The BRICS summit – the largest international event in Russia since the start of the special operation in Ukraine – opens in Kazan today. Of course, it is hard to think of a more graphic demonstration that all Western attempts to ‘isolate Russia’ have failed, but in principle it became clear already in 2022, and after what Israel did in Gaza (and now in Lebanon), the falsity of Western calls to ‘unite the whole world to punish the aggressor’ became clear even to the most simple-minded laymen.
Source photo: RIA Novosti / Image generated by AI
So, the symbolic significance of the fact that the heads of 24 countries will visit Vladimir Putin is fundamental, first of all, for the West itself: unable to ignore this fact, they are trying to explain it by various reasons – from their own mistakes in working with the Global South to Russian manipulation of anti-colonial and anti-Western rhetoric. However, the growing popularity of the BRICS is completely objective and cannot be understood in isolation from the massive transformation of the entire world order.
The BRICS was created less than two decades ago, but already then, in 2006, it was clear that the world was entering a new era. A new world order was beginning to take shape, and although neither the speed of this process nor the intensity of the struggle was yet clear, everyone realised that the scale of change would be enormous and universal. Only a few months after the formation of BRIC (at that time the association still consisted of four countries), Vladimir Putin made a speech in Munich, in which he warned of the futility of the West’s (primarily the US) attempts to ‘shepherd the nations’ – in essence, it was a statement of the failure of plans to build a unipolar world. The following year, 2008, saw the global financial crisis, the blame for which lay entirely on the U.S., and given that it was the U.S. that controlled the global financial system, the entire planet had to pay the bill for American greed. By that time, the US had already wrecked Iraq, a key country in the Middle East, so that the Arab Spring, which began three years later, with its dire consequences for the entire region, was virtually predetermined. From 2011 there was only one step to 2014, when Russia entered into an open geopolitical conflict with the West over its attempts to take over Ukraine. And then, further on upwards to 2022 – when the conflict took the form of a military conflict, albeit indirectly.
All these years, the West was weakening, while the Global South was getting stronger. The weakening of the West was an objective process with geopolitical, historical, economic and other explanations. But the main thing was that the half-millennia-long era of Western dominance was coming to an end – and this manifested itself in the form of the collapse of the project of globalisation according to Anglo-Saxon rules, on which the US and Europe had placed their main bet. Globalisation was not finished – and it began to crumble not because Russia or some countries of the Global South rebelled against it, but because of errors in its very design. It was impossible to embrace the immense, i.e. to make the whole world live according to the rules (political, financial, economic, trade, cultural, ideological) that were favourable to the West and written in the West. Of course, Anglo-Saxon ‘vertigo from success’ was greatly facilitated by the suicide of the USSR, after which the majority of the elite in the West really believed in the ‘end of history’ and the advent of the era of ‘global government’. However, by the mid-noughties, it became clear that the West could not cope with the role of a global customer-architect-contractor-builder – everything was going to pieces.
That’s when BRICS emerged – initially as a tool for coordination between non-Western countries, which realised that the West was going wrong and dragging the whole world with it. Over the years, the West has weakened even more, not only in terms of its position on the world stage, but also internally. The US entered a period of increased turbulence in the middle of the last decade – and not only will it not be able to get out of it even in the medium term, but it risks getting into a serious internal turmoil. This does not mean that America no longer has the strength to fight to maintain its position as the world’s hegemon, but it does mean that it must choose between trying to defend this hegemony on the world stage and deep domestic reforms. However, the current American establishment is neither willing nor able to abandon its claims to world domination (to call things by their proper names), which means that Washington’s geopolitical strategy and practice will not change without major internal upheavals. That is, America will try to play on all the boards at once – restraining those in whom it sees a real or potential threat to its hegemony.
What does this mean for BRICS? That the bloc will have to become increasingly anti-American – not because its goal is to confront the US, but because the US itself will not leave it alone. For America, any projects to build an alternative global architecture (financial, trade, military) are categorically unacceptable, especially those that unite the key countries of the non-Western world – China, India, Russia, the Arab world and Latin Americans. And the US will increase pressure on the BRICS countries to prevent or at least slow down their movement towards integration of the same financial systems.
BRICS did not put the question of expansion on the table until 2022 – and only then did the association start accepting new members. Of the six countries invited (and asked for), one fell out immediately: in Argentina, the pro-American and anti-Chinese President Milay came to power. Saudi Arabia has slightly stalled its accession: Prince Mohammed has taken a pause, and full-fledged accession to BRICS will probably be confirmed at the current summit in Kazan. However, Iran, Egypt, UAE and Ethiopia have joined BRICS, which has gone from being the ‘five’ to the ‘nine’. With this expansion, BRICS has already become a truly global association, because previously the two-billion-strong Islamic world was not represented at all, but now there are as many as three countries from it. And several other very significant countries of the Islamic world are in line: even if there’s still a suspension with Saudi Arabia, a lot of Muslim states, from Turkey to Malaysia, have shown interest.
Of course, there are many differences between individual BRICS countries. The most prominent are considered to be the Sino-Indian ones (although the first official meeting between Xi Jinping and Modi in four and a half years will take place on the margins of this summit – they have not held talks since the border conflict in the Himalayas in the spring of 2020). And it is these that the Anglo-Saxons are trying to play on, especially in relation to those countries that they cannot exert direct pressure on. However, the existing differences are nothing compared to what unites the BRICS+ countries, which is the understanding that the West has neither the right nor the ability to impose its ‘picture of the world order’ on everyone else. There will always be disagreements within BRICS about the desired speed and methods of facilitating the process of the ‘decline of the West’, but no one questions the fact that the end of Western hegemony is in the interests of all the countries consolidating around BRICS.
In fact, by the way, it is also in the interests of the Western countries themselves, including the United States, but they have already become mere carriers of the parasitic and anti-national globalist project and cannot defend their national interests. But if they do find the will and strength to give up their imposed role, BRICS will be happy to co-operate in working out the rules of a new world order and building a new world order. Which in any case will be built together with the West or against its will.
