By Kelly Sloan | Contributing Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Writing a political column is a notoriously difficult endeavor two days before a major election. By the time you read this, editorial vagaries being what they are, the election will be over and any electoral prognostication or attempt at influence will be rendered, well, moot.
We may or may not know for certain how it all turned out, but even if there remain votes to count, or recounts to be conducted, the United States will have, via the electoral college, selected either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as President. Sort of Schrodinger’s Cat as applied to democracy.
What we do know is that whoever the next president is will be inheriting an increasingly dangerous and unstable world beyond America’s borders, and the new inhabitant of the White House will need to muster resources preternatural to either candidate’s inherent instincts to deal with it.
Politico’s National Security Daily newsletter ran a kind of a fun piece recently dwelling on the various attempts to attach a moniker to the emerging (emerged?) quartet of anti-western nations that are posing the new threat –- Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Among the suggestions were “Axis of Evil” (we’ve been there before); “Axis of Authoritarianism” (please); a couple plays on the acronym – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or “CRINK” (really?), or alternatively adding “global extremists” to the end, making “CRINGE” (speaks for itself.) Mike Pence’s “Wolfpack of Rouge Nations” is not bad, but sounds a little too appealing, like something one might want to join rather than to mount a defence against. Speaker Mike Johnson’s “Interconnected web of threats” is surgically precise and categorically accurate, but too staid and academic, even for me. And that’s saying something.
Whatever we end up taxonomizing them as, the key nations in this devil’s brew -– Russia and China –- are the undisputed leaders of BRICS; yes, another acronym, this one for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the first four of which founded the group in 2009 before admitting South Africa in 2011 at the invitation of China. Since then, it has expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and is set to expand its number further, up to 22.
BRICS leaders held their 16th annual summit in Kazan, Russia from the 22nd to 24th October. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin squeezed out every ounce that he could from the summit, using it as a platform to garner support for his war of naked aggression on Ukraine, condemn Isreal for their defensive war for survival in Gaza, and criticize the West -– and America in particular -– for every horrible capitalist, imperialist sin imaginable. It attracted the likes of former British MP George Galloway — a guy so radically leftist that he was once booted from the Labour Party, who fawningly embraced it as the future of world order: “I’m a father of six. BRICS is their future, and it’s very exciting. BRICS now represents half the world’s population –- this is a turning point in world history.”
Putin agreed wholeheartedly, telling the assembled leaders that “the process of forming a multipolar world order is underway, a dynamic and irreversible process.”
Why does this matter? Well, the organization was explicitly founded to provide something of a counterweight to the G-7 –- that is, to challenge the economic dominance of the free-market West. Much of the discussion at BRICS summits, this one no exception, centers around establishing an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the de facto global currency. It would be easy to write off the organization as an inconsequential parcel of rogues, save for the fact that it’s two top founding members share a few things in common: the most important being that both are nuclear powers, both are vigorously committed to expanding their influence, and both hate existing in a rules-based world led economically by the United States.
The fledgling alliance has its difficulties; for one thing, its founding members are not exactly the picture of cohesion. Russia and China are pretty much sympatico with one another when it comes to their desire to take the West down a few pegs. But Brazil and India are not so enthusiastic. Neither really wants to entirely upend the global economic order, and neither wants to entirely alienate the West. Both have stayed largely on the sidelines when it comes to Russia’s Ukraine war, neither explicitly condemning nor supporting it. This fissure within the alliance is an important one.
Nevertheless, the ascendency of BRICS poses a challenge to the West, economically and strategically. BRICS has granted Putin an avenue to insulate himself from Western sanctions and garner legitimacy for his aggression; and has vouchsafed China a new avenue to expand its own global influence, at the expense of the U.S. Exploiting the fissure within the organization would seem a rather obvious and crucial evolution, but represents a level of statecraft that seems sorely lacking in the West at the moment. It is precisely that level of statecraft, however, that history is demanding of the person just elected to be the next U.S. President, so help us God.