Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Multipolar Mythmaking, Mixing Western Degeneracy and BRICS Expansion Chaos

January 13, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.


BRICS: Talk left, walk right. | Graphic by The Analysis News



Early 2025 is already a tough time for those expecting the consolidation of a multipolar alternative to polycrisis-riddled, Western-dominated, neoliberal multilateralism. It was especially dispiriting given the hype – or at least hope – invested by many geopolitical dissidents in the fast-growing BRICS grouping. What began as Brazil-Russia-India-China in 2006, added South Africa in 2010 and four other members in 2023 – Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates – and then over the past two weeks, another full-fledged member, Indonesia, and also eight ‘partners.’

Yet it’s utter chaos when it comes to BRICS composition, and it won’t be easier to meld the 18 governments which Brazilian President Lula Ignacio da Silva inherits as he chairs the bloc in 2025. And this condition of undirected chaos is also rampant at the global scale, witnessed in repeatedly-failing multilateral institutions always in need of (rarely-specified) ‘reform.’

The most important fail was at the Baku United Nations climate summit in late November, an event that will be remembered most for the furious walk-out protest by the most vulnerable countries – without any BRICS solidarity, even from impoverished Ethiopia. From non-Western and BRICS elites, there was near-universal disgust expressed about the final outcome. (Without a pause, South Africa’s ultra-neoliberal environment minister – a white, former apartheid soldier and later Member of Parliament representing Johannesburg’s financial district – predictably ‘welcomed’ the catastrophe).

That was just one indication of the urgent need for imaginative, visionary alternatives to forcefully address world crises. And on climate, Lula will again attempt to pick up the pieces when hosting the next UN climate summit in December, deep in the fast-decaying Amazon, in Belem.

Moreover, even a cursory examination of how the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, United Nations Security Council and other international regulatory bodies continue to conduct themselves, confirms that global-scale crisis management remains weak, incompetent and often malevolent.

Baku was preceded by the November 5 Trump election victory and an inconsequential G20 Rio de Janeiro summit on November 18-19, also hosted by Lula. In early December, accompanied by robust self-backslapping, South Africa’s rightward-moving Government of National Unity then took the G20 hosting reigns from Brazil. The G20 site then shifts to the U.S. in 2026.

The other core BRICS have also played host to the G20: India in 2023, China in 2016 and Russia in 2013 – and Indonesia did in 2022. So within the last dozen years, all five original BRICS – and six of the current ten members (not including invitee Saudi Arabia which in 2020 during Covid-19 was the virtual chair) – have hosted the G20.

But all the world’s problems have been amplified since then, with nary a word to suggest progress via the imperial-subimperial G20 alliance. Two war zones remain brutally hot, with the daily murder of hundreds of working-class and poor Ukrainians and Palestinians, and as a result of their illegal invasions of neighbours, the leaders of both Russia and Israel facing International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes. Both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu dismiss these warrants, although their travel plans have been severely curtailed.

And after Bashar Al-Assad’s Damascus regime collapsed on December 8, a moment celebrated by the apparent vast majority of long-oppressed Syrian citizens, there came next the predictable resumption of U.S., Turkish and Israeli opportunism. Benjamin Netanyahu land-grabbed further into the Golan Heights, backed by the Western Axis of Genocide and accompanied by Tel Aviv’s carpet bombing of ex-dictator Al-Assad’s military equipment.

The West is at least consistent here, at the cost of permanent reputational damage to their claims of liberal internationalism, human rights and rule-of-law values. In contrast, the BRICS – especially South Africa – talk left about Israel halting genocide, but walk right when it comes to greed: nine out of ten of the 2024 BRICS have leading corporations now enjoying lucrative trade, investment and privatization management deals with the genocidaires.

The new full member, Indonesia – the world’s most populous Islamic society – profits from palm oil exports to Israel and has imported Tel Aviv weaponry. President Prabawo Subianto has played a central role in normalization talks with the Netanyahu regime from 2021 when he was still defense minister. After he won the presidency, Israeli sources offered support for Jakarta’s membership in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development so long as those negotiations resumed.

Back in Syria, regime change was also praised by Hamas, perhaps due to what Palestinian writer Jamal Kanj termed “Al-Assad’s abandonment of the Resistance in Gaza and Lebanon. Since October 8, Assad has behaved more like other impotent Arab dictators as mere observers of the genocide in Gaza and the war in Lebanon.”

The main foreign losers of Syria’s regime change are Iran and Russia, but since November 2023, there has been no specific BRICS meeting to address the crisis, illustrating the bloc’s worsening internal incoherence when it comes to West Asian geopolitics.

Trump’s degenerate disruptions

Trump, meanwhile, felt sufficiently empowered in December to threaten the sovereignties of Panama, Mexico, Canada and Greenland, using as a weapon his regularly-threatened tariff increases on imports. (He did the same to the BRICS in the event they offer a currency alternative, which is worth exploring in more detail on another occasion, to expose de-dollarisation hypocrisies.) If major tariffs are activated by Trump’s team, that will denude the World Trade Organisation of any self-respect.

Internal U.S. resistance to a proto-fascist government will need to be as creative as Jeremy Brecher has outlined so well, but is expected to be quashed by executive orders against ‘terrorist-supporting’ activists (e.g. in solidarity with Palestine) and climate defenders, plus a compliant Republican Congress and Supreme Court.

Calls for Boycott Divestment Sanctions against U.S. state and capitalist institutions are sure to follow, when Trump pulls out of UN climate negotiations (as he did in 2017) or commits other major human rights abuses such as mass deportations or the promised McCarthyism: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

On the other side of the class struggle, there may be fractions of U.S. capital which arise in brief dissent to what could be open fascism. Some businesses had cohered with Clinton-era neo-liberalism, others to Bush-era neo-conservatism, others to the Obama-era neo-con/neo-lib fusion, and still others to Biden’s promised Inflation Reduction Act with a green-Keynesian ideology.

But among those whose needs extend beyond expected corporate tax cuts, Big Data stands out for its leaders’ recent groveling to Trump, identifying sufficiently fluid opportunities, and welcoming the techno-feudal surveillance, social-control potentials, and AI-dystopias that will inevitably emerge. These corporates will thrive, whether through the dominant neo-cons and neo-libs, or via aspiring paleo-conservative forces. Trump will continue to insist that they find a way to fuse, even if the H-1B visa controversy illustrated how quickly the Tech-MAGA alliance would be strained. Elsewhere, unprecedented financial and ideological outreach to the European hard right by the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Bannon ensures the cancer will spread, e.g. in Germany’s February 23 election.

Hence against obvious Western degeneracy and Trump’s insane belligerence, the BRICS bloc will continue to attract interest and even a kind of perverse admiration, especially given the group’s rapid expansion since mid-2023.

An expanding club without coherent entry rules

Still, extreme caution is needed, when reminded of how poorly the group’s onboarding process is managed. In mid-October, the Russian-hosted Kazan summit unfolded with some discomfit among diplomats, following an ‘impasse’ at a session of new BRICS foreign ministers the month before, on the sidelines of the annual UN leaders’ summit.

There, the two new African members from Cairo and Addis Ababa objected to the way the UN Security Council’s half-hearted expansion of permanent members appeared to exclude them, instead implying that South Africa and Nigeria would be the (non-veto-power) invitees. That BRICS session ended bitterly, called off early without an anticipated formal statement. (But the problem is likely to be disappear, now that Trump will sabotage any loosening of U.S. reigns, in the Security Council or anywhere else.)

That incident would have influenced the first-generation BRICS not to immediately expand full membership – but instead offer ‘partner’ status. The BRICS now has ten members given Indonesia’s surprising promotion last week from partner, a category that now includes eight countries: Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, Thailand and Uganda. Their leaders were invited into this new status – similar to a NATO ‘aspiring member’ – at the 2024 Kazan summit, and may attend meetings this year hosted by Brazil (with the leaders’ summit in Rio in July).

Not all countries which applied are following the BRICS process through. The Russian meetings included one extremely recalcitrant member-invitee, Saudi Arabia. And four partner-invitees are, at the time of writing, still deciding whether to accept: Turkiye, Vietnam, Algeria and Nigeria.

The difference between 18 and 23 is crucial given the weight of these last five in terms of geopolitics, population and fossil fuel supply. It appears Western political pressure – as well as bruised egos – are to blame for the chaos of who’s in, who’s not and who’s fence-sitting.

For as one journalist reported on the world’s fourth-most populous country, “Indonesia’s candidacy was first approved by BRICS leaders at the Johannesburg Summit in August 2023. However, as Indonesia was preparing for general elections in February 2024, the nation formally communicated its intent to join the bloc only after the new government was formed.”

But if so, why was Indonesia first called a partner-invitee last October? Already in mid-2023 it was apparent that the thuggish Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto would win the presidency. Amnesty International had warned of Prabowo’s past:

“As a general during the country’s occupation of East Timor in the 1980s and 1990s, Prabowo organized gangs of hooded killers to terrorize and subdue civilians associated with the independence movement. And he allegedly participated in one of the bloodiest events of the Timor war: the Krakas massacre, in which 300 Timorese – mostly civilians – were hunted down and killed by Kopassus units.”

Moreover, BBC reported, Prabowo’s military “unit tortured several democracy activists during the dying days of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s. Of the 23, some survived, one died and 13 remain missing.” Prabowo was “banned from entering the US and Australia at this point, on a blacklist for his human rights record. That ban was lifted only in recent years.” Prabowo “was fired from the army following this and went into self-exile in Jordan in the 2000s. But he returned to Indonesia a few years later, building up his wealth in palm oil and mining before making the jump to politics.”



The tendency among multipolar advocates (e.g. the Geopolitical Economy Report) is to uncritically celebrate Indonesia’s ascent into the BRICS without any acknowledgement of Prabowo’s history of repression – in a context of rapidly decaying civil rights – and his pro-Israel orientation, not to mention the country’s status as the world’s largest supplier of coal and ecologically-destructive palm oil.

Pepe Escobar was characteristically ebullient that Indonesia was

“admitted as a full BRICS member. What does that mean? You have southeast Asia barking at the heart of BRICS. Without even a pit stop they went straight to the top. Now one of us… one of the biggest economies of the 21st century by PPP, the seventh economy, soon it’s going to be the fifth, it’s going to overtake other Europeans. The powerhouse of Southeast Asia. Good relations with China. Good relations with Russia. Good relations with India.”

Um, also great relations with U.S. militarism, as Prabowo bragged to Trump while congratulating him on November 11: “All my training is American, sir.”

Angst in Algiers and Caracas

And then there are the mysterious Algeria and hapless Venezuela. In the latter case, the Maduro regime’s foreign ministry expressed fury back in October: “The Venezuelan people feel indignation and shame at this inexplicable and immoral aggression.” The cause: a BRICS membership-veto by Lula, who stayed in Brasilia instead of going to Kazan due to a head injury and instead participated via video feed (the way Putin did to avoid arrest in Johannesburg in August 2023).

Caracas specifically attacked Lula’s long-standing foreign policy adviser, Celso Amorim, who explained the veto on BRICS membership: Maduro had “breached the trust” of the Latin American left by not releasing detailed vote records after the unsatisfactory 2024 election. So according to Venezuelan diplomats, Amorim was “acting more like a messenger for North American imperialism.” The country’s genuine socialist activists know all too well this talk-left walk-right dance move.

As for Algeria, last September the manager of the Algiers nationalist newspaper El Moudjahid, Brahim Takheroubte, reported his country’s BRICS application fiasco in a jilted-lover tone of voice:

“When, in August 2023, the Johannesburg summit concluded with the accession of six new members (Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iran), absolutely no plausible argument was put forward to justify the elimination of Algeria. To everyone’s surprise, the Algeria file was withdrawn at the last minute. There is a blatant inconsistency, both in substance and form. This organization, which is supposed to challenge an established world order represented by the IMF and the World Bank, should act with a more inclusive approach. Yet it adopts an absurd selection logic, limiting both its impact and its reach. Instead of casting a wide net and providing global solutions, it takes a restrictive approach. Doesn’t this contradiction weaken its credibility?”

After the rant against BRICS hypocrisy, came Takheroubte’s juvenile sniping from a very different direction:

“Indeed, how can we be in any doubt about its true intentions when we know that Algeria is far better off than several of the countries admitted to the organization of this famous summit. A country with no foreign debt, the largest land area in Africa and abundant mineral and energy resources, Algeria’s infrastructure is the envy of the entire continent. Even more surprisingly, the IMF and the World Bank, usually stingy with compliments, have publicly hailed Algeria’s economic performance, going so far as to call it a ‘model of success’. Yet, ironically, it was the BRICS, the self-proclaimed champions of the global economic alternative, who chose to ignore such a feat.”

The final grievance was blaming the UAE for bullying another BRICS member – likely South Africa – into vetoing Algeria’s mid-2023 application:

“But there’s nothing mysterious about this blindness; in fact, it’s an open secret. The truth is that a BRICS member country, obeying petty interests far removed from economic rigor, has vetoed Algeria’s membership with almost theatrical insistence. And to top it all off, this country is acting, not out of conviction, but under the orders of a modest Gulf emirate, which is orchestrating behind the scenes pressure as devious as it is ‘strategic’ on the rest of the members, ensuring that Algeria is eliminated. This just goes to show that, behind the scenes at the BRICS, geopolitics is a well-oiled comedy. Is there any reason left, just one, to respond to the BRICS’ call to action? The case of Algeria, whose exclusion stems less from economic criteria than from political maneuvering, is a striking example… This incoherence will no doubt eventually reveal the limits of a bloc that claims to be reshaping the world economic order but is in reality itself a prisoner of its own calculations. Beyond the slogans, BRICS integration is based on logic far removed from economic excellence alone.”

Yet at Kazan, Algeria was still invited to be a partner. What has become of that invitation, remains a mystery. And there’s more confusion about similar reluctance to accept partner status from Türkiye, Vietnam and Nigeria, where leaders also appear to be stuck between Western pressure points and their BRICS partner invitations – and are scared to issue any decisive official statement, just as was the case over the past year in Saudi Arabia.

A rebuff from Riyadh

The hype that the Saudi Arabian ruling class would leave the U.S. orbit, ditch half-century-old Petrodollar arrangements (mainly pricing oil in the U.S. currency) and do more deals with China and Iran has risen and fallen dramatically over the past few years. As a residual example, Escobar argued this week that Trump “doesn’t understand that now, for instance, Iran and Saudi Arabia are sitting at the same table inside BRICS and they discuss geopolitics as well.”

Nor have Russian state media outlets Pravda and TASS processed, or even figured out, Saudi Arabia’s status, for in recent days both incorrectly claimed, “On January 1, 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, became its full-fledged members.” Yet in late December, there was actually a ‘freeze’ of Riyadh’s role in the BRICS, according to Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Yuri Ushakov.

(Some of us were predicting this for weeks here and here and here and here; namely, that a Trump victory would drag his ally Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, back firmly onto Western turf, instead of allowing Saudi Arabia to continue wallowing in the multipolar quicksand.)

A typical interpretation of Riyadh’s reluctance, on Firstpost, was this cause: “Trump’s 100% tariff threat” in early December. But the illogicality there is that vast Saudi Arabian exports to the U.S., amounting to $24 billion in 2022, were made up of 70% crude oil, 20% refined oil and 2% fertilizers, with 8% other miscellaneous products. Trump simply cannot put a painful 100% tariff on imported goods from Saudi Arabia, given the status of oil in the world economy and inflationary fears in his electoral base.

So what’s really at play in the Saudi retreat from BRICS? Consider four choices from various spin-doctors across the spectrum. First, the view from geopolitical pragmatists Oliver Stuenkel and Margot Treadwell at the Carnegie Council in November:

“Saudi Arabia has chosen a tricky balancing act of an ambiguous approach to BRICS that leaves it room to adapt to changing global conditions, including the coming U.S. leadership change. Although Saudi Arabia’s strategy represents an extreme approach to hedging, such a balancing act is not unique to Saudi Arabia. In the context of BRICS alone, analysts have focused on the balancing acts of Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, and Türkiye, among others – reflecting the growing concern around the world about how to navigate an increasingly multipolar and unpredictable global environment.”

Second, from the neo-con perspective, the National Interest is one of the main U.S. outlets, and hence gleeful whenever there’s successful divide and conquer traced to U.S. manipulation. So on December 28, unaware of Russia’s confirmation of Riyadh’s retreat five days earlier, Rimon Hossain surmised,

“the recent inclusion of Middle Eastern states like Iran, Egypt, and the UAE after the 2023 BRICS Summit raises questions about BRICS cohesion, given the regional rivalry such a big tent would now inherit. Saudi Arabia’s recent inclusion also draws doubt, given its ongoing endemic security rivalry with Iran. Riyadh made this point clear during the 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan, where the Saudi foreign minister only attended the last day, making clear that it is hedging its commitment to a club it perceives as a hedging club for middle powers.”

But that stage is now well past, and no doubt at some stage after Trump takes office, the Saudis will move forward with an official normalisation of relations with the genocidaires, as appeared imminent in early October 2023.

For a third version of spin-doctoring, the pro-BRICS multipolarists appear reduced to silence, as their preferred narrative-of-retreat, aside from Escobar who has been drawn much further down the three predictable stages of geopolitricks-psychosis – from hype to hope to helplessness – in the particular case of mighty Saudi Arabia joining the mighty BRICS.

There’s still hope, as Escobar put it in Sputnik on January 9: “Imagine China-India-Russia-Iran-Indonesia-South Africa-Brazil-Egypt-Saudi Arabia as the transcontinental pearls of the emerging multi-nodal world. Huge populations; massive natural resources and industrial might; myriad development possibilities.”

But helplessness also sets in, because not only are contradictions extreme, with “Iran, UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (when the Saudis show up for meetings) struggling to reach consensus on the same table.” And after all, “Saudi Arabia, wary of its wealth parked in London and New York financial markets, is still cautiously hedging its bets: theoretically Riyadh is a BRICS member, but in practice not really.”

Moreover, there is a “war against the BRICS,” Escobar insists, because:

“In the absence of long-term strategic vision, and amidst the progressive imperial expulsion from Eurasia, all that’s left for the Hegemon is to unleash chaos from West Asia to Europe and parts of Latin America – a concerted attempt to Divide and Rule BRICS and thwart their collective drive affirming sovereignty and the primacy of national interests… US Think Tank had already floated a year and a half ago the notion of swing states. Not the parochial American electoral version, but its transposition to geopolitics. All six candidates at the time were BRICS members (Brazil, India, South Africa), or potential BRICS members or partners (Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye). The code for ‘swing states’ was unmistakable: all these are targets for destabilization – as in if you do not abide by the ‘rules-based international order,’ you’re going down.”

A fourth narrative would logically be to celebrate that a regime appearing impervious to humane and ecologically-sustainable values does not further degrade the subimperial power bloc, one that it will take many years for social, labour and environmental movements to clear out as it is.

As argued in a new essay by Janine Walter of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Johannesburg office, it’s obvious that the BRICS bloc “does not represent an anti-capitalist alternative. It is much more a matter of seeking to secure more influence within the capitalist world-system: ‘neoliberalism with a Southern Face,’ as it were. Progressive forces ought instead to concentrate on identifying — and also making use of — strategic spaces for alternative political approaches.”

And were Saudi Arabia a member, MBS would certainly contribute to closing down such spaces; he didn’t get the nickname Mr Bone Saw for nothing.

For others, the Saudi membership-invitation quagmire continues, with odd new claims about Riyadh and the BRICS, e.g. that the world’s most surreal city – NEOM, whose extreme-luxury tourist island was recently launched with full-on hedonism and which is seen as a model for collaboration with Israel’s high tech sector – is a model for a sustainable, diversified economy. BRICS myth-making in this case comes from Murad Sadygzade, President of the Middle East Studies Center:

“Saudi Arabia has taken a pause in the process of becoming a full BRICS member, reportedly due to having to complete unspecified ‘internal procedures.’ The kingdom participates in the group’s activities that are of interest to Riyadh, but refrains from taking part in drawing up joint documents or decision-making… The Kingdom actively invests in large-scale infrastructure and technological projects, such as NEOM and various innovation hubs under the ‘Vision 2030’ program. These projects are aimed at building a sustainable, diversified economy less reliant on oil, which aligns well with the goals of BRICS nations to develop high-tech and environmentally sustainable industries. Saudi investments could support the economic modernization of countries like Brazil and South Africa, which also seek to strengthen their industrial and technological capacities. For BRICS, this opens a unique opportunity to create an integrated economic space capable of attracting new capital flows and accelerating the shift to green energy and digital technologies.”

Hope springs eternal, but it merges with surreal hype like this far too often within multipolarism to be taken seriously, given that BRICS members, partners and invitees include the world’s leading CO2 annual emitters in 2022 (the last available consistent data): #1 China (10.5 Gigatons), #3 India (2.3Gt), #4 Russia (1.5Gt), #6 Iran (0.73Gt), #7 Indonesia (0.59Gt), #12 Saudi Arabia (0.47Gt), #13 South Africa (0.44Gt) and #14 Brazil (0.41Gt).

Moreover, additional ‘Scope 3’ emissions come from fossil fuel exports of coal, gas and oil burned elsewhere but nevertheless are vital to factor in as ‘national’ interests for these BRICS economies: Russia (1.7Gt in 2021), Indonesia (1Gt), United Arab Emirates (UAE) (0.3Gt), and Brazil, Iran and South Africa (0.2Gt). Saudi Arabia would have added much more for decades to come (0.9Gt). New BRICS partner-invitees include other major fossil-fuel exporters, including Kazakhstan, Nigeria and Algeria. But as witnessed in Baku, these countries’ ruling elites have certainly not joined – and won’t in future – a lobby to ‘shift to green energy.’

Fossil fuel emissions measurements: domestic (2022) and exported (2021)

BRICS seen with scorn – for bad and good reasons

All these narratives continue to float around, waiting to land upon some version of reality. The same problem of sustained confusion exists in Western ruling elite circuits, as illustrated by the imperialist-whispering agenda of Tony Carroll (from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), recently interviewed by a conservative South African business ezine, National Security News:

“South Africa’s in trouble… The Trump Administration are going to be more critical about South Africa for many of the same things that have been for many of those things that have been cited in the past: its relationships with Russia, its stance on Ukraine, its leadership in the BRICS agreement, its relationship with China and most pointedly I think the issue of the International Criminal Court (ICC) case in Gaza, which is the one that I think drove most of those signatures in Congress… South Africa is a large issue that I think transfers across all of our national relationships I think that the issue on the ICC case in Gaza is the one that specifically has gotten the interest of those signatures in Congress, and the incoming people that will be populating both the trade and the diplomatic teams within Congress and the White House… Mr Trump has signaled also that you know he’s very much, the BRICS movement is in his crosshairs. I think South Africa waving the flag and recruiting other countries to join the BRICS agreement is not going to play well. And I think that’s a threat or fear that I would take on board.”

Striking fear – in this case, potential denial of Africa Growth and Opportunity Act ‘benefits’ (which in any case mainly accrue to multinational smelters and car companies) – is one part of the corporate agenda.

Another is dismissal of the BRICS as a force worth taking seriously, as witnessed in a new essay by Joseph Nye, one of the most influential political scientists in history, a Democratic Party neoliberal. Most of Nye’s brief analysis of the BRICS provides banal, conventional wisdom; but here are two examples of the negativity one hears all too often, not from the BRICS’ leftist critics, but from the imperialist right, annoyed at the new pretenders to the throne of U.S. Empire:

“Rather than making the BRICS stronger, the admission of new members merely imports more rivalries. Egypt and Ethiopia are locked in a dispute over a dam that Ethiopia is building on the Nile River, and Iran has long-standing disputes with the UAE and prospective member Saudi Arabia. Far from making the BRICS more effective, these new intra-organizational rivalries will hamper its efforts… the group’s stated intention of avoiding the dollar and clearing more of its members’ bilateral trade in their own currencies has made only limited headway. Any serious attempt to replace the dollar as a global reserve currency would require China to back the renminbi with deep, flexible capital markets and the rule of law – and those conditions are nowhere close to being met.”

True enough, these are serious problems, it’s fair to admit – while continuing a debate someone like Nye would avoid like the plague: aren’t the BRICS actually subimperial amplifiers of Western imperialism, and if so, why not advocate resumption of Barack Obama’s strategy of assimilation, e.g. through the G20? It’s revealing that Nye has no such agenda in mind, what with an incoming paleo-con Trump regime expected to tear down not fatten up imperialist multilateral institutions.

Another prominent ruling-class site – the mirror opposite of the Council on Foreign Relations which Nye has chaired – is Russia’s Valdai Club. Its Programme Director Oleg Barabanov has recently analysed all the UN votes of old BRICS, new BRICS and new partners, to see whether General Assembly resolutions against Russia and Iran gained support from the various members. It’s a hodgepodge of results, with very few clear patterns aside from an evolution from early resolutions against Putin’s Ukraine invasion which were characterised by more abstentions, evolving towards an increasing anti-Russia bias in voting, in contrast to steadier solidarity with Iran. In the first case,

“Russia is supported, first of all, by two countries: these are Belarus and Cuba. Then there is a group of countries that abstain in most cases, but sometimes can support Russia. These are Algeria, Bolivia, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Uganda has always abstained. The next group of countries opposed Russia in about a third of cases. These are Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria and Thailand. Turkey stands out here, having voted for all 10 anti-Russian resolutions. Moreover, Turkey was the only country here that spoke out for the resolution after being invited to become a BRICS partner.”

Barabanov’s second case is Iran:

“None of the 13 countries voted for anti-Iranian resolutions during the same period of 2022-24. Six countries have always supported Iran (Belarus, Bolivia, Vietnam, Cuba, Indonesia, Uzbekistan). Two countries (Algeria and Kazakhstan) either supported Iran or abstained. Five countries (Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda) always abstained or did not vote. This situation correlates to a sufficient degree with the results of voting on these resolutions by BRICS members. With regard to anti-Russian resolutions, there was also a difference in approaches. And with regard to Iran, there was also more open solidarity with this state on the part of the ‘old’ BRICS members.”

Again, this cursory consideration of intra-BRICS diplomacy suggests utter intra-subimperial chaos. Barabanov’s summary, sounding like Nye, is that:

“If there is no internal unity based on ‘all for one and one for all’, then all prospects for strengthening the BRICS as a new pole of world politics will remain unfulfilled. One of the most obvious, albeit not the most important, indicators of this internal political consolidation is the example of voting in the UN General Assembly… The level of internal consolidation of a particular structure is also determined by a unified approach to voting on international platforms. This is clearly seen in the example of NATO and the EU, whose member countries in the UN General Assembly, as a rule, vote in the same way.”

Chaos or not, the trajectory is again clear when it comes to BRICS operating as a geopolitical bloc: from hype to hope to helplessness.

To Brazil, with trepidation

What, then, does Lula inherit when hosting the BRICS leaders in Rio in July? In Modern Diplomacy, Kester Komegah writes,

“Now awakening from its slumber to the global development realities, BRICS+ together with its partner states, as an informal non-western association, ultimately seeks to participate actively in the economic system and reduce the influence of uni-polarity, the dominance of the United States.”

That’s a generous way to say that simply, BRICS elites want a bigger seat at the existing table, eating the same pie, cooked the same way, and not an alternative to imperialism. That was precisely what has been learned for at least 15 years – since Copenhagen in 2009 – when Barack Obama barged in to a private room at the UN climate summit, to thrash out a pathetic deal with leaders of Brazil, South Africa, India and China (the ‘BASIC’ bloc).

To illustrate this desire to be subimperialist not anti-imperialist, consider an interview last week with BRICS ‘sherpa’ Eduardo Saboia in AgenciaBrazil:

“Brazil will also be hosting the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Pará state, this year. How can we take advantage of the BRICS presidency to build an understanding that can help make COP30 a success? The BRICS countries play a central role when it comes to energy, which is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions.”

The ‘success’ the BRICS elites have shown they want since 2009 is that Lula change nothing in the UN climate-negotiations alliance. This is especially poignant after climate catastrophe hit Porto Alegre extremely hard last May, with floods killing more than 200 and displacing 430 000. Lula has subsequently given the notoriously corrupt parastatal oil corporation Petrobras thumbs up to:

· drill for oil at the confluence of the Amazon River and Atlantic Ocean, and

· in the spirit of intra-BRICS collaboration with the West, allowing Petrobras to explore offshore the western coast of South Africa near where the Orange River hits the Atlantic Ocean, allied with filthy-corrupt TotalEnergies of Paris.

That says it all: that central role for energy dashing hopes for those who believe BRICS will offer an alternative to the climate-fouling Western imperialists.

And what to expect may arise from the chaos of BRICS expansion in 2025? The official Russian hope is a proliferation of new partner-applicants to be announced six months from now in Rio: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Chad, Colombia, Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Honduras, Laos, Kuwait, Myanmar, Morocco, Nicaragua, Senegal, Pakistan, Palestine, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.

Dictatorships are prolific on this list. Multipolarists aiming for a genuinely progressive BRICS may notice the names Colombia, Senegal and Sri Lanka, whose new leaders do come from the left – but Nicaragua, Venezuela and Zimbabwe certainly no longer qualify.

All this expansion myth-making reminds of what the imperialist West and subimperial BRICS have in common: wars, violations of sovereignty, worsening inequality, poverty, exploitation, unemployment, pandemic mismanagement, looting of poor countries’ resources, extreme contributions to climate change and ecocide, violence against women, abusive high technology, censorship, surveillance, austerity, neoliberalism, false ‘de-dollarisation’, human rights abuses, LGBTQI+ repression, venal corruption and tyrannies.

Can we not add to the unipolar and multipolar options a third, a non-polar, anti-imperialist and anti-subimperialist politics – given the chaos overwhelming both Empire and the BRICS?


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Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.

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