Brics is fake

It's not an anti-Nato, it's not going to replace the dollar, and it's not going to control global economic growth

di Noah Smith

Even as China’s economy enters what’s probably a long-term slowdown, the Western press is warning about China’s attempt to build world influence — and maybe world domination? — via new international organizations that it controls. Here’s James Kynge in the Financial Times:

The key to China’s blueprint is to steadily institutionalise its leadership over the developing world by creating, expanding and funding a raft of China-led groupings of countries…[T]he aims of this strategy are largely two-fold: to ensure that a broad swath of the world remains open to Chinese trade and investment and to use the voting power of developing countries at the UN and in other forums to project Chinese power and values.
The most important such grouping — or at least, the one that has received the most attention and been met with the most alarm in the West — is the Brics. This somewhat odd organization began life 22 years ago as an investment strategy created by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill — basically, a grouping of large developing countries he thought would grow rapidly. “Brics” was an acronym for that list of countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China. Later, the four countries actually got together and decided to turn the Goldman Sachs acronym into an actual economic forum, where they’d meet periodically and talk about how to speed economic development, create new financial institutions, and increase developing countries’ general influence in the world. In 2010 South Africa joined, and Brics became Brics.

The Brics kept meeting and proposing economic initiatives, none of which went anywhere. I’ll just quote what I wrote about the grouping back in February:

In 2009 [the Brics] started meeting regularly and trying to think about how to create their own economic institutions — a New Development Bank to compete with the World Bank, a Contingent Reserve Arrangement to lend each other money in times of currency crisis (something the IMF usually does), a system of submarine fiber-optic cables, and so on.

This, too, did not end up working out. The New Development Bank has disbursed almost no loan money at all, causing Jim O’Neill to declare it a disappointment. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Ndb cut ties with it. The Contingent Reserve Arrangement has done basically nothing, and the Brics Cable never happened.

Yes, two short paragraphs are sufficient to list the sum total of all the nothing that the Brics organization has so far succeeded in doing. And yet somehow people keep believing that Brics is an organization of global importance. I don’t just mean people in the Western press, but a number of countries around the world. At the recent Brics summit in South Africa, the grouping accepted six new members: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Uae, Argentina, Egypt, and Ethiopia. These six were narrowed down from 19 that originally submitted bids earlier this year (though some, like Indonesia, later backed away). It’s not clear whether the organization will have a two-tiered membership and some countries will be only “partners”, but given that Brics doesn’t actually do anything in terms of actual economic policy, I’m not sure that matters.

So why has Brics received so much attention in the media?

Continua la lettura su Noahpinion