Another BRICS in the Fall

The Failure of Western Aggression

As I write South African President Cyril Ramaphosi is hosting the 15th Annual BRICS Summit at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg. It’s a meeting that takes on far more meaning today than any of the 14 previous annual summits of the economic alliance between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It is a meeting that reflects the kind of shift in global power that occurs over a span of decades, but which when complete, utterly changes the world.

We are in such a moment. The balance of power also known as the ‘international order’ or ‘the international rule of law’ is broken. What we understand as the natural order of the world, with a dominant West led by a hegemonic USA, is on its last legs, a wounded beast tottering towards extinction. The beast has exhausted itself in too many petty and unnecessary conflicts, and long since spent the coin of good feeling generated by past noble deeds. It’s also spent the coin of fear generated by past military success and current military spending levels.

The 800 or more US military bases scattered around the globe are becoming not the lynchpins of US dominance and ability to project force anywhere on the planet, as they once were, but instead an enormous albatross of irrelevant and even counter-productive spending. And they are becoming so for several factors mainly based on two things-the rise of China, and the disastrously incompetent mismanagement of US foreign strategy by every recent President except Donald Trump.

Anyone paying proper attention should know by now that the world has shifted and the players on the board have different values. We are moving away from a period of unipolar US hegemony which was almost absolute from the fall of the Soviet Union to the recent emergence of China as an economic superpower. But we are more than that moving rapidly away from the entire post WWII settlement, which even during the existence of the Soviet Union still saw most small nations following the lead of the USA and it’s allies. Old European powers like Britain and France, recovering Axis powers like Germany and Japan, were rapidly aligned behind US leadership.

This leadership was cemented by multiple practical considerations consequent on victory in WWII, namely: 1. The incredible economic and industrial base the US had built during WWII 2. The dependence of defeated Axis powers on US aid, spending and trade to rebuild their nations 3. The manner in which the US and UK created the legal frameworks and institutions designed to prevent future conflicts, such as the UN 4. The status of the US as the primary trade partner for a large part of the world 5. The effective bankruptcy of the UK and UK inability and unwillingness to sustain it’s global status as a superpower and 6. The emergence of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the deliberate enforcement of this through US policy.

Really the US was a beneficiary in this period, between 1945 to at least the turn of the millennium, of an incredibly unlikely set of advantages all dependent on, ultimately, Hitler’s desire for war. WWII knocked out of action the prior superpower, Britain, which had utterly exhausted itself. The US proved far harsher to their ally than to their just defeated enemies. Whilst Germany was generously rebuilt through the Marshall Plan, British attempts under their economist representative John Maynard Keynes to get a good or forgiving settlement plan for Lend Lease debts were cruelly and peremptorily dismissed. Many of those postwar US bases were formerly British ones, given over as payment for wartime assistance.

When Britain tried to reassert old imperial claims in response to Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal, a successful Anglo-French military operation was turned into a diplomatic disaster when the US government essentially warned that they would economically ruin the already parlous finances of the European powers unless they backed down. This brutal slap-down of former allies was intended to cement and enact the new reality of US dominance, which refused to tolerate any European rival on the global stage.

Such treatment ensured that the old imperial powers could not fully rebuild their strength and status, placed them firmly in the rank of subordinate ally, and allowed the US unfettered access to once ring-fenced and protected colonial markets. The huge opening up of former British and French possessions to US trade without imperial tariffs, and to newly emerging post-colonial nations using the dollar as their reserve currency, could only have emerged with the combination of the European powers becoming indebted to the US during WWII, and the US ruthlessly exploiting that after WWII.

Both former allies, France and Britain, and former enemies, Germany and Japan, were forced into positions of subordinate allyship, various versions of a ‘special relationship’ most characterized by the fact that the US held the whip hand.

Even with the Cold War rivalry of the Soviet Union, the circumstances were inherently set in the favor of the US. Central planning Soviet-style worked remarkably well in war when the sole need was to mass manufacture tanks and planes on simple but effective designs and combine that with armies of men more afraid of the Commissar’s bullet than the Nazis. The Soviets had done the equivalent of that already against White Russian armies and merely repeated the process (at horrific loss of life). What Soviet planning wasn’t good for, and what the Soviet Union lacked, was the ability to turn this wartime production into peaceable and profitable economic gain between conflicts.

Whilst the Soviet Union was a genuine military threat, it was never a genuine economic threat, and the nation that chose Soviet alliance over US patronage was generally one choosing slow suicide in a pact of disastrous economics. This economic advantage closely combined with a total soft-power dominance. The attractiveness of the consumer society (far more attractive to those who have nothing than it is to those who inherit everything) was a double offer the Soviet Union could not match. For most people, freedom and prosperity were more attractive propositions than tyranny and poverty, even if ruling regimes disagreed. That’s part of why US products and US culture (more widely, western products) were so cool that people smuggled them into the Soviet Union.

All of these things built the hegemony that is now dying. So why was it that this dominance died, this attractiveness died, and how does that relate to the BRICS summit?

Well, the BRICS Summit is proof of the dying hegemony, just as it is proof of the multipolar reality replacing it. There was a time when BRICS did not really matter, because it was clearly still less powerful and less attractive than the US led alliance of nations. That is no longer the case. The collective GDP of the BRICS nations has now surpassed that of the G7 nations, for the first time. Economically, these nations matter. Whilst the European nations of the EU have been in stuttering decline mode for decades, and whilst even US Presidents popularly considered successful have had the most modest of economic ambitions, BRICS nations have boomed.

China has come to regard growth between 5-10% as normal and anything below that as a disaster, whilst the West sees 3% growth as exceptionally good. Barack Obama opined that growth above 3% was impossible for the US and would never be seen again. This went alongside the deliberate and astonishingly short-sighted transfer of US manufacturing to China, a policy which only Trump has sought to reverse. EU share of global GDP has massively declined. US share of global GDP has declined. Western (including allies like Japan) share of global GDP has declined. In the same period China has gone from a backwards Communist hellhole of agrarian farmers starving to death to a nominally Communist superpower of giant cities, huge currency and gold stockpiles, global investments and consistently superior economic performance. The West has shrunk while China has grown, doubling its economy several times over.

The troubles in the Chinese economy, by the way, aren’t big enough yet to register as a cautionary to this tale of success. They are just big enough to prompt increased Chinese energy in forging alliances and opportunities.

There are over 40 nations wanting to join BRICS. Wanting to join what has become the Sino-Russian dominated alternative to the declining West. One of the topics being covered at the 15th summit is expansion and how to deal with so many nations clamoring to join. Some of these are themselves powerful and wealthy nations once officially closely aligned with the West, like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s desire to join BRICS represents a huge snub to a US that has been courting the Arab nation ever since the 1970’s oil crisis. Others are African nations already dependent on Chinese investment. Some, like Serbia, are embittered recipients of prior western military actions, or old allies of Russia. A recent poll showed that in a choice between EU membership and membership of BRICS, most Serbs favor BRICS.

The Nixonian policy of drawing China into the world economy to make them more western has been disastrous. It has built the West’s greatest threat. China has economically boomed without relenting in any of its repressive attitudes. Instead, western nations have declined by this trade, both morally and economically. Every short term benefit to a particular company in outsourcing it’s manufacturing to China, or any benefit to a western consumer from cheap Chinese goods, has come at the cost of China supplanting the West, replacing the US as the world’s primary trade partner, and of course at the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of western jobs and the western industrial base at home.

We now see western nations whose leaders admire China’s totalitarian methods, and who ape them within the West. So in addition to the long-term economic loss and self-destruction caused by building up China, the West has also been contaminated with Chinese attitudes and policies (not just with COVID lockdowns, but in how the ruling elite view the rights of those they rule). And we see western nations who have leaders, like Trudeau and Biden, who have not only admired China, but been paid by China and the Chinese Communist Party.

All the while the West has been transferring manufacturing to China and eyeing access to the giant Chinese market, China has been infiltrating and bribing western political parties, institutions, and politicians. China’s had senior US officials in bed with its spies, and almost every US university taking endowments from it too. The number of western politicians and CEO’s who are effectively on the Chinese payroll is something few if any mainstream news organisation will discuss, but it’s at levels that completely compromise western security and interests far more extensively than the Soviets ever managed during the Cold War. A lot of it isn’t even hidden.

BRICS is simply the most polite and respectable expression of this new Chinese eminence. China is the sun around which the satellites of BRICS, even the proud Russians, revolve. It is to BRICS what the US is to the G7 or what Franco-German cooperation is to the EU.

Think back to all those advantages the US had in 1945. Nearly all of them are already gone. The US is no longer the world’s primary trade partner. China is. The US does not have, and has not had for decades, the world’s fastest growing or most consistently successful economy. Other nations are no longer primarily indebted to the US. They are primarily indebted (especially in places like Africa) to China. The US does not fund all its endeavors though its enormous trade and people owing it. It funds them through inflationary money printing and through enormous debt, through it owing others, both of which have reached insane proportions. The US refuses to unlock its own reserves of energy on climate hysteria grounds. China places no such shackles on itself, and Russia has enormous natural stockpiles it does use and sell.

In their reliance on debt to maintain the illusion of wealth, both the US and the rest of the West have squandered the position they had in 1945. Or rather the advantage that helped defeat the Soviets has been the weakness building debt (the consumer society) when accompanied by truly foolish leadership. And this foolishness has built the conditions of a collapse that will make 2008 or the Great Depression look trivial. They have been like a man who refuses to exercise but wants to pretend to be strong. He’s spent all his money on fake plastic muscles slipped in beneath the skin. But he’s not strong anymore. He has just had the illusion done, with scars.

Those advantages which would have once rendered a BRICS summit irrelevant included the coin of respect and the coin of fear. People respected and were attracted to the consumer society when it represented having more. But they don’t when it just represents debt papering over weakness, or consumption masking despair. The Beatles, jeans, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and big cars all look pretty good when you have three cabbages on a shelf in a drab Eastern European disaster. People are less impressed when the cultural offer of the West is no more actual freedom than China, LESS economic success, and celebration when your five year old boy is castrated and dressed as a girl. Putin in particular has been quick to recognize and comment on how the US and the West squandered their cultural coin of respect. And he’s been right.

If Chinese boom and Chinese investment has been the economic draw for those wanting to join BRICS, then Russian rhetoric on culture has probably been almost as effective, particularly for traditionalist nations (Christian and Islamic) who already see the West as decadent and perverse. Russia’s talk of western depravity chimes with many non-Western ears. It chimes, let us be honest, with many western conservative ears too. We can see how John Wayne or Marilyn Monroe might be admired worldwide as templates of masculinity and femininity. It’s hard to see how Lizzo or Sam Smith would be.

But what has wasted both economic strength and cultural attraction more than anything else, and what has made of strength a liability, is US neocon foreign policy, particularly military interventionism. Neocon wars, of which the proxy war in Ukraine is the latest but which include the disasters of various levels of engagement in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, have squandered first affection, then fear. It’s harder and harder for a nation to say it is the champion of freedom and sovereignty when it has a 70 year record of invading other nations and ignoring their freedom to live differently. Even those who see one or two of these wars as justified are unlikely to see 70 years of them as justified. Taking on the role of the world’s policeman has actually been as toxic for attitudes towards the US as it was before that for the UK. Those who are saved are seldom thankful and often humiliated by needing the assistance, whilst those who were crushed or defeated remain embittered for generations.

If you are going to run around the world as a knight in shining armor, the armor truly has to be spotless. It has to be a conflict that is morally simple, and very few ever are. It has to be relatively brief, or your armor drags you down into a quagmire. It has to genuinely be disinterested, which almost no neocon venture is. The Second World War, thanks to the nature of the Nazis and the swift reconstruction of the defeated, largely justified itself in moral terms. But very few engagements since have done the same. The First Iraq War might just about have met these criteria since a limited aim based on the argument of repelling an invasion was swiftly accomplished. The Second did not, since the claims to justify it were lies, the aim was not limited, and the consequences were far worse than not fighting it.

But it’s things like a 20 year involvement in Afghanistan, spending over 2.2 trillion US dollars, to result in crushing humiliating defeat including the loss of 80 billion dollars worth of military equipment and the Taliban back in power, that really squanders both affection and fear. Such disasters make it impossible for other nations to love you, and equally impossible for them to fear you. Neocon strategy has turned the US into a despised laughing stock, as every measure taken to preserve US hegemony has in fact weakened it. Other nations look at this and wonder how readily the US would invade or bully them. They suspect it could easily happen. But they no longer fear it. Instead, China and BRICS offers them a more attractive alternative.

Ally with the people who haven’t got a record of bombing the world. No longer care about who the West, with its own record of censorship and oppression within and bombing and invasion without, tells you is a bad guy. The Chinese are not telling you nonsense about 97 genders. And they aren’t threatening you with missiles. They are offering you a loan for a hydroelectric dam, together with very welcome bribes to your leaders. The Chinese don’t seem to care how you organize your own affairs, as long as you make them a bit of money too. The West has all these ridiculous demands-change your culture, change your way of life, change your beliefs-or we will bomb you.

Which of those sounds more attractive?

And the ultimate in the difference between something like BRICS and the whole edifice of ‘the West’ is seen most clearly in the Ukraine proxy war. If smarter people in the West can see how the West pushed Russia towards invasion, so can people outside the West. They do see it. And they see it failing. They don’t see Russia as the aggressor. They see the US as engineering a conflict on Russia’s border that Putin had to respond to. They see NATO expansion. They see US biolabs. They see what Ukraine has got as a ‘western ally’. Used as a battleground in a failed scheme to destroy Russia. Bombed and blasted and broken, like all the other places the US has surreptitiously or openly intervened. They see what Germany has gained, with its pipeline bombed by its supposed NATO ally protector. They see Russia proud and unbowed, and western economic warfare through sanctions failing.

They see they have nothing to fear, and nothing to admire, in the West and in the US.

Now it doesn’t even matter if that narrative is partly true, fully true, or completely untrue. It’s what neocon strategic failure, its what the utter shambles of the management of the West and its foreign policy, economic policy and cultural policies since 1945 and especially since 2020, shows the world. The only exception was between 2016-2020. Otherwise, all they can see is western aggression combined with western weakness.

And they believe it. Which is why more of them want to join BRICS rather than NATO or the EU or the shrinking, failing, flailing western sphere in any of its forms. US hegemony is already dead, and nobody did a better job of killing it than US leaders.