Malaysia to Join BRICS
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
> “When I first met President Xi Jinping, I was attracted to him because President Xi is one of the few outstanding leaders who talks about civilisation. In a sense, he is unique,” he was quoted as saying.
But last year we had a headline like "Malaysia rejects new China map claiming entire South China Sea":
* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/malaysia-rejects-ne...
Curious to see how the ocean dispute will play into this.
India and China were shooting at each other over long-disputed borders a few years ago. BRICS was never a security pact. (To the extent it means anything, it’s analogous to the OECD.)
Hell, it’s easier for me in America to do business with either China or India than it is for them to do business with each other.
I don't see how you can make that claim from such a distance.
The distance matters little if you're comparing reality with unbelievable claims that don't hold up to the fastest scrutiny.
I am travelling to India on a tourist visa in November and again in December. (I have family in India.) That literally hasn’t been possible from China for two years [1].
It’s also easier to do money transfers between China and India through the U.S., because both have capital controls and both flag large transactions with the other. (I do more business in India than China, but there aren’t many hurdles.)
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/india-tourist-visa-chi...
India's ED has de facto been raiding Chinese businesses and forcing them to divest to Indian ownership after 2020.
For example, MG Motors India is now majority owned by JSW Group, Huawei India (once Huawei's largest R&D hub and their main chip design hub) was forced out of India after the Doklam standoff, and all the Chinese mobile manufacturers were harragued by the ED and sold their assets to Samsung, LG, Apple affiliates, etc.
Yeah, no. Huawei Bangalore was tiny in comparison to Dongguan, Beijing and Shenzhen. And far from being the main chip design hub, barely any hardware specific work happened in Bangalore.
Source: Worked for Huawei Bangalore for over 6 years.
https://twitter.com/chedetofficial/status/162898188067786342...
In particular the follow up (European's love of war) is hilarious and not an uncommon view in that part of the world.
Alas, we don't hear that narrative because it's only bad when Europeans do it.
OP was clearly and unambiguously pointing out the problem with colonialism.
If you think that colonialism is bad exclusively because of racism then you aren't really thinking things through.
I mean,listen to yourself: do you think that the complains pinned on "Jewish merchants in 30s europe" was not being able to do trade with them?
To be exactly sure you only need to read OP's post.
> (...) when China never colonized (...)
Read OP's post.
> Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money
There is certainly a lot of bad in the world but The Atlantic stance seems over the top.
The Conversation and Rest of World are two much more even magazines in my opinion.
There’s both bad news and good news about climate change in the future.
The bad news is that as long as we keep burning carbon, it will continue to get hotter and hotter.
The good news is that we can substitute clean energy, like solar and wind power, instead of burning carbon, to power the products and services of modern life.
This is something I’d expect to see written in a 6th grade textbook trying to get past Texas’ textbook adoption committee. They pretend to give a nod to the climate change deniers by writing, “there’s good news and bad news..” with the good news being a non sequitor. One can use clean energy and strive for that regardless of whether or not climate change is real.
The website did seem much less alarmist than Fox News, CNN, etc.
It’s a few hundred character Tweet that has been reproduced fully. You don’t even need to know the author to assess the contents of the tweet.
Frum took an accurate view IMHO.
Unless you think that property rights (and window incidents) in Russia are not a problem, or that China already has good transparency in their economy… Do you think those things?
The individual countries should be taken seriously. Which western countries finally have started doing over the last couple of years. The watershed moment was Russia’s attack on Ukraine. It finally dispensed with the neocon idea that they could spread free market democracies in Russia and China by simply trading with them.
One can also take the countries seriously but the 'BRICS project' not-seriously.
Again, which claim is incorrect?
> Brazil's history of monetary stability
Does Brazil have a history of monetary stability?
> Russia's respect for property rights
Does Russia have respect for property rights?
> India's domestic tranquility
Is India’s domestic affairs tranquil?
> China's financial transparency
Are Chinese finances transparent?
> South Africa's investment opportunities
Does South Africa have great investment opportunities?
One could argue much of this really matters when it comes to economic growth for individual countries. But all these properties certainly matter when it comes to forming an economic alliance across nations.
Which is why BRICS has been almost completely worthless and to the extent these countries have had any effect together it’s through bilateral agreements.
It does, now that its in BRICS.
>Does Russia have respect for property rights?
It does, now that its in BRICS. (ahem sanctions are a crime against humanity, yo.)
>Are India’s domestic affairs tranquil?
They certainly will get better, now that they're in BRICS and their people stand to gain a lot from the economic growth that involves, outside of the Western control that has put India in the position its in, in the first place.
>Are Chinese finances transparent?
Well, ask the other BRICS members: they are the ones who can say, definitely, yes. To Americans? No, of course not.
>Does South Africa have great investment opportunities?
They certainly do, now that they're in BRICS.
>Which is why BRICS has been almost completely worthless ..
.. to the Western Empire.
BRICS is a solution, not a problem. Its a solution to the 'situations' listed, but its also a solution to the fact that the USA has weaponized the petrodollar while committing heinous atrocities across the landscape.
We can do it for America, too: a union with Mississippi’s economy, California’s taxes, Alabama’s services and Kansas’s natural beauty.
This form is good for jokes but bad for analysis. BRICS could have worked if its members agreed on anything. They don’t, and there are better multilateral forums that don’t rely on the West that could be constructed in its place. (Starting with continental organisation.)
When it snows, all you see is a sea of snow everywhere, and in the spring it's a sea of prairie grass in the rural areas.
The cities are like Chicago and San Francisco had a baby in terms of the architecture and layout.
Our taxes are also higher than California if you are going by percentage (for property taxes and sales taxes, but not income taxes, except for food). California is "okay" I guess. They could do some tax reform, but it's a large state with some large programs and initiatives, so considering that, it's not bad. Additionally, Alabama has less than stellar in person services, but great online services. Mississippi is often troped as having not the greatest economy, but their economy is based on oil, and chemical processing, and fishing. They are also located in a hurricane zone. That means that they get hit hard all the time, and have to keep rebuilding infrastructure. That's not easy. They also get hit economically every time there is a chemical spill or an oil spill, cause the plant will shut down, and they cannot fish there either. We should probably open datacenters there.
30 years and counting.
Yes. I would say better enforced/respected than in Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece) or Balkans.
I guess one simply needs to live on the ground floor or not have any windows in their high-rise apartment:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_notable_R...
That doesn't mean BRICS has achieved lots. It does mean that his snide comment has no merit with respect to saying anything about BRICS whatsoever.
Also, it is high time for the US Coastal Elites to realise that they're losing the game, and they're losing the game globally, so unless they change their strategy they're going to be in for a hard time in 10-15-20 years, because at some point the money will stop flowing in.
So over the last couple of years they’ve started decoupling from China/Russia and their entirely export oriented economies will collapse.
India will eventually have to stop fence sitting and either choose a side or have a side chosen for them. I don’t expect India to do the smart thing here either. They haven’t for the past half century.
I find it hilarious that the RIC of BRICS are all battling each other for territory. Chinese maps since Russia’s war on Ukraine have started renaming Eastern Russian territories to Chinese. India and China are battling for territory and fighting each other. If you’re in India importing anything from China is extremely difficult. The U.S. is currently trying to get a TikTok ban through but India banned TikTok and every other Chinese website years ago.
This is apparently the wonderfully strong hegemon that’s gonna threaten the west.
What a joke.
I couldn't find a reference for this. I could find a reference to a single island at their border that has been disputed for 30 years. All of these disputes have been ongoing for a long time.
The west has its fractures. US caught spying on Merkel. France's Macron has stated that he wants to diversify his ties to keep China included in trade relations. The west has been more unified in the last couple years because of the Ukraine War.
US and company are equally reliant on BRICS. Small shifts in balance can have ripple effects in the economies.
But after Russia attacked there were several Neocon interviews where they acted surprised and did frame it as "We did not think it would happen" in a very casual way.
Perhaps the people who said those things thought Putin was bluffing, or that the response was going to be weak… kind of like it was in 2014.
> And yet by all accounts, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been shrugging off threats of new sanctions if he attacks Ukraine. Maybe Putin is bluffing. But if so, he has taken his bluff very far, keeping more than 100,000 Russian troops in battle-ready positions through mid-winter.
> Maybe, however, Putin has assessed that Western democracies’ threat to issue sanctions “like none he’s ever seen” is a bluff? He has some good basis to doubt European resolve.
* https://archive.ph/eizpt / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/europe-rus...
Of course if one understood Putin and his world view, it is hardly surprising:
> Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders.
* https://archive.ph/qqcKH / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...
What they think or intend in private is another issue.
It isn’t explicitly anti-American yet. But if it takes that tack, I’d expect Egypt, the UAE and India to drop out while leaving Malaysia in an uncomfortable place.
[1] https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/china-...
It is certainly not pro-petrodollar.
Which, given the blood the petrodollar spills, is probably a good thing for billions of people to get behind.
As in it’s not an anachronism from the 1970s, yes. BRICS (né BRIC) wasn’t coined until 2001 [1].
America should take QUAD to the next level ASAP
India doesn't want that, because India uses Russia as a mediator with China [0][1][2], and India wants to maintain the current status quo.
[0] - https://eastasiaforum.org/2020/10/23/how-russia-emerged-as-k...
[1] - https://www.orfonline.org/research/the-india-factor-in-china...
[2] - https://www.nbr.org/publication/india-and-the-quad-when-a-we...
BRICS expansion has essentially blunted it, as every expansion require unanimous support of [edir: the founding] all 5 members.
There's a reason Turkey (opposition from India due to it's military support for Pakistan) and Bangladesh (opposition from China due to Sheikh Hasina's dependence on India for sanction relief) weren't accepted.
Every state that has been accepted in the expansion is a state that has strong economic ties to both China and India, thus canceling out any potential bias.
- UAE's 1st and 2nd largest trade partners are China and India
- KSA's 1st and 2nd largest trade partners are China and India
- Ethiopia's 1st and 2nd largest partners are China and India.
- China is Egypt's largest import market, but India is one of Egypt's largest export market and is Egypt's credit guaranteer.
The addition of Malaysia follows this pattern as well.
BRICS has become as meaningless as APEC, because India ended up doing the same thing that China did to APEC in the 90s when Jiang Zemin unilaterally declared it cannot be a Community like the EC.
Isn’t it nine [1]?
> Every state that has been accepted in the expansion is a state that has strong economic ties to both China and India, thus canceling out any potential bias
This is true. But looking at military vulnerability, Malaysia is obviously subject to one more than the other. (China’s security relationship with Russia and Iran further undermining India.)
The founding members (in reality just China and India) are the ones with competing and diametrically opposed interests and veto each other.
> But looking at military vulnerability, Malaysia is obviously subject to one more than the other
Not severely. Indian sanctions on Malaysian imports and ban on exporting key foodstuff to Malaysia collapsed Mahathir Mohammed's government when he became overly chummy with Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar (thus pissing off UAE and KSA as well), and has been contributing to severe inflation in Malaysia
> Iran further undermining India
India's relationship with Iran is compartmentalized to investments and it's presence in Iranian Balochistan.
Iran's only seaport located outside the Persian/Arab Gulf chokepoint is Chabahr Port, which is operated and funded by an Indian SoE. Most of the highways in Iranian Balochistan and Iranian Khorasan are Indian built and operated as well.
> China’s security relationship with Russia
It's not a unified bonhomie. A good example is the North Korea problem.
While China keeps NK on a short leash, they limit any military technology transfers to NK because CN values the relationship with SK and JP more (even despite the trade wars from the last decade).
Russia has been undermining China in NK by transferring military and nuclear technology and opening it's market to NK [0], infringing on China's near-abroad and also making it's relations with SK and JP extremely rocky (which is bad because China is trying to negotiate a FTA between CN-SK-JP, which is increasingly looking like a failure [1].
There are similar clashes in Central Asia [2], Vietnam [3], and the Sahel [4].
And Russia does use India as a negotiating tactic with China, as it was Russia that negotiated the current status quo between China and India after the Galwan Crisis almost became a regional war [5]
-----------
The reality is, China's push for a multi-polar world only makes it harder for China to leverage it's own best interests within regional powers as well.
The same way it is very difficult for the US to get China to bend, China has a difficult time with regional powers like much of ASEAN, KSA, UAE, India, SK, JP, etc.
[0] - https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/china-and-russia-disagree-on...
[1] - https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/explained/article/3266464/tal...
[2] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/05/31/central-asia-russia-chi...
[3] - https://worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9781800611641_00...
[4] - https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/19/wagner-china-russia-afr...
[5] - https://eastasiaforum.org/2020/10/23/how-russia-emerged-as-k...
Yep it's still the only currency that matters.
Checks Indian-Chinese relations
Yep they still have effective visa bans against each other.
So what is this BRICS club exactly? A dictionary club?
That's what the US govt thought when it sanctioned Russia. It only resulted in Russia falling back to their local currency without any significant problems, while making the rest of the world wary of reliance on the US dollar
Any idea why people don't put their foot where their mouth is?
Can't loose anything if you have nothing - or a giant landmass, natural resources and still only an economy the size of Italy.
The pig has grown way too big and is drowning in debt. Way too much overhead to keep feeding it. On top of that the US dollar is being used as a club which is an issue for countries that do not want to toe the line. Given a time the world will find a replacement.
Ah yes, the yuan[1].
Though the way this is going, it might as well be the Russian local currency now.
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/russia-china-yuan-ruble-1912458
I think you're trying to spin reality into a far rosier picture.
Russia is now bounded to do international trade with any currency other than the ruble, and it is famously piling on a huge trade deficit with India while stockpiling rupees without any way of exchanging them for anything. You're talking about a scenario that not even Russia is able to use Russia's currency in direct trades with other BRICS members.
What does this tell you about "significant problems"?
> while making the rest of the world wary of reliance on the US dollar
You're commenting as if no one in the world was aware of the US dolar hegemony, and even if it was anything new. That's not what's happening in reality. Even the eurozone has been trying to leverage the euro as an alternative to the US dolar in markets like oil, and hasn't been that successful. If a trading block and economic powerhouse like the eurozone isn't able to shake that off, what tells you that Russia, whose economy barely matches Italy's, is an exception?
But .. that's nothing less than a huge opportunity for India to start building things the Russians need and want.
The same thing occurred with the Euro, which was doing fine until the energy sources feeding its growth were attacked, recently ..
And for either they run a risk of running afoul of US and EU sanctions depending on what goods and services are provided.
How so?
> This war has already been lost by the West.
How are you defining won or lost?
> the effects will be limited and won’t act as deterrent
I don't disagree the effects would or could be limited/targeted, but it has deterred China for example in that large Chinese banks now won't do business with Russia out of fear of US sanctions.
China is taking over Russian car or consumer electronics markets, for example. The trade between two countries is soaring, Western brands are being substituted by Chinese production.
> How are you defining won or lost?
Strategic imperative of the West was that European borders cannot be changed by force and the global order based on rules and international law will ensure that. It is clear now that without direct NATO involvement the best achievable outcome will be a new iron curtain on Dnepr river. No sanctions or military supplies can change that, it is just too late. This in turn means that the old order has collapsed, USA cannot be trusted as a guarantor of security, EU is not a serious power and we already see how other nations are recalculating their alignment.
I see - yes I don't disagree with that, but wasn't entirely sure what you meant. I think on the whole the west doesn't really care outside of the oil and gas which they've managed to put Russia's infrastructure into a desired state. Exports halted, Ukraine is attacking infrastructure, Europe is doing whatever it can not to buy Russian oil (good for US and Saudi Arabia), and what oil Russia does sell is sold at a discounted rate to India last I checked.
> Strategic imperative of the West was that European borders cannot be changed by force and the global order based on rules and international law will ensure that. It is clear now that without direct NATO involvement the best achievable outcome will be a new iron curtain on Dnepr river. No sanctions or military supplies can change that, it is just too late.
Well the war isn't over yet is it? The US and EU just gave Ukraine around $100bn which is 2x the official Russian military budget. It seems that things in the east have sort of stabilized with neither side able to do much, so perhaps the west will have "lost" because Russia took over that part of Ukraine and no more? If so I mean it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things given the cost imposed on Russia.
> This in turn means that the old order has collapsed, USA cannot be trusted as a guarantor of security, EU is not a serious power and we already see how other nations are recalculating their alignment.
This I would strongly disagree with. I don't think Russia throwing body after body into Ukraine which is much smaller in every aspect only for it to be stopped at the Dnepr River means that the entire western order has collapsed.
I would also strongly disagree with your assessment that the EU is not a serious power. The EU as a whole sure in the sense that the EU doesn't have the ability to unilaterally field an army, but both France and the UK have quite serious militaries and are able to project power at least as well if not better than Russia with or without American help. USA not being trusted doesn't make much sense to me either. Trump scares our partners (rightfully so) but almost everyone in Congress and in the military and intelligence establishment recognizes the US's need to defend allies and shore up alliances.
Frankly, if you take a look at troop deployments and training exercises, both Sweden and Finland joining NATO (and NATO troops heading to Finland), it's pretty clear the US is committed to the defense of Europe. Actions speak louder than words.
OP asserted that Russia switching away from US dollars to rubles had no significant impact.
The fact is that Russia cannot even use rubles in international commerce. That is a major impact. They cannot buy stuff.
Nevertheless, you are commenting on hypothetical advantages for India. Not Russia, but India. And merely hypothetical in the sense that hypothetical indian companies might have a potential market now that Russia cannot use rupees. How's that a real advantage?
Everyone just points out major blockages and barriers when switching away from the US dolar accompanied with absolutely no upside at all, and we are expected to believe this change should not have any significant impact?
This is false. They can't buy things from American-dominated states, but that is also changing.
It has nothing about domination. This is a matter of having an international currency, and using it to do international trade.
Think about it for a second. Nothing stopped Russia from dealing with India, and Russia is selling Russia's oil to India in exchange for ruppees. That's fine for India, but Russia found itself with a massive volume of rupees without any way to exchange them for stuff it needs.
With an international currency such as the US dolar, Russia would be able to exchange them for anything at all, because that's the whole point of money. As barely anyone in the world deals with rupees, Russia either buys anything at all from India, which so far has been a no, or scratches off it's oil deals as a loss because not being able to buy anything with rupees is as good as giving their oil away for free.
I mean, a currency that no one uses is like buying arcade tokens: sure, you can play video games in the only store that accepts them, or you're stuck with a useless token thatyl you can't do anything about it as it is worth nothing.
And the brain-dead idea of complaining about arcade-dominated stores because you can't buy shit with arcade tokens is simply absurd. You're the one unilaterally trying to trade with a medium of exchange that no one uses. How is this anyone's fault other than yours?
I think you better explain that to the politicians in Washington who have long since weaponized the petrodollar.
>You're the one unilaterally trying to trade with a medium of exchange that no one uses.
The assumption that there aren't alternatives to the petrodollar actively being used today is entirely false. You may not see it - perhaps because of your own investments in the petrodollar - but it is definitely happening.
And then, there is Bitcoin. You might want to see which weapons manufacturers accept bitcoin in payment, and which only prefer the blood-stained petrodollar.
That might give you a clue as to your own myopia.
>Russia either buys anything at all from India, which so far has been a no,
You are aware that there is a rail line from Moscow to India, right, and that it operates entirely outside the scope of Western control?
It took until May of this year—over 2 years from first sanctions—for the yuan to hit top currency on the Moscow Exchange [1].
Of course sanctions hurt both America and Russia. But they hurt Russia more. Within a year, it will be a total suzerainty of China’s, a dynamic that’s beginning to become apparent in the concessions the latter is already demanding on resource pricing [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/13/investing/us-russia-sanctions...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/f7a34e3e-bce9-4db9-ac49-a092f382c...
Joining BRICS is akin to joining the "third world": joining it means nothing and even the original meaning it was supposed to represent has long been lost and forgotten.
BRICS has been totally absent in the Sino-Indian conflict [1]. Given China and India are its anchor economic heavyweights, and Russia an emerging Chinese suzerainty, it’s in nobody’s interest to bring that issue to the forum.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Indian_border_dispute
However, there are billions of people within the BRICS context. Billions and billions. I think this is why Western-aligned folks are in such fear of it as a concept for world diplomacy.
I asked chatgpt to tell me about the history of this concept. It confirmed that it is a BRICS invention.
The singularity is near.
BRICS gets strong feelings because it's an made-up economic bloc created by Goldman Sachs in 2001 as a way to describe powerful developing economies. A few ETFs / Index funds were created based on that... and mostly fell apart, since all of the growth was in China.
Brazil is something of a high-tariff basketcase, South Africa is a borderline failed state and can't keep the lights on, Russia is eviscerating itself in Ukraine and looking at demographic collapse regardless of how many Ukrainian kids they kidnap, and China v India isn't cooling down -- they just had a sword & rock fight in the mountains not too long ago. Like, one of my big bets for 2000-2100 AD is a Chinese-Indian War, which has the potential to end life on Earth, much like US-USSR MAD fears did 90 years ago.
This is rapidly turning into a collection of everyone that isn’t strongly west aligned. While it seems directionless for now they do have that in common.
Don’t think it’s safe to dismiss it given direction of travel
It's called "blunting".
The best way to undermine alliances is to be a part of them and undermine consensus.
China did this to APEC in the 1990s and the WTO in the 2000s, and India is doing the same in BRICS and SCO.
Because this is a zero-sum competition, this means if one is a member of an alliance, the other needs to join as well to blunt their relative advantage.
I want to make it clear that I'm not pro-BRICS, but we have to coexist and buy their resources in the future. Especially Europe.
If western institutions and way of life are superior ,then capital will naturally gravitate towards them ..
Goldman Sachs coined the term BRICS. If the institution worked, we’d see Western finance rushing to join it.
Nobody hates BRICS. It’s just sort of pathetic. As a security consortium, it’s a failure. As a trade consortium, it’s a failure. It talks about a dollar alternative, yet when Russia needed one China and India reverted to their own currencies.
It’s a dumb idea that made sense when Russia could balance India and China. That balance has failed. There isn’t a unified global south.
Take away Western purchases of Russian gas for 2 decades and Russia collapses. Take away the encouragement of outsourcing manufacturing from the West to China since the 1980s and the Chinese miracle never happens.
People laugh at BRICS because the BRICS is a joke.
- Brazil is relatively stable but is a largely globally meaningless nation which does little more than export tourism and the Amazon. It’s highly replaceable in the world order.
- Russia is on the verge of collapse. Their strength lay in the appearance of their military strength. But they’ve struggled to defeat a country which didn’t have a military a decade ago and the modern 21st century technology whose sales they’re depending on is failing against Cold War NATO leftovers. They do have natural resources and could have spent the next few decades getting massively rich off selling gas to Germany but they killed that golden goose by starting a land war in Europe.
- India is a country with extremely high potential. Lots of people, enough educated people, etc. However, politics is a disaster, and environmental issues are crushing India. Yet India is poised to take off but their entire growth is based on trading and integrating with the West and yet India keeps ideologically resisting that like it has for half a century and instead aligning with BRICS, whose largest member China is currently fighting a territorial war with India and Indian companies cannot import products and have Chinese websites are banned in India and vice versa.
- China is a one of a kind country. Ridiculously strong manufacturing, extremely capable citizenry, etc. But China is fighting with every neighbor. No one trusts them. Least of all their fellow BRICS member India. And they’re facing a demographic timebomb and despite their economic successes people would much rather emigrate from China than immigrate to it. That’s not a recipe for success a decade+ down the line.
- South Africa is a basket case of an economy. And their politics just got worse. South Africa can enter the conversation when their government becomes capable of delivering widely available drinking water to their population and not have people thirsty because of political corruption.
- we’re on the verge of electing a fascist into the country, primarily because the opposition also sucks. Politically we’re a mess.
- we’ve caused the largest number of modern world fights and deaths. And now we’ve applied our stamp of approval on a genocide where most of the rest of the world is disgusted by us.
- our public infrastructure is collapsing and crumbling. We have no high speed transportation. We have lead in our pipes (flint was just the tip of the iceberg). We have our primary plane manufacturer dying and unable to produce a plane people want to go on. We really don’t have anything to add to the table until we can stop poisoning people due to political corruption.
Anyway it’s easy to selectively pick points and make fun of them.
Western powers have burnt a lot of bridges there over the years. There's been 75 years of coups and interventions, clumsy to downright evil charity efforts, foreign military bases that long outstay their welcome, "development" schemes that lean more towards exploitative than actually bootstrapping, and financial timebombs that result in imposition of austerity and fire-sales of public goods.
China has shown it's possible to massively modernize without completely selling out, so they are an aspirational model for the rest of the developing world. When they come and say "we want mutual progress", it doesn't have the immediate untrustworthy smell it would coming out of an American mouth. What is Washington/London/Brussels doing right now to win back that audience? Even if the West can offer a better deal than Belt-and-Road, itself questionable, will Africa and South America even be willing to listen anymore?
Malaysia, UAE, Russia, India, China, And others
I present you... the MISERIE CUBS:
----
Malaysia
India
South Africa
Ethiopia
Russia
Iran
Egypt
.
China
United Arab Emirates
Brazil
Saudi Arabia
----
Note: splitting into two words is necessary to keep Iran separate from Saudi Arabia & UAE, lest they get into a fight.
India / China too, to be on the safe side.
Brazil and Ethiopia have effectively no trade between them[1] (23 million — that's nothing even for Ethiopia), so putting them together makes little sense anyway.
[1]https://www.worldstopexports.com/ethiopias-top-trading-partn...
Btw how do you know he/she was from west?
The demographic composition of intra-EU migrants by nationality has remained broadly unchanged: Romanians make up the largest group, accounting for 27 per cent of intra-EU migrants, followed by Poles (12 per cent) and Italians (10 per cent). The main “contributors” to this exodus are the economic powerhouses – Germany and Luxembourg in the EU, but also Switzerland
Also: windows (in the case of Russia).
I see plenty to disagree with here -- from conflating the 'richest' with the 'most talented' to odd use of parenthesis and quotation marks to conflating brain drain with the flight of capital. Brain drain refers to people with real accomplishments or potential in academia, science, entrepreneurship etc. who aren't necessarily rich.
India and China, yes. Russia, South Africa and Malaysia, far from it. (Brazil is sort of a regional power, sort of not; it’s unique in being a soft power first type.)
BRICS was known for being strong economic growth candidates in the early 2000s. It was a package term for Goldman bankers to be able to sell their securities more effectively.
It might not be considered a power-house on its own yet but the potential is there. Obviously the current top dogs don't want one more big player at the table so the Brazil struggle is always to find a way to develop without getting into colission route with the West or the East.
Latin America is a whole "unexplored" world far away.
And the same is sadly true for most cases where you'd expect some global brotherhood.