Mani Basharzad @ManiBasharzad
Nietzsche once wrote, ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’. In the case of the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa,
Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (BRICS), the first two lines apply – but not the third. We didn’t kill it. The BRICS project was a slow-motion suicide from the start.
The 17th BRICS summit took place in Rio de Janeiro on July 6 and 7, and if this is the first time you’re hearing about it,
you’re not alone. The event passed largely unnoticed. Neither Xi Jinping nor Vladimir Putin showed up.
Vladimir Putin, who once boldly claimed that BRICS, not the West, would drive global economic growth, was absent.
Speculation points to the risk of arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant, given Brazil’s membership of the court.
Xi’s absence marked his first no-show in over a decade. It’s a symbolic moment: if two of its leading figures don’t even attend the summit, what kind of future can BRICS really claim?
The original illusion
All the countries in BRICS that experienced high growth did so with the help of the US market. After their initial period of catching up,
they seemed to forget this. They thought they could now do it on their own and ‘play God’ for the other members – an illusion from the start. There’s a reason Deng Xiaoping,
once Mao’s right hand, wore a cowboy hat during his 1979 state visit. The so-called economic miracle was made possible by the US and the West.
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