Can BRICS dare to challenge US hegemony?

BRICS includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It will hold its first ministerial meeting on Friday and Saturday in preparation for heads of state summit in August. This year's gathering will be held in Cape Town, South Africa.

Around 20 non-BRICS foreign ministers will be in attendance at the end of the week, with many countries actively expressing an interest in becoming members.

During last year's BRICS summit in China, a strong message was delivered of putting development on top of everything else on the international agenda. As Chinese President Xi Jinping pointed out at the UN General Assembly, the goal of the initiative is that no country or individual should be left behind in pursuing development.

As the rotating chair switches to South Africa, among the themes of this year's summit is multilateralism in promoting international development.

It's no surprise that the success of the BRICS mechanism has attracted many like-minded nations who are expressing a desire to join, from the UAE in Asia to Algeria in Africa and Argentina in Latin America.

Among other issues on the agenda at the BRICS summit in August is increased economic autonomy. Another is plans to decide on admitting new members and what criteria they would have to meet.

Talks on the enlargement of the bloc are mainly based on the interest of other countries over the self-made economic prosperity of its members, as other nations who seek BRICS membership are growing tired of dealing with the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

According to Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador to BRICS, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran are in talks to join the economic bloc.

“What will be discussed is the expansion of BRICS and the modalities of how this will happen,” Bloomberg has cited his as saying.

“Thirteen countries have formally asked to join and another six have asked informally. We are getting applications to join every day.” 

Since its formation as the four-member BRIC in 2006, the bloc has only added one new member, South Africa, in 2010, which made it BRICS.

In March, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said international interest in the BRICS group was huge, Saudi Arabia is one, she said. Others are United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, and Argentina, as well as Mexico and Nigeria."

Iran is said to have already applied to join BRICS and its foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian has confirmed he will be participating in the Cape Town meeting at the official invitation of South Africa.  

The latest submissions for membership give substance to the argument of the rapidly changing global developments following the Ukraine, Yemen and Afghanistan wars.

Among the attractive aspects of BRICS is that nations view the alliance of emerging markets as an alternative, and not necessarily a challenge, to a US-led world order which is weakening, as experts point out, because of America's unilateral foreign policy blunders.

Experts also argue that Europe lacks any sovereign world vision, as witnessed by the Ukraine war, where it has taken its marching orders from Washington and failed to bring peace to Ukraine, as European households suffer from record inflation as a direct result of the conflict on its doorstep.

The Ukraine war has had a direct impact at international scale when it comes to food and energy.

In the absence of any willpower to stamp its authority on regional affairs, let alone global affairs, Europe has, in essence, failed the international community as a reliable economic partner, forcing many to seek alternatives to the West.

Iran for instance has the second largest gas reserves in the world, something that Europe is desperately searching for, but has not approached Tehran about, because of its bizarre compliance to illegal US unilateral sanctions. It now looks that the much-needed Iranian commodity will most likely be heading elsewhere.

While BRICS has its own bank (New Development Bank), it is not as large as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but this could be down to just a matter of time as more countries seek to join the economic bloc.

The World Bank and the IMF were founded back in the 1940's and have failed in their declared goals of creating a more stable and prosperous global economy.

The austerity that comes with loans has brought increasingly high levels of poverty and inequality to countries who borrowed money from them. Just ask the people of Greece or Argentina. Critics accuse the US of having unfair influence on the World Back and the IMF.

On the other hand, the New Development Bank or the BRICS Bank, which was just established in 2015 and with its stated aim to help build a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable future for the planet is appealing.

It may sound like a good advertising slogan, but the facts on the ground show BRICS is attracting a record number of clients seeking to expand the bloc.

According to reports, BRICS is in talks with Saudi Arabia to become a member of its New Development Bank. While Saudi Arabia has yet to confirm this, such reports were unheard of just a year ago.

The idea itself makes sense as most oil purchasing clients are now based in the East and Latin America. But it will be a major setback for the United States, which will see an agonizing decline of petrodollars.

In the early 1970s, Washington and Riyadh reached an agreement that Saudi oil sales to all international clients be sold in dollars in exchange for American military protection, something that the US failed to adhere to in the Saudi conflict with Yemen.

Today, Saudi Arabia is in talks with Beijing to sell its oil to China in the Yuan and has restored diplomatic ties with Iran in another blow to the US and its extremely mischievous proxy in the region Israel.

Should the Kingdom become a New Development Bank member, it would be a boost to the bank as well as for Saudi Arabia itself, as BRICS members, among other things, provide a safety net in times of difficulty.

For instance, BRICS members have not bowed to NATO pressure to join the sanctions regime against Russia.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has argued that BRICS nations should establish their own common currency, highlighting the advantages of such a unified economic measure that would be independent of the US dollar.

Under a US dollar dominated world order, prosperity has been taken over by poverty while peace has been replaced by violence.

In April, BRICS' deputy ministers and special envoys held a meeting in Cape Town to discuss, among other issues, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as developments in the Persian Gulf states, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Western Sahara and Yemen.

Such platforms provide an opportunity to bring emerging markets together to discuss both the financial and political aspects of the world.

 

China’s Middle East Strategy

The Middle East’s emergence as a key front in the new Cold War between the United States and China has become even prominent. Bloomberg believes that Beijing is making efforts to widen the breach between Washington and Saudi Arabia.

China has put its stamp on the region in a way that could hardly have been guessed six months ago, notably by brokering a rapprochement between longtime regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Remarkably, China Foreign Minister Qin Gang this week launched an effort at encouraging a restart of Israel-Palestine talks.

On the finance front, the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) opened its first overseas office this week—in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The hub is to serve as a strategic destination supporting the agenda of the AIIB—a multilateral development bank conceived almost a decade ago as China’s answer to institutions set up by Western nations.

This followed the shock in Washington when Saudi Arabia and its fellow OPEC P members not only rejected a US request for production increases, but cut output earlier this month.

It’s become inescapable that the Middle East—and specifically a Saudi Arabia led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—is rapidly departing Washington’s orbit in favor of Beijing.

Still, the Middle East’s exchange-rate pegs to the dollar remain a powerful link to America, as do its strong, enduring military ties. So for the US government, all is not lost—yet.

The US dollar remains by far the most powerful force in the global financial system, even if its share of central bank reserves has been waning. And that confers on Washington inimitable power, the threat to impede access to the currency.

That’s the reason the Gulf Cooperation Council members’ use of the dollar as the key currency of cross-border exchange—and not Beijing-sponsored diplomacy—is the ultimate gauge of the council’s geo-economic alignment. A sudden change would be destabilizing for the countries themselves, so any shift would have to be gradual.

But signs of movement are there. Just last month, the UAE made the first settlement of natural gas exports to China denominated in Chinese yuan. That’s an especially interesting precedent after China’s landmark US$60 billion deal in November 2023 for liquefied natural gas from the UAE’s fellow GCC member, Qatar.

That Qatar deal, which saw European buyers pipped for crucial long-term energy supplies, is designed to last until the 2050s. 

“Chinese state-owned energy companies historically did not have the expertise to compete on an equal footing with Western energy companies,” said Justin Dargin, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Middle East specialist. “This contract highlights how the situation is rapidly evolving.”

Indeed, one thing to watch for is how the currency aspect of the deal unfolds. Shifting approaches toward currencies are also apparent in Saudi Arabia, which was the largest supplier of crude oil to China until Russia displaced it earlier this year.

Riyadh had telegraphed to Beijing in January 2023 that it’s open to discussions about trade in currencies other than the dollar—which is currently used to settle more than 80% of Saudi Arabia’s US$326 billion in annual oil exports, according to Eurizon SLJ Capital calculations.

In addition to becoming the Middle East’s key customer, China is also being approached for more investments of its own. This week, the UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, was in Beijing seeking to bolster clean-energy cooperation.

That trip came after China and Saudi Arabia signed a number of agreements on renewable and green-hydrogen cooperation during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit in December 2023. And it comes ahead of the UAE hosting COP28, the United Nations climate summit (which Al Jaber, despite presiding over a massive fossil-fuel exporter, is overseeing).

Analysts at Trivium China, a policy research consultancy in Beijing, lent support to Xi’s move into the Middle East. Those green deals enable Chinese clean-tech firms to expand into lucrative foreign markets and strengthen economic and diplomatic ties with major Gulf swing states, they wrote.

While Beijing’s effort at diplomacy should be viewed as less important than currency considerations, there’s a third arena where Washington may wish to remain most vigilant, if it wishes to forestall displacement from the Middle East stage.

What hasn’t yet been seen from China yet is any big headline on a military connection to the Persian Gulf—whose sea lanes have long been overseen by the US.