First, three years of Covid-19 prevented BRICS leaders from holding face-to-face summits or convening the large number of specialized meetings of bureaucrats, businesses and civil society that figured in the bloc’s ecosystem.
Second, from 2019 to 2022, the Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro delayed the bloc’s progress and destroyed its cohesion, due to its right-wing extremism and pro-Western alignment, for example, in the very important factor of the South obtaining patent exemptions for vaccines. and remedies against Covid-19. The exemptions represented a primary proposal to reform the World Trade Organization (WTO), and were basically vetoed by Europeans on behalf of their pharmaceutical industries in 2021-2022, Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson will have appreciated that Bolsonaro joined the handful of leaders who reject the repeated calls of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. who have spoken on behalf of more than a hundred countries, it is not easy for important prescription drugs to be considered “global public goods”.
+ Third, territorial disputes have erupted between China and India in the Himalayas, reflecting a lack of border settlement dating back to the early 1960s, which in 2020 led to the deaths of dozens of foot soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. There is no end in sight to the military skirmishes in the mountainous lands and, because of massive Chinese dams, in the headwaters of south-flowing rivers. The other big fighting ground stretches west into Pakistan from Kashmir, where local resistance to Delhi’s strict control and Islamophobia, as well as Beijing’s preference to control Kashmiris in China, continues. Further west, Beijing is investing $65 billion in corridor infrastructure linking the Pakistani port of Gwadar to western China, which it sees as increasingly important due to industry vulnerabilities in the Malacca Strait. Array and in order to gain faster access to the Belt and Road Initiative. to China’s oil imports. the Persian Gulf. But this point of economic compromise with India’s main enemy state – adding a disputed sovereign zone in Pakistan – infuriates the Delhi government, which in turn has continuously shut down investments through Chinese corporations and exposed an immoderate point of nationalist sinophobia.
Fourth, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was not only catastrophic locally, but also disrupted global food and energy markets, creating enormous political pressures around the world. Putin came close to provoking a constitutional crisis in South Africa over the prospect that local courts would force Ramaphosa to execute an International Criminal Court arrest warrant (for the abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children), should he arrive in person at the Johannesburg summit in 2023. Ramaphosa begged the Russian leader to virtually attend the summit, as part of South Africa’s leadership in a futile peace project between Kiev and Moscow led by several African leaders in June 2023. Ramaphosa also publicly called on the Russian leader to repair maritime access to Ukraine. Exports are responsible for about 10% of the world’s cereal supply. However, Putin ignored that call and instead provided loose materials of his own grain to several substandard countries whose leaders attended the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg last July.
+ Fifth, there have been significant divisions within various BRICS leaderships, with Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s narrow electoral victory over Bolsonaro and the latter’s supporters’ failed attempt to lead a government in January 2023; the June 2023 mutiny of Yevgeny Prigokhine, Putin’s former close best friend, and his Wagner mercenary organization; the mysterious disappearance of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang in July, amid rumors of an affair with a British spy or simply ineffective performance; and in South Africa, the virtual resignation of Ramaphosa in December 2022 due to a damning investigation into private corruption. While Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Modi and Putin appear to have consolidated their personal power, the two weakest BRICS are unstable: Lula faces a hostile Bolsonar-dominated Congress and relies on self-defeating alliances with neoliberals at the most sensible moment. . his own government; while the Ramaphosa monetary corruption affair and the unreliability of his vice-president (not to mention his predecessor’s brief imprisonment on August 12 – for fees similar to bribery from a French arms dealer – followed a swift pardon), as well as widespread blackouts, will most likely result in the loss of his party majority and the formation of a coalition government after the mid-2024 elections.
The $100 billion Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA) was intended to provide a backstop, but its 2014 design gave the IMF more power, by forcing BRICS borrowers seeking access to more than 30% of their borrowing quota (e. g. , in the (case of South Africa). $3 billion) to sign an IMF structural adjustment program in advance. thus amplifying Washington’s monetary leverage.
When in 2020, the BRICS finance minister, who faced the greatest vulnerability, Tito Mboweni of South Africa, estimated that he needed a $4. 3 billion loan for the Covid economic crisis, he turned to the IMF, not the ARC, so this specific “alternative” was not only falsely advertised, but only exists on paper.
Although the BRICS gained greater voting strength in the IMF and World Bank, reaching only about 15% in the late 2010s (at the expense of poorer countries such as Nigeria and Venezuela, whose share of the vote fell to more than 40% each), the two establishments whose main leaders are still appointed through the European and US governments respectively. BRICS politicians, as well as the heads of the Bretton Woods establishment, only complain occasionally, but since 2012 they have not even put forward other candidates for the IMF presidency. or the Bank.
The continuing tendency of the BRICS to “talk to the left, walk to the right” tends to complain about Western imperialist power, but does nothing to replace the regulations of the neoliberal multilateral order – and welcomes the missions of the IMF and the World Bank (and in the case of South Africa, billions of dollars ‘value of new loans’).
The US Federal Reserve had supported Richard Nixon’s destruction, between 1971 and 1973, of the $35 per ounce of gold Bretton Woods agreement (dating from 1944), with an $80 billion default on the bond, with the fastest interest rate increases to end US loans. inflation in 1979, which caused the Third World debt crisis that impoverished billions of people.
In the 1990s, the Federal Reserve carried out damaging monetary deregulation and when this led to the implosion of housing markets and many primary creditors, speculators and insurers in 2007-2008, US government bailouts in 2008-2009 were followed by quantitative easing (QE). in 2009-2013, which represents new bailouts).
After the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, the Federal Reserve recommitted to QE and ended it in early 2022 with a series of painful interest rate hikes.