2024-10-16 14:56:00
Between the 22nd and the 24th of October, there will be a summit meeting of the countries that make up the BRICS+ in the Russian Federation. The event will be held in the city of Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, located on the banks of the Volga River. Until last year, the BRICS+ consisted of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. On January 1, 2024, four countries joined it: Egypt, Ethiopia, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Argentina – which was nominated to join – rejected that affiliation in the name of geopolitical alignment with the G7 and NATO.
The ten BRICS+ members currently account for 46 percent of the world’s total population, 37.6 percent of total global GDP and more than two-thirds of hydrocarbon production. Three decades ago, the G7 (made up of Western Europe, Japan, the United States and Canada) had a 50 percent share of GDP, while BRICS barely reached 16 percent. By the time of the Kazan summit, BRICS will reach 32 percentage points, while the G7 will be around 29 percent, a gap that will deepen in the coming years.
In August this year, 32 countries asked to join the BRICS+. Applications include the paradigmatic cases of Cuba and Türkiye. In the first case, because the island in the Caribbean suffered a criminal blockade by the United States for six decades. Entry into the BRICS+ would create opportunities to break this blockade through the cooperation proposed by the New Development Bank (NBD), which offers financing without geopolitical interference.
This platform will allow many countries to avoid the illegal sanctions ordered by the State Department, giving way to financial architecture. As for the request made by Ankara – if accepted – it would be a serious blow to NATO, which would lead to the weakening of its membership.
While Washington and Brussels insist on promoting blockades, unilateral sanctions, direct programs of political, economic and/or financial interference, hybrid wars and cognitive confusion operations, BRICS+ envisions a New World Order based on respect for sovereigns and consistent regulation on large corporations. . The second of them insists on the confusion of the media, algorithmic manipulation, the destruction of the sense of community, the destruction of the environment and the disappearance of national identities.
As a counterpart, BRCS+ proposes an alternative model of global governance that seeks to disconnect the Global South from the rift of the Atlantic and, at the same time, to overcome the current paralysis of the United Nations, powerless against the NATO military, the technological war against the China and the Middle East crisis. In this framework, the continuation of the de-dollarization policy will be one of the focuses of the debate in Kazan. Four decades ago, the greenback was used in eight out of ten international trade transactions. Today that figure has been reduced to 45 percent.
To further deepen this process of monetary disconnection, the creation of the BRICS Bridge, a supranational payment platform that would compete with the Western Swift, which monopolizes the exchange of eleven thousand financial entities, will be analyzed. The Bridge would allow payments to be made in the national currencies of the member states, and the New Development Bank (NDB) would act as clearing conversion and compensation. In this way, trade between partners would be improved by facilitating transactions between governments, companies and individuals. Another of the most feared initiatives in Washington will also be discussed, the creation of a single BRICS digital currency, called R5, for the first letter of their respective currencies: real, ruble, rupee, renminbi and rand.
The Russian proposal includes the possibility of using it for international transactions and for savings. In research conducted by Zongyuan Liu and Mihaela Papa – members of the US academic establishment – they asked in 2022 whether BRICS had the potential to deepen de-dollarization.
The answer was overwhelming: the Global South will increase the decline of the model created in Bretton Woods. The decision of Javier Milei’s government to withdraw from Argentina’s membership – at the beginning of 2024, at the request of its joint elections in Washington – prompted a debate regarding the responsibilities and commitments of the members. Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mauro Luiz Vieira (photo), confirmed that one of the issues that will be addressed in Tatarstan is the rules that will govern future incorporations. The Club that Challenges the West will continue to grow, and the West will try to stop its decline with cognitive, hybrid and proxy wars (Taken from Page 12).
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