after emphasizing the positive implications arising from economic prosperity in the Global South and the digitization of the economy as a harbinger not only of emancipation from the USD and unilateral sanctions, dwells implicitly on the costs of the complex containment of a China surrounded by more than 300 U.S. military bases evidently deemed insufficient for the purpose if at the recent Camp David summit President Biden saw fit to make new arrangements with Japan and the Republic of Korea consisting of an additional security consultative commitment that somehow binds the contractors to talk to each other in the event of a crisis or security threat in the Pacific: something Beijing has been quick to point out as a truly major threat to peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region being an extension of U.S. efforts to expand NATO into a global network.
All fair, all true, but paradoxically, in the light of the above, all perfectly justified by the instrumental use of statements about BRICS-promoted economic cooperation acted upon by China’s strategic philosophy, which in no small measure justifies the Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s decision to abandon the principle the principle of a defense-oriented strategy by focusing on enhancing its counterattack capability translated in the immediate term into Japan’s granting permission to the United States to station an advanced Marine Corps unit in Okinawa.
Chinese diplomacy is manifestly something that should certainly be studied very carefully as it represents the most brilliant example of a warlike use of provocation implemented by ostensibly promoting Peace.
Promoting, in fact, all that the Johannesburg summit has been about, and then blatantly beginning by stigmatizing the recent Camp David agreement with the rhetorical implicit question, steeped in false astonishment, that appeared in the aforementioned China Daily article (“All this is being portrayed as a defensive response to supposed adversaries, but one wonders: who is planning to disrupt trade with China, Japan’s main trading partner? Certainly not China, even though that is the clear objective of the Camp David summit.”), -which at this point we can and should read and invite to be read with a decidedly more shrewd eye-, highlights in no uncertain terms all the danger of China’s well-thought-out strategy aimed at building a Multipolar New World Order in words alone.
Admirable, then, of course passing over in silence the entire body of military provocations put in place by China targeting the waters facing a and the skies over Taiwan, Beijing’s ability to instill in U.S. allies the doubt of having made the right strategic choices, as witnessed by China of this (note: the Camp David Accord) is portrayed as a defensive response to supposed adversaries, but one wonders: who is planning to disrupt trade with China, Japan’s main trading partner? Certainly not China, although that is the clear goal of the Camp David summit.
Some in Japan fear that strengthening security cooperation could lead the country into an economic cold war with its main trading partner. Others in the region fear that Japan’s military objectives will extend further, perhaps supporting U.S. attempts to stir things up across the Taiwan Strait.”
And what about the instrumental, albeit true, strategic historical recasts that it comes in handy, nearly 80 years after the end of hostilities, to resurrect those disputes that revived today bring new sap, emotional this time, to Beijing’s strategies?
We have a clear example of this in the same article by Daryl Guppy when he writes: “The Republic of Korea remains tied to the United States as a necessary bastion of support in the continuing conflict with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea because the Republic of Korea has refused to sign the Korean Armistice Agreement. There is a 70-year truce in the hostilities, but technically a state of war still exists. No wonder the DPRK feels constantly threatened with attack.
Having to rely on U.S. military support, the Republic of Korea chose to adhere to U.S. policy directives at Camp David, despite widespread distrust of Japan’s political motives and commitment to peaceful stability. This distrust is the legacy of World War II’s massacre of civilians, torture and slavery in mines and factories, as well as enduring disagreements over disputed territory.”
As we can well see, the divide and rule of ancient Roman memory is always a guiding principle of the best strategy, which was and remains the one that in order to sow discord in the opposing camp goes so far as to pass off as certain news (a typical tactic of war propaganda) a mere inference such as that “The idea that the Camp David summit produced a rapprochement between Japan and the Republic of Korea is a fabricated press release under pressure from the U.S.” as undefined “polls” would show that “a solid majority of people in the Republic of Korea oppose Yoon’s handling of the forced labor issue and this reflects a broader unease about Japan’s commitment to regional peace.”
It is hard to give credence at this point to the good faith of Beijing, which has dusted off the issue of sovereignty over Taiwan when necessary to justify all those intimidating measures and actions that have prompted the United States to launch a plan to engage its allies in a belated attempt to put in place a more synergistic and coordinated effort to contain a China that thus capitalizes on the undoubted advantage of running up the already more than soaring budget deficits of Washington’s allies.
When Beijing accuses the United States of bringing a physical threat to trade routes, the use of economic sanctions and the use of the U.S. dollar as a weapon, as well as the establishment of the U.S. security alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom (known as AUKUS), the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue the new military agreements with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, and the attempt to expand NATO in the region, one wonders (see, for example, what was reported in a 2022 article of mine published by The States General under the title “Taiwan, green energy and the fear of China” i.e., republished by IBI World in English under the title “Taiwan, green energy and the fear of China”) what all the measures taken by the Chinese government to boycott Taiwan’s off-shore wind energy project, which is essential to enable the peacetime operation of strategic companies here operating in the high-tech chip manufacturing industry -of which it is a world leader- for both civilian and military use, have pointed to, threatening in sum, in fact, its trade routes and thus its ability to meet -on time and in a contractually agreed manner- the demands of European and U.S. companies for the purpose of blatantly undermining its ability to maintain its market shares and consequently its employment and its ability to sustain its national economies, i.e., to provide for the stability of its defense apparatus?
Only when Beijing has clarified its position on this matter, as well as clarified its attempts to bind the Pacific Rim countries to itself by any means, including intimidation put in place through diplomatic channels, will it be able to stand up as the champion of global peace, planetary multipolarism and all the fine projects it cleverly shows off by the mouth of President Xi Jinping on every possible occasion and in every forum, including that of the recent BRICS meeting.
In light of the facts, when the China Daily goes to close its examination concerning Western strategic choices, offering the reader the following two paragraphs:
“This is a policy initiative based on the assumption that China could somehow harm global trade by taking some unspecified action in the South China Sea. It is not explained why China would choose to block its vital trade routes, nor why its major customers would block maritime trade with China, thereby damaging their own economies. The illogical basis of the Chinese threat is apparently beyond dispute for those who stand behind the United States,” and again
“The illogical thinking behind this complex situation makes it difficult for Asian countries and the Global South to find the right choice. China has shown no inclination to develop an extensive network of military bases in the region or in the Global South, much less near U.S. shores. Chinese submarines do not probe U.S. coastal waters or conduct freedom of navigation exercises between Florida and Cuba. China has not even entered into military agreements similar to those promoted by the United States.”
One wonders why the right remarks are not also referred to the Chinese government whose modus operandi has for years traced point by point -and with the same motivations- that of the U.S., with the only difference being that Beijing’s chosen battleground is the economic and financial one having well understood that military occupation of a territory is nothing compared to gaining economic control of it using free market rules and monetary strategies.
If mistakes have been made by the West, it is right that they should be blamed and its unchallenged leader, the United States of America, should be held to account to remedy them, but do so with the knowledge, however, that its greatest detractor, China, that war it accuses Washington of wanting to unleash at any cost has already started long ago thanks to the means with which the very West has endowed it by making it the undisputed factory of the world.
The only winning strategy that can be adopted at present by the U.S. passes through repentance and beginning to play openly with its allies and the international community in order to blow up Xi Jinping’s hegemonic plans by defusing the threat and promoting a true Multipolarism that, in fact, is the only way to prevent the world from mutating into a cage worse than the one in which the West’s selfishness and U.S. millenarian vainglory, of which Trump and Biden are the latest bearers, have forced much of the Planet.
What amazes me most is that in Beijing’s well-conceived media and diplomatic trap even Daryl Guppy, the author of the aforementioned article (an article with which the author contributed to China Watch, a think tank promoted by the China Daily, which astutely, at the close of the piece, pointed out that the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the well-known -and usually valuable and attentive- English-language Chinese newspaper), a well-known expert in international financial technical analysis and former member of Australia’s national China Business Council.
