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Ukraine Stays With The West But Russia Is Winning

The war in Ukraine grinds on and the Ukrainian army is being destroyed by Russia with great loss of life. One would think that Ukraine would be grateful for any and all peace efforts, but it is being used as a proxy by the United States and its NATO allies, the collective west. The seeds of this catastrophe began long before Russia’s special military operation. The European Union and NATO nations brought anti-Russian right-wing forces to power in 2014 in a coup against the elected Ukrainian president. If not for them there would be no war at all. Their degree of culpability became clear recently when a delegation of African leaders traveled to Ukraine and Russia as part of a peacemaking initiative.

Emergence Of A New Non-Alignment

A new mood of defiance in the Global South has generated bewilderment in the capitals of the Triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan), where officials are struggling to answer why governments in the Global South have not accepted the Western view of the conflict in Ukraine or universally supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in its efforts to ‘weaken Russia’. Governments that had long been pliant to the Triad’s wishes, such as the administrations of Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Türkiye (despite the toxicity of their own regimes), are no longer as reliable.

BRICS Bloc; Adding Members, Planning New Currency To Challenge US Dollar

The BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is expanding, as its members grow in economic and political influence. Together, the five BRICS members represent more than 40% of the global population, and their share of the world economy (when measured in purchasing power parity) is larger than that of the G7. The foreign ministers of the BRICS states met in South Africa on June 1 and 2. There, they discussed a series of issues, including plans to create a new global reserve currency to challenge the dominance of the US dollar. Also present at the meeting in South Africa was a group of top diplomats from countries described as “friends of BRICS”, including Egypt, Iran, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

De-Dollarisation Clashes With India-China Border Dispute

The global de-dollarisation trend is not totally a bed of roses, or at least there are thorns in the roses that have to be taken into account. While de-dollarisation seems to be an irreversible trend on the global scale, at regional levels it is running into bilateral or regional political tensions. In this regard, one of the most prominent cases is in Asia: the India-China border dispute. In April 2023, the Chinese national currency, yuan, ranked third in international trade settlements made through the US-dominated SWIFT system. According to data from the system itself, yuan’s share in April was “record high,” although that share was only 4.72%, after euro’s 6.54%.

Whither Multipolarity In A Changing World Order

The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci presciently observed: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This period that we live in is arguably shaped by three elements: two moribund (the implosion of the USSR and the centrality of US imperialism) and one vital (the promise of multipolarity). The camp associated with the US is consolidating at the same time that a countervailing multipolar tendency is emerging. Major changes are reshaping the world order, I contend, but the outcome is not yet clear.

Can BRICS Triumph Over The IMF And World Bank?

Who would have expected that the BRICS nations could rise as the potential rival of the G7 countries, the World Bank and the IMF combined? But that once seemingly distant possibility now has real prospects which could change the political equilibrium of world politics. BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. It was supposedly coined by the Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs in 2001 as a reference to the world’s emerging economies. It was then known as BRIC, with the ‘S’ added later when South Africa formally joined the group in 2010. BRIC’s first official summit took place in 2009. T

Brics Bank De-Dollarizing, New Chief Dilma Rousseff Says

The new president of the BRICS Bank has revealed that the Global South-led bloc is advancing toward de-dollarization, gradually moving away from use of the US dollar. The New Development Bank plans to give nearly one-third (30%) of its loans in the local currencies of the financial institution’s members. Dilma Rousseff, the left-wing former president of Brazil, took over the leadership of the Shanghai, China-based New Development Bank (NDB) this March. The NDB was created in 2014, by the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as a Global South-oriented alternative to the US-dominated World Bank, which is infamous for imposing neoliberal economic reforms on impoverished countries, which hinder their development.

Lula Criticizes The Hegemony Of The Dollar During Visit To China

The president of the New Development Bank (NDB), Dilma Rousseff, received the president of the Republic of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for the inauguration ceremony at the head of the bank. This was the first activity on the official agenda of the president during his state visit to China. Lula and Rousseff held a closed-door meeting with directors of the financial institution before starting the ceremony. First to speak, Rousseff, who was one of the founders of the BRICS bank, talked about the need to expand the institution’s capacity. “It is fundamental to expand the bank’s reach and impact. On the one hand, we have expanded the number of member countries, strengthening our cooperation platform.

World Bank, Brics Bank; New Leaders And Different Outlooks

In late February, US President Joe Biden announced that the United States had placed the nomination of Ajay Banga to be the next head of the World Bank, established in 1944. There will be no other official candidates for this job since, by convention, the US nominee is automatically selected for the post. This has been the case for the 13 previous presidents of the World Bank; the one exception was acting president Kristalina Georgieva of Bulgaria, who held the post for two months in 2019. In the official history of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), J Keith Horsefield wrote that US authorities “considered that the Bank would have to be headed by a US citizen in order to win the confidence of the banking community, and that it would be impracticable to appoint US citizens to head both the Bank and the Fund.”

Saudi Arabia Joins Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

The government of Saudi Arabia decided to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as a dialogue partner on Wednesday, March 29, making it the third Arab country to do so after Egypt and Qatar. The decision to join the SCO was taken in a cabinet meeting headed by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA). Saudi Arabia’s dialogue partner status can be converted into full membership of the group in the future. The SCO was established in 2001 with China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan as members. It is the successor of the Shanghai Five group. Later, India and Pakistan also became full members of the the political and strategic grouping, and Iran is set to join by the end of this year.

G7 VS Brics — Off To The Races

Last summer, the Group of 7 (G7), a self-anointed forum of nations that view themselves as the most influential economies in the world, gathered at Schloss Elmau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, to hold their annual meeting. Their focus was punishing Russia through additional sanctions, further arming of Ukraine and the containment of China. At the same time, China hosted, through video conference, a gathering of the BRICS economic forum. Comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, this collection of nations relegated to the status of so-called developing economies focused on strengthening economic bonds, international economic development and how to address what they collectively deemed the counter-productive policies of the G7.

China’s Iran-Saudi Peace Deal Is Big Blow To Petrodollar

China surprised the world on March 10, announcing that it had successfully sponsored peace talks between rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Four days of secret negotiations in Beijing led to a historic agreement in which the two West Asian nations normalized relations, following seven tense years without any official diplomatic ties. Iraq had previously hosted peace talks between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but these were sabotaged in January 2020 when US President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike to assassinate top Iranian official Qasem Soleimani, who had been involved in the negotiations.

Multipolar Economic Order

The international economic system had been dominated for decades by the United States, but this financial architecture is rapidly fracturing with the creation of new institutions in the Global South. The BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is working “to develop a fairer system of monetary exchange”, to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa’s foreign minister has revealed. Saudi Arabia publicly confirmed that it is considering selling its oil in other currencies. China’s President Xi Jinping said Beijing will buy energy from the Persian Gulf states in its own currency, the renminbi. Prominent economist Zoltan Pozsar, of the Swiss investment bank Credit Suisse, has observed that the “unipolar era” of US hegemony is quickly being replaced with a new “multipolar” order of “one world, two systems”.

Pakistan And China Partner To Build Climate Resilience

As part of an ambitious initiative to build climate resilience in the aftermath of disastrous floods, Pakistan has, with Chinese assistance, put up a high-tech environmental observation station to anticipate weather and research climate change. Disasters such as floods, droughts, and cyclones have struck Pakistan in recent years, causing widespread destruction. Since the monsoon season started in mid-June, Pakistan has seen extremely heavy rains—about three times higher than the country’s 30-year average. As a result, Pakistan is facing its worst floods this century, with rivers spilling their banks, flash flooding, and bursting glacial lakes. The climate minister of Pakistan has declared that floodwaters have spread across one-third of the country, making this the worst flooding event in the country’s history.

What Worries The United States Most About Lula

President Joe Biden kept a promise to Lula da Silva by congratulating him for “free, fair and credible” elections minutes after Sunday’s results declared Lula the winner over incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Pundits have interpreted the Biden administration’s words on the Brazilian election as a demonstration that it was rooting for Lula over his opponent, known as “Tropical Trump.” This reasoning is at best misleading, if not completely faulty. What has Washington actually most worried about Lula is the reemergence of a powerful non-aligned movement and the prospect that a progressive like Lula would be at the helm. During his previous two presidencies, Lula cast himself as a spokesman for the Global South. Times have changed since then. There is a growing number of ideologically diverse governments, which were formerly subservient to the U.S. and are now boldly defying Washington’s dictates, creating fertile ground for the expansion of a bloc of non-aligned nations that has been reinvigorated by opposition to NATO’s stance on Ukraine.
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