The United States and the Western world are upside down. In 11 days there are elections for the White House and the predictions, although tight, point to a victory for Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, this week, the great enemy of the United States, Vladimir Putin, received more than 20 world leaders with red carpets at the BRICS summit, in the southern Russian city of Kazan, next to the Volga.
The BRICS 2024 summit, which originated in 2006 – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa –, now visibly enlarged, has two clear leaders: Putin and Xi Jinping. These have met on more than 40 occasions during the last 11 years in which they have been the strong men of their countries.
These frequent meetings demonstrate a deep association between both leaders with a common mission: destroy and replace the network of pro-United States institutions and its European allies with a more consistent and beneficial international order for them.
The Kremlin has called the BRICS summit one of the “most consequential foreign policy events” in Russian history. Visiting countries make up 35 percent of the world economy, while the pro-Washington grouping, known as the Group of 7 (G7) (United States, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom and Canada) represents 30 percent. percent of global GDP.
Putin, the host, will be at ease. He is not burdened by the threat of arrest he faced at the previous summit in South Africa last year. The International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant against him for war crimes linked to the invasion of Ukraine. Always cautious and one step ahead of his enemies, the Russian leader stayed in the Kremlin without attending Johannesburg.
BRICS is an alliance that arose from a concept by economist Jim O’Neill in 2001. He anticipated that these countries would assume a leading role in the global economy in 2050 and advocated for their integration as the core of global policymaking.
The BRICS share key characteristics, such as their vast territories and large populations, which together represent 45 percent of the globe’s inhabitants.
This year, the bloc of emerging countries expanded to admit Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia as new partners. However, the new president of Argentina, Javier Milei, with a radically liberal and markedly pro-Washington agenda, declined the invitation to Russia.
The main plot of the host of the BRICS 2024 summit is to replace the dollar payment system with a digital mechanism in which the central banks of the countries would be the nodal points of transactions. This proposal not only goes to the heart of the global order dominated by the United States, but it would make light of the economic and financial sanctions that the United States and its allies have imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine.
The global payments plan presented at the BRICS 2024 summit, according to the weekly The Economist, “could induce faster and cheaper transactions (…) is a scheme with genuine potential.”
The election in the United States was surely a central topic of conversation at the summit in Kazan, Russia. The two great patrons of the meeting, Putin and Xi Jinping, have not only shown their preferences for Donald Trump, but have even intervened electorally with trolls and other sophisticated schemes in favor of the Republican.
Trump is a leader in style. As president, he always bowed down to both counterparts, in addition to professing a kind of admiration for them for not having to go through the customs of the checks and balances of democracies, Congresses and independent presses.
Furthermore, Trump and his nationalist-isolationist Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement plays into the global interests of Russia and China by opposing the United States’ traditional postwar alliances. , the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and even the European Union itself.
Trump or no Trump, Putin and Xi are not wasting their time. They have taken advantage of the confusion of the United States and its allies since Trumpism began (2016) to consolidate their binational alliance and to court the countries with the most future on the planet, not only India, Brazil and South Africa, but about twenty more .
