BRICS Summit: Is Trump or Harris Best for Transition to Multipolarity?

How insular. America’s media barely is covering the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia. They think Tatarstan is something you put on fish at Long John Silver’s. I get the print Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, and today neither features BRICS on its front page. Two days ago, as I was doing research, I checked the NY Times online. BRICS was the 19^th story on the left column.

And get this AP story: “Putin hosts a summit to show the West it can’t keep Russia off the global stage.” To the AP’s insular writers and editors, it’s all about Putin Putin Putin.

Actually it’s about the acceleration of something going on for three decades: The move from a U.S.-dominated world to a “multipolar” world, with no single, dominant country. Some are using “multi-nodal,” which is better; “multipolar” means opposites, as in the North Pole and South Pole, while “multi-nodal” means several centers of power. But for here I’ll stick with multipolar.

So, who is best to deal with this transition, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? You choose.

BRICS is Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. BRICS+ now includes Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. It now has a bigger combined economy than the G7 countries: The USA, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Japan.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed on that joyous Christmas Day in 1991, I’ve been pushing for America to lead the world in this multipolar direction. We could have been a benevolent First Among Equals. Instead, we insisted it was a “Unipolar Moment” with the U.S. as the “sole remaining superpower.” And the U.S. leadership and its neocon idealogue cheerleaders started war after war after war, when peace was possible with creative negotiations.

Only Trump tried to move beyond that, but was hit with the Russiagate absurdity, the Ukraine impeachment and his own generals and foreign policy team sabotaging his efforts to move into this new world. Despite that, he’s the only recent president not to start new wars. And look at what his replacement has done: turned much of the world against us.

For a taste of how delusional our leaders remain, consider former Vice President Dan Quayle’s op-ed in the WSJ, in which he doesn’t even mention BRICS:

If China eclipses America’s military might, we’ll complete the transition from a unipolar world dominated by America’s benevolent strength to a bipolar world in which our enemies unite against us. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea share the same short-term goal: to take down America.

Too late, dummy. This isn’t the 1990s’ “unipolar world” and America’s strength has not been “benevolent,” beginning with the Bush-Quayle administration’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and the 1990-91 Gulf War, which could have been prevented with capable diplomacy. It’s been war, war, war.

BRICS was inevitable in some form. But what’s accelerating it now has been the increase in sanctions under the Biden-Harris regime. And, to be fair, Trump also imposed far too many sanctions. Even the Establishment’s tabloid the Washington Post reported:

Today, the United States imposes three times as many sanctions as any other country or international body, targeting a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty on people, properties or organizations. They have become an almost reflexive weapon in perpetual economic warfare, and their overuse is recognized at the highest levels of government. But American presidents find the tool increasingly irresistible.

To that the rest of the world is saying, in Kazan: Basta! Enough!

Remember what Biden shouted after imposing many new sanctions after Putin’s Feb. 2022 invasion of Ukraine? “The ruble is rubble.” The intent was to collapse Russia’s economy, then collapse China’s to restore U.S. unipolarity. It didn’t work. Putin had prepared for that moment since 1999 by restoring the country’s economy through market reforms and hooked up with China’s Xi. Now the Kazan Summit is advancing BRICS. Notice how China and India patched up their border dispute just days before.

This is just a beginning. Critics are saying the Yankee dollar remains king. Sure. For now. But countries already are moving toward de-dollarization. And if that only proceeds at a 2% rate a year, in a decade it will be 21% (with compound interest) of world trade moving away from the U.S. currency.

BRICS also is establishing BRICS Bridge, an alternative payment system to the U.S.-dominated SWIFT system. SWIFT long has made easy financial transactions within and without the USA. But it has been abused by banning its use by countries hit with sanctions.

All of this means the dollars floating around the world will start flowing back home, pushing up inflation.

If the next president doesn’t get on top of this, and work through the switch to multipolarity to our benefit, we’ll end up like the British Empire after the two world wars: broke, crumbing, irrelevant. At least they got the Beatles. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!