From 22-24 October 2024, BRICS hosted its annual meeting in Russia, and the key concern was what would happen there without leaving the impression that it was another talking shop.
As BRICS expands fast, it also risks abandoning its original goals: to address past and current grievances against the once unipolar world headed by the US.
This article articulates what BRICS will be charting out in the Southern City of Kazan, Russia, a much safer and more secure location from Ukrainian drones and other firepower.
The originators of BRICS were Russia and China, which had long-standing reservations about the Western World, chaperoned by the US.
Both Russia and China nursed a perception that the US was attempting to snare them and prod them into vassal states under the beck and call of the US, just like most European nations today.
Both Russia and China are irked by the dominance of the US Dollar that has permitted the US to establish global exploitative structures that have subdued almost the whole world under the American economic chokehold.
The US generates its wealth by merely printing money and spending as it wishes while spreading the cost of its vast operations and investments through the global circulation of the US dollar!
Saudi Arabia is a notorious facilitator because it is a major producer of fossil oils. In the 1970s, it entered into an unholy covenant with the US to accept only the US Dollar as a transaction medium, and the rest of the world reluctantly obliged.
The US had initially promised not to weaponize its economic leverage as a tool of war. Still, time and time again, the US violated that obligation, citing “American exceptionalism” as an excuse!
The US barely feels the impact of inflation as it prints trillions of dollars because the rest of the world depends on the dollar as a medium of circulation.
The US has printed more than ten trillion dollars, at the current inflation adjustment, to resolve her various challenges, yet she has not been punished by inflation as most countries would have been.
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The US printed over $831 billion during the Obama administration as an economic stimulus package to defer an imminent economic contagion.
Stimulus bills approved by the US Congress beginning in 2020 unleashed the largest flood of federal money into the US economy in recorded history. Roughly $5 trillion went to households, mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, airlines, hospitals, local governments, schools, and other institutions around the country grappling with the blow inflicted by COVID-19.
The Trump administration released about three trillion dollars, and the Biden administration unlocked almost two trillion dollars as an economic stimulus targeting families recuperating from the hazard of the global pandemic and refurbishing decaying American infrastructure.
It also included rebuilding her defence industries and revitalizing its chip industries, which have lagged behind those in Southeast Asia, such as Taiwan, and Western Europe, such as the Netherlands.
While all governments owe an unprecedented 91 trillion dollars in debt, the US debt is about a third of the global one, but it is not felt thanks to the domination of the US dollar global circulation. What is happening is that the US economic problem is globalized through the US Dollar, and poor decision-making in Washington becomes a global burden.
The US excesses in defence and social welfare expenditures suddenly become a global baggage to carry!
The US has been smart enough to create artificial conflicts and showcase itself as a global sheriff. Through this strategy, NATO was born as a deterrence force against the “irredentist” Soviet Union.
Western Europe, out of fear of the Soviets during the Cold War and enticed by the Marshall Plan after the Second World War, folded its nationalism and became a satellite nation under US hegemony.
As recently as last year, an EU president, Ursula von der Leyen, unashamedly said Europe is in the NATO to shield herself against the Russian nukes.
She reassured member states that Russia would not nuke their countries because the US atomic bomb is the ultimate deterrence!
So, sanctioning a formidable nuclear power, Russia would come without military ramifications since Uncle Sam was there to protect them!
Germany planned to authorise using Nordstream Pipeline 2 to pump natural gas from Russia to Germany and power the latter economy, which is heavily dependent on cheap energy. The Biden administration vehemently objected!
The Germans bowed down to US concerted pressure. President Biden said the US would ensure that the pipeline would not pump gas to a NATO member, citing the Ukrainian conflict as a reason.
The pipelines were blown out much later, terminating the Russian-German economic cooperation initiated during Angela Dorothea Merkel’s chancellorship.
In unison, all NATO members, except a more pragmatic Turkey, sanctioned Russia’s cheap energy, inflicting personal injuries on their economies.
The US gas companies attempted to replace Russian cheap gas. Still, geographical constraints made such an effort too costly for European industries that were designed to depend heavily on cheap Russian energy.
The cost-benefit ratio indicates that the American replacement of Russia’s cheap energy will de-industrialize European countries under American control.
Poverty is not the best way to win the hearts and minds of Europeans to trust NATO as a defence consortium when the bellies are empty. It is also a notable question mark how many countries within NATO will endure a referendum acid test and keep their membership intact.
While NATO scoffs at Russian referendum exercises in liberated Eastern Ukraine, only inflated opinion polls are deployed to legitimize future NATO debuts, and Finland is a case in hand.
Recent elections in Europe and a foiled coup attempt in Germany have shown quite clearly at last that Europe is waking up against neo-colonialism, where the US is the colon master anchored by puppets purporting to be rulers of independent Europe while they are mere American vassals.
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Elections after elections in the EU, governments have been rejected by voters driven by anger and frustrations of fallen living standards, unchecked illegal immigration and, as in Germany, revulsion of being under an American leash.
BRICS is an effort to rival and challenge American global subjugation, as well demonstrated in sanctioning and military interventions all over the world to bolster her position as a uni global economic and military superpower.
The US was attracted to helping develop the Chinese economy as a bulwark against the expansion of the imperial Soviet Union.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some American think tanks forewarned China as a future threat to the US, which was more menacing than the Soviet Union.
The think tanks had counselled America to decapitate her economic links with China that were powering her economy through intellectual piracy and legitimate purchases of vital technologies.
American conglomerates, lured by cheap labour, a well-trained workforce, and what seems to be the largest consumer market in the world, refused to heed a call to delink from China economically.
With China making it abundantly clear that it may take Taiwan by force in 2027, while the Biden administration is breathing fire to defend Taiwan, the lines of economic disengagement and strangulation have never been more urgent.
The problem is that China needs the US less than the US needs China. Amazon’s empire will collapse tomorrow if it departs from China’s cheap labour, market, and technological input for its enormous products.
The EU is dilemma about whether to side with the penniless US and risk long-term disinvestment and its associated unemployment and socioeconomic upheavals. Canada has been at the forefront of disengaging from China, but time will tell how long it can sustain that without furthering its economic downfall.
Bad news for Canada: Her economy is funded by an unsustainable debt burden, pushing her to raise taxes while permitting local banks to print money to make ends meet. The clock is ticking against wasteful expenditures and living beyond her means.
Most NATO members are houses of economic cards whose survival depends on milking weaker countries white. All houses of cards ultimately come down tumbling, and we know what will happen to NATO countries very shortly.
While BRICS has correctly diagnosed the geopolitical opportunities and threats, its tent is wallowing in contradictions and potential military conflicts.
Endless border disputes among her members are still thorns that are unlikely to be resolved within the BRICS community. China and India harbour a long-simmering border dispute that has pushed the two BRICS principal members to the brink of war.
China also claimed parts of Russia when it issued a new map that claimed parts of Russia as very Chinese. Russia, too, quickly produced its own map to reassert its territorial claims of status quo ante.
Russia and China may have unresolved border disputes but are unlikely to fight over their differences because the integration of their economies will ultimately dissolve their borders.
So, making war over borders has been bypassed by economic necessities stoked by American imperialism. The US hostilities against the duo have melted their differences since, in NATO, they have a bigger “Sangara” to fry.
However, Chino-India border disputes may disrupt BRICS in many conspicuous ways.
Being an eagle, the US is plotting to wedge and widen those differences in hopes of weaning India out of the BRICS.
Three major players in BRICS, led by India and Brazil, with South Africa hanging in the coattails, do not want BRICS to rival the US but deploy it to cushion themselves against the consequences of American economic domination.
India will soon be rewarded for “double-dealing” with the most valuable American company. Apple will begin to transfer its factories from China to India. With its highly educated workforce, India is just experiencing what the Germans call schadenfreude.
Nothing gives India more pleasure than seeing herself as a beneficiary of Chinese economic pain. Whether such an audacious move will generate a consumptive market like the one witnessed in China is a matter of wait-and-see.
So far, the Russians have learned bitterly that India is still a very banana Republic that is energy-thirsty but incapable of providing what the Russian economy needs.
The Russians have amassed piles of Indian rupees from the sales of her discounted energy to India but are struggling to turn it into profitable transactions.
The US will soon learn that India will manufacture its products, but most of it will have to be shipped back to the US and elsewhere when such outside-looking policies bankrupt US employees.
Few, if any, in the US and Europe will have deep pockets to buy American products that are being produced in India.
Indians, who will receive peanuts for manufacturing American-cherished products, will not have the cash to buy those products, creating a vicious cycle that will soon explode as an economic bubble.
The economic disparity among BRICS members is an existential threat. Most BRICS wannabes grew up with economic overdependence syndrome, and their unmitigated consumptive patterns are unlikely to change soon.
Most poor countries are poor because their leaders exhibit kleptomaniac affinities. They are proud to consume what they do not produce and produce what they have no intention of consuming is a serial pattern that identifies and unifies most BRICS wannabes save for Burkina Faso’s new leaders who have begun thinking out of the box, putting their money into the mouths of their hungry poor.
Most BRICS wannabes do not have long-term plans since they are slaves of winning the next elections by hooks or by crooks.
Such economies are hellbent on appeasing loyalists rather than forging the cogent production capacity needed to be key players in the BRICS.
While democracy is not essential for development, its weakening has significantly eroded public accountability, paving the way for mass looting of public resources and condemning those nations to a pathetic beggar stature.
There is no chance for primitive accumulation when the plunder of public resources is accompanied by capital flight, leaving such nations in a perpetual parasitic state. Such nations cannot have a long-term view but live on day-to-day exposition.
Countries like Saudi Arabia may want to join BRICS but are ambivalent about severing the power of the US Dollar for national security concerns.
While China is now purchasing almost all of its energy needs in its local currency, the Yuan, whether from Russia or Saudi Arabia, very few countries can follow suit.
The economic limitations are simply mind-boggling. Most countries in the BRICS lack the Chinese manufacturing capacity to wean themselves from the US dollar’s exploitative mechanism.
Without substantial sacrifices from the leaders of poor BRICS countries, the path to economic liberation would be booby-trapped.
Most leaders in poor countries owe their access to power to buying political loyalty. They are ensnared from initiating meaningful reforms demanding belt-tightening that would bristle and alienate powerbrokers.
Can BRICS really achieve its goals despite its members’ disparate ambitions, aspirations, and limitations? Technological breakthroughs more than what BRICS does may crash the US Dollar’s global torment.
The US global influence is waning partially because it is not investing in the manufacturing sector at home with NAFTA despite Trump interventions and similar overseas economic accords have left the American worker at the perils of underemployment, overworked, underpaid, overtaxed and categorized as a disposable product.
With renewable energy technologies growing very fast, our overdependence on fossil fuels to power our economies will shrink, sending the US Dollar into a cold yet shallow grave. I must foreshadow that that will be achieved without BRICS playing any major role.
As the US and its allies fight back, cosmetic reforms are now on the table to give poor nations a sense of belonging in anachronistic institutions such as the Bretton Woods institutions.
The UN anticipates a non-American one-day becoming president of the World Bank, a non-European head of the IMF, and expanding the UN Security Council to incorporate the AU.
However, while our corrupt African leaders will hail those innocuous gestures of goodwill as diplomatic achievements, little do they appreciate why the former president of France, Charles De Gaulle, coronated African leaders to be MPs in the French parliament.
Or why did the British kingdom name Tanzanian George Kahama Sir? George Kahama?
In Tanzania, having our speaker as the IPU president is paraded as diplomatic ingenuity, and having Dr. Asha Rose Migiro as deputy UN secretary general is a masterstroke or similar ascension with vaunted applause!
Still, what happens behind the scenes is to make the exploitation of Tanzanian natural resources more palatable to citizens who can hardly afford one decent meal a day.
Bribing our leaders with toys and untold wealth is now the dints to justify deepening wanton exploitation of our vast natural resources.
As Napoleon once said, generals are ruled by toys in the form of medals, and rephrasing, poor nations are ruled by the titular of one of their own on the global scene.
Having Tanzanians heading global institutions without addressing the causes of our economic miseries is preposterous!
As correctly pinned down by Messr Robert Kennedy Jr before he terminated his presidential bid and joined the Trump presidential team.
American problems hail from the way she treats other countries. Whatever the US faces at home is due to the evil it exports to other countries abroad.
Venezuelan asylum seekers are daily knocking on the US southern border because America has been meddling in her internal affairs, shutting down the Venezuelan economy through economic sanctions. Libyan, Afghanistan, Syrian and Iraqi too are seeking asylum in the US because of what America has done to their countries.
Strangely, the US is increasingly coming to terms with sanctioning Russia, which was the stupidest mistake she had committed since the end of the Cold War.
The US, with a stroke of a pen, has pushed Russia into the arms of China, and when Taiwan is invaded, the US will confront another Vietnamese rendezvous.
Russia and China defeated both the US and France in Vietnam, which is a poorly documented part of war history.
The US is considering ending the Ukrainian conflict because it realizes it has chewed more than it can swallow. Standing against Russia has made Belarus a nuclear power and strengthened the hand of North Korea because her learning curves for the practicality of modern wars are extremely steep.
The Russian economy is now slowly intertwined with the Chinese one, even before the moribund BRICS is looped into the equation.
Of more significance, military cooperation between Russia, China, North Korea and Iran are erupting nightmares in the American global ambitions and designations.
Even the Houthis in Yemen are flexing their muscles in the far-flung oceans, a gratitude of geopolitical strains. The expansion of NATO closer to the Russian border cannot compensate for what has already been recklessly squandered.
What the US has done is dig her own grave with European allies weakened by economic subjugation that has left them in a state of hopelessness.
Even without BRICS inflicting significant damage on the US and its allies, the World is ready to flip the page and embrace a more peaceful multipolar coexistence with or without them.
