I’ve written for Compact about the Trump administration’s efforts to derail multipolarity — and why, alas, they appear to be working.
For all the BRICS-led efforts to loosen the US’s financial stranglehold, Washington retains significant structural power — political, financial, military and ideological — with which to shape policies around the world: to discipline the countries of the global NATO bloc, to extend its influence over strategically important regions and to inflict economic pain on rivals unilaterally.
Moreover, under Trump, what began as an increasingly aggressive weaponisation of the dollar system — one that initially accelerated the move towards de-dollarisation — has escalated into an all-out war on multipolarity, including the naked use of violence against key players in the emerging non-Western order. This has fundamentally altered the playing field. It is one thing to coordinate among countries whose differences amount to diverging views about the depth of their integration with the West, or the pace of their delinking from the existing order, especially when the latter doesn’t invite retaliation. It is quite another to coordinate among countries some of which are at war with the West while others are its allies, in a context where shunning the dollar or trading with sanctioned states can entail heavy costs.
This has opened up deep fractures within BRICS, as last month’s summit in New Delhi made painfully clear. The US has shown that it can seriously disrupt the emergence of a multipolar international system. All this raises serious questions about the future of BRICS and similar non-Western institutions — and about the transition to a multipolar order itself. To say that non-Western countries are currently woefully ill-equipped to deal with the Western-led assault is not a criticism but a statement of fact. Can a world in which the US remains free to launch military and economic strikes, unchecked by any other power, really be called multipolar in any meaningful sense?
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)
The truth is that the BRICS nations are also part of the New World Order; they accept the economic order dictated by the IMF and the World Bank. Two years ago, Lula opposed the entry of communist Venezuela into the BRICS, and he embraces the AI-driven biometric tracking system pushed by the transhumanist banking oligarchy—the "full-spectrum dominance" of an electronic cage in which we will all be imprisoned. It is a dystopian, technocratic nightmare. It is likely that parts of the Amazon will be repurposed for massive data centers. As for Trump, he, too, is a puppet of the financial establishment—specifically, the more thuggish, gangster-like faction that they choose to fund...
The flip side is the west thus far has proved itself capable only of a destructive response. Until and unless it finds a constructive response, its own social, financial, industrial, and philosophical decline means that its efforts will remain doomed to failure other than as spoiler / rearguard action.