from Strategic Culture:
This week provided an instructive juxtaposition of summits. In Italy, the United States and its Western allies convened the Group of Seven (G7) talking shop, while in Russia the BRICS nations held a workmanlike summit for their foreign ministers.
The G7 has become a shorthand term for elitist Western dominance over the world economy. On the other hand, the relatively new group known as BRICS can be seen as a progressive forum and voice for the global majority. While the former is shrivelling with irrelevance, the latter is steadily growing in importance for authentic international development.
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There was a time when the U.S. and a clique of Western capitalist nations (including Japan) were viewed with respectability and an aura of global leadership. The heyday of Western economic and political power has waned in line with the systemic failing of U.S.-led capitalism as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. The presumed moral authority of these nations has also diminished as their reputation for hypocrisy and insufferable arrogance has burgeoned.
Indeed, the G7 has become a caricature of power. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan are seen as being ruled by self-serving extortionists, contributing little to global development. Their presumed superiority is untenable and looks ridiculous. The group represents a neocolonialist clique whose exploitation of finance and natural resources of other nations is an obscenity and shackle on the abundant potential for world development.
By contrast, the BRICS coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa plus a growing number of other nations, collectively known as the Global South, is a living harbinger of a more just and equitable international order. The multipolar world that the BRICS represent and advocate has become the practical roadmap for proper international development. It is based on cooperation, partnership, and mutual respect grounded in a genuine commitment to the principles of the United Nations Charter.
The BRICS summit this week held in the beautiful city of Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River was a convening of foreign ministers. In October, the national leaders of the BRICS will gather in the Russian city of Kazan. The list of nations seeking to join the group has reached 50, representing every continent. In terms of combined economic power and population, the BRICS Plus has far surpassed the G7.
At the G7 confab, the leaders of that motley crew look like yesterday’s men. U.S. President Joe Biden is languishing in record-low poll numbers among his citizens while Britain’s Sunak, France’s Macron, and Germany’s Scholz are clinging onto power by their fingernails. European Union elections this week showed a cratering in voter support for Macron and Scholz. No doubt their slavish pandering to Uncle Sam’s warmongering in Ukraine while their citizens endure hardship and poverty rightly took a toll.
The G7 has dispensed with any pretense of standing for international economic development. The entire summit in Italy can be summed up as a gathering for warmongering and theft. The disreputable clique could henceforth be labeled the “economic wing of NATO”. Guest of honor was the corrupt dictator of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, wearing his pantomime military fatigues and being ladled with tens of billions more dollars. His G7 patrons pledged $50 billion a year for the NeoNazi Kiev regime to buy more weapons “until it prevails” in the proxy war against Russia. This is despite Russia winning decisively in that two-and-half-year conflict and the Kiev regime facing oblivion from corruption and alienation from a war-sickened population.
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