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By Dr Wayne Kublalsingh
August 24, 2023, marked a dramatic shift in the course of global history. BRICS, the nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, announced that they were admitting Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into its fold. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has calculated that the larger BRICS Plus formation is worth roughly 30 per cent of the global economy, which is US$30.7 trillion. BRICS Plus is home to 46 per cent of the global population, 3.7 billion citizens. Its share of oil production is now 43.1 per cent, and its share of global exports is 25.1 per cent. However, the significance of this global shift may not be reduced to plain IMF numbers.
For over 500 years the trade, economics and politics of the planet have been dominated by Western Europe, namely Spain, France, Britain, and to a lesser extent Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Danes. The militaries of these nations have disrupted the histories of the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific (e.g. Guam, Hawaii) South East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and Northern Asia (North Korea, China), through conquest, the decimation of human populations, enslavement and the creation of satrap, or puppet, proxy, pawn, pussycat states.
The United States emerged as an industrial power in the 1860s. After its Civil War, it shifted from an agrarian slave economy, carpetbagging its African labour Northwards, into a proletarian industrial economy. Armed with its edicts of Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine, gunboat diplomacy, dollar diplomacy, US exceptionalism, and a marauding Navy in the Pacific, and Northern Caribbean (Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic), it placed itself in a position of global dominance when Western Europe bled itself out in World War Two. So said so done.
Since 1945, the US and NATO have held in economic thraldom large swathes of human populations in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. Using such institutions as the IMF, the World Bank, its military-industrial complex, CIA, its global surveillance apparatus, its media, and, by dint of its prestige acquired through the impressive and threatening thunder of war, its dollar. No matter how much in debt (now over US$30 trillion), or how much money it prints, after getting rid of the gold standard, its dollar still retains its worth. Regularly, through its sanctions policies, it absconds with the financial assets of nations it is in disagreement with.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa have had enough. BRICS Plus is the first expansionary retaliation. And in due course, more will be added. More than forty countries had expressed an interest in joining and twenty-three had formally applied to join. The great theme of BRICS has been multipolarity. Multipolarity versus unipolarity. Multipolarity means an existential break from the system of control by the one, the single power. A shift from one voice, one authority, one edict, one hierarchy.
Now, what is the position of the English-speaking Caribbean in this historic movement? Over the last three days, other signal events have occurred. On the same day that India landed its rover craft on the invisible dark side of the moon, at its South Pole, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, an eighteen-year-old chess grandmaster was challenging the great Norwegian chess master, Magnus Carlsen for the World Cup title. He had earlier defeated the world numbers three and two Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana, both from the US. Three of his compatriots had also qualified to play in the quarter-finals, the last eight. The BRICS were hosting their conference in South Africa. And Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former convict and chef, the leader of a mercenary buccaneering army group, Wagner, was reported killed in a plane crash over Russia.
The quest for technological and intellectual supremacy is no longer the exclusive preserve of Europe or the United States. BRICS made sure that it included another large nation from Latin America, three from the Middle East, and two from Africa: Egypt, and lo and behold – Ethiopia! The BRICS Plus formation boasts three nations from Africa. The permanent UN Security Council (The Big Five: Britain, the US, Russia, France and China) has no nation from Latin America, the Middle East or Africa.
After news broke of the death of Prigozhin, a local TV station ticker-taped the news. First, that Prigozhin was killed. Second, it reported the response of US President Joe Biden. He stated that there’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin is not behind. There was no reportage of the many other voices on the subject. The impression given by Biden was that Putin was the person behind the death. This action by our local TV station crystallizes the meaning of unipolarity.
Joe Biden, over his fifty-year career in the US Senate, and his eight years as Vice President under Barack Obama, has regularly finessed wars of decimation globally. He was one of the Senate’s chief gospellers of Bush’s Iraq war (Senate Committee,1998). He clearly indicated that the US would terminate Russia’s Nord Stream 2 into Europe, before it was sabotaged in September 2022. This is the Massa that the local mainstream station rushed to, an implicated, partisan and deeply untrustworthy source, in preference to any other narrative. The English-speaking Caribbean possesses one of the highest per-capita of colonial stooges on the planet. This is the key obstacle to our making a beeline to the BRICS to apply for membership.
Dr Wayne Kublalsingh is a Trinidadian activist for authentic economic development, academic and writer .
