Trump Vs BRICS+ and a war of the worlds

Donald Trump has expressed implacable hostility to the BRICS grouping of non-Western powers, threatening its 10 members and other partner states with additional tariffs because of the bloc being supposedly “anti-American”.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was hosting a BRICS leaders’ summit in Rio de Janeiro around the time Mr Trump raged against the group hit back: “The world has changed. We don’t want an emperor”. Lula described BRICS as follows: “This is a set of countries that wants to find another way of organizing the world from the economic perspective. I think that’s why the BRICS are making people uncomfortable”.

True.

But it’s not just economic reorganisation and Mr Trump cannily seems to recognise BRICS for what it is: 10 countries that see the world through a prism that is decidedly, determinedly not Western.

BRICS+ has roughly 45 per cent of the world’s population, generates more than 35 per cent of its GDP (as measured in purchasing power parity, or PPP) and produces 30 per cent of its oil. The grouping engages in intergovernmental cooperation with institutions such as the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, which was created in 2014 with an initial funding of $100 billion and the New Development Bank, which was established in 2015 with an initial subscribed capitalisation of $50 billion.

So with BRICS accounting for almost half the world’s population, roughly one-quarter of global gross domestic product, and, by some measures, a larger share of global economic activity than the G7 rich countries, it’s fair to say it can be a huge force.

For what?

Stewart Patrick and Erica Hogan note in a paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace that “the main uncertainty is whether BRICS+ signals a turn against rather than simply away from the West”.

Might this be mere semantics? If BRICS+ got its way, wouldn’t the end result be the same whether it turns against the West or away from it?

Back in August 2023, when I was writing a This Week, Those Books newsletter on BRICS’ 15th annual summit, I headlined it “BRICS for a new world order” and noted that the grouping symbolises nothing so much as “an imagined world in which the West has lost dominance”.

One of the books I felt spoke to the moment was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt.

It’s a novel that builds the very world BRICS might want. I wrote as follows: “Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel has a remarkable premise: 99% of Europe is dead and China and the Muslim world are the dominant powers. A virulent plague kills everyone west of Constantinople so Christian European culture plays no part in building the international order for 700 years. Asia and the Middle East (called the “Middle West” in the book) take charge”.

The alternative history cobbled together by Mr Robinson shows Africa, Europe and Russia mostly Muslim by the 20th century and China with a maritime Pacific Rim empire comprising most of what’s left of Asia, as well as Australasia. India is portrayed as a progressive force and native American tribes have formed the Hodenosaunee League to resist the Chinese and Muslims. In the novel, the superpowers fight a 67-year war. The story plays out across the world and uses Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist concepts. As I wrote, “We see the Chinese – in red felt coats, rich as Americans today – shopping in great port towns”.

But the larger point of the story seemed not to be that the world will be better or more Utopian or fairer without the West. Instead, it was to say, the world would be much the same despite having very different power centres and cultural markers.

As Penn State professor Gib Prettyman has noted in a brilliant essay Apocalypse and Enlightenment in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, “neither the European apocalypse nor the alternate historical ‘facts’ of peoples and places and events are the novel’s most significant challenge to conventional historical understanding. Indeed, in terms of plot points (as opposed to lived details), the overall narrative of this alternate history bears striking similarities to actual history: tribalism, feudalism and empire building, a humanistic renaissance, scientific enlightenment and discovery, mechanization and industrialization, and even world war and the threat of nuclear weapons. In other words, the trajectory of the counterfactual history is roughly the same as that which generated the factual crisis of history experienced by Robinson and his readers. History as a succession of apocalyptic endings, culminated by the horror of a 70-year world war, generates an intense need to re-conceive history; as one character, a historian, says late in the novel, ‘What I want to do … is to cut through all the stories, through the million stories we have constructed to defend ourselves from the reality of the Nakba [the ‘Catastrophe’ of the recently lost world war’]…”

Perhaps the BRICS+ aspiration is not to make the world a better place per se, but better for BRICS?

Go figure.