Brics-11: The dawn of a new era

In the beginning there was only four countries, then it became five and soon it will be 11.
Your editor is talking about Brics – a grouping of the world economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa formed by the 2010 addition of South Africa to the predecessor Bric, which is an acronym referring to the developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
The four original members were then identified as rising economic powers, and the grouping then was typically rendered as “the Bric”, “the Bric countries”, “the Bric economies”, or alternatively as the “Big Four”.
The term was coined by Jim O’Neill, global economist at Goldman Sachs in 2001 as an acronym for the four countries he identified as being at a similar stage of newly advanced economic development.
The original Bric encompassed over 25% of the world’s land coverage and 40% of the world’s population and had a combined GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) of US$20 trillion.
On almost every scale, they would be the largest entity on the global stage other than the G20 and the UN itself. These four countries are among the biggest and fastest-growing emerging markets since 2011.
Its genesis began when the foreign ministers of the initial four Bric countries met in New York City in September 2006 at the margins of the General Debate of the UN Assembly, beginning a series of high-level meetings.
A full-scale diplomatic meeting was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, on June 16 2009, which led to the official establishment of Bric. On the same day too, the grouping’s first formal summit, was also held in Yekaterinburg.
The summit’s focus then was on improving the global economic situation which was then reeling under the Great Recession caused by the US mortgage crisis in 2008, reforming financial institutions, how the four countries could better co-operate in the future, and the various ways that developing countries could become more involved in global affairs.
In the aftermath of the 2009 Yekaterinburg summit, the Bric nations announced the need for a new global reserve currency, which would have to be “diverse, stable and predictable.”

Although the statement that was released then did not directly criticise the perceived “dominance” of the US dollar – something that Russia had criticised in the past – it did spark a fall in the value of the dollar against other major currencies.
In 2010 Bric became Brics when South Africa began efforts to join the Bric grouping and received an invitation on Dec 24. The original aim of Bric was the establishment of a multipolar world order, and its successor Brics pursued this aim with more vigour.
With South Africa in, Brics become bigger encompassing about 27% of the world’s land surface and 42% of the global population. Brazil, Russia, India and China are among the world’s ten largest countries by population, area and GDP (PPP), and the latter three are widely considered to be current superpowers or are still emerging ones.
All five states have a combined total GDP (PPP) of around US$57 trillion (33% of global GDP PPP), and an estimated US$4.5 trillion in combined foreign reserves (as of 2018).
At its recently concluded 15^th Brics Summit held in Johannesburg, South Africa in August 2023, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced six emerging market countries (Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates) had been invited to join. Their full membership will take effect on Jan 1 2024.
The aim of the latest expansion is touted as part of plan to build a multipolar world order that puts weight to hitherto subdued voices of the Global South and brings them to the centre of the world agenda.
With the organisation gaining six new members, it would be interesting to see how the organisation will rename itself.
It could be known as Brics Plus or Brics+, although your Editor prefers to call it Brics-11, with the implication that it is a force to be reckoned with.
Why not, when Brics-11 will continue to be a colossal organisation representing nearly 40% of the global economy with a combined GDP (PPP) of US$65 trillion, as compared to the share of the G7 group of advanced economies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US) currently at around 29.9%.
Even now with just five members, the combined GDP of Brics is 31.5% of the world’s GDP – already more than the G7’s 29.9%.
Furthermore Brics-11 will account for almost half of the world’s food production. In 2021, the group’s wheat harvest amounted to 49% of the globe’s total. The share of the G7 was 19.1%.
Brics-11 will also have an advantage in terms of the production of metals used in the high-tech industry. The 11 nations will account for 79% of global aluminium output, against just 1.3% controlled by the G7. For palladium, the disparity is 77% for Brics-11 versus 6.9% for the G7.
The expanded Brics will also account for roughly 38.3% of the globe’s industrial production, versus 30.5% for the G7. However, the latter will retain the advantage in terms of exports, with a share of 28.8% against 23.4% for Brics-11.

Saudi Arabia has the largest economy among the new Brics member states. Its GDP in dollar terms at the end of 2022 was estimated at US$1.1 trillion.
Meanwhile, the UAE will be a formidable addition to the bloc thanks to its status as a major exporter. Its exports of goods in 2022 amounted to nearly US$600 billion.
Overall, the 11 Brics countries will account for 48.5 million square kilometers, representing 36% of the world’s land area. This is more than double that of the G7. The combined population will amount to 3.6 billion, 45% of the globe’s total, more than four times above the G7.
Also, the expanded Brics is expected to dominate global energy markets, as it will soon control nearly half of the world’s total oil output, 719.5 billion barrels out of 1.6 trillion. In comparison, the G7 group of leading economies controls only 3.9% of known crude reserves.
While Brics have had many admirers judging from the more than 40 countries that have shown interest in joining it, there are also many detractors, especially from the west which is actually taking a spat at Russia for invading Ukraine.
Among the recent headlines in the global mainstream media taking a dig at Brics are “Bric Nationalism Is No Alternative” and “Brics is now a motley crew of failing states”.
Then there are those trying to sow division with headlines such as “Brics summit exposes the high wall between India and China” and “Brics – India is the biggest loser”.
And when it was reported that more than 40 countries have shown interest and applied for membership, western analysts had a field day in making fun of the absence of an official criteria for membership like the accession process that Nato and the EU have.
And when the new six members were announced, more sickening questions were asked like for example, why was Indonesia not asked? Why Argentina and not Mexico, or Ethiopia and not Nigeria?
Haven’t these people heard of the adage on simplicity propounded by their own western sages such as “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” (Leonardo da Vinci), or “nature is pleased with simplicity and nature is no dummy” (Isaac Newton), or “the greatest ideas are the simplest” (William Golding) or “the simplest solution is almost always the best.” (Occam’s Razor)?
Enlargement is hardly compatible with full-fledged institutionalisation because it would be too complicated.
Just look at how Türkiye and Serbia have to wait for donkey years to be a member of EU when a newcomer applicant Ukraine which is the darling of the west and despite being well known as a country with rampant corruption seemed to have been given a priority in the accession process.
Judging by the way the six new members of Brics were chosen, Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, said they, and probably some other candidates in the next wave, are expanding the sphere of non-western interaction.

“This, by the way, is the only condition for an invitation – non-participation in western military and political coalitions. The other parameters are conditional.”
Adding that a rigid framework is unpopular and most countries in the world want a flexible relationship with maximum scope so as not to miss opportunities, Lukyanov also said:
“This new approach is acceptable to Russia. It is unrealistic to turn Brics into a battering ram against western hegemony. But it is in Russia’s interest to expand the sphere of interaction by bypassing the West and gradually creating appropriate tools and mechanisms.
“In fact, it is in everyone’s interest, because hegemony no longer warms anyone’s heart, it only limits opportunities.”
But success is not guaranteed, as enlargement may lead to the automatic addition of new countries on a formal principle. But in general, the soft separation of the west and the non-west is an objective process for the coming years.
Isn’t this the height of simplicity? This will just make the popularity of the Brics franchise grows.

The original Bric alliance has its roots in the Russia-India-China (RIC) strategic triangle, which was envisaged by Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov in the 1990s.
Various sources refer to a purported “original” Bric agreement that predates the Goldman Sachs’s coining of the term Bric in 2001.
Some of these sources claim President Vladimir Putin was the driving force behind this original cooperative coalition of developing Bric countries.
Fifty years after Henry Kissinger’s game-changing secret visit to China which led to the Sino-US rapprochement and became a key turning point of the Cold War, important voices have called for a readjustment of the US’s confrontational approach to Russia in a bid to play Moscow as a card against Beijing.
The argument hinges on a seeming power disparity between a declining Russia and its ambitious and much more powerful neighbour, China.
Stephen Blank, a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Programme argues that this “ever-greater disparity … may, in time, allow the [US] and its allies to exploit Russian feelings of resentment and resistance to subordination.”
The argument went on that if only the US can find a way to fuel Russia’s fears of China to the point where it might, as Charles A. Kupchan, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations puts it, “leave a bad marriage.”
Hence, the proposed US approach to the Sino-Russian relationship rests on the assumption that Russia resents its junior position vis-à-vis an ever more powerful China, and that such resentment and Moscow’s mistrust of Beijing’s intentions can be profitably exploited.
But this is a flawed assumption. It was true only in the late 1950s up to 1970s when relation between China and Russia were very bad.
Unlike in the past, the Sino-Russian relationship is now no longer hierarchical and does not require Russia’s unquestioning deference to China’s wishes or vice versa.
The two countries are miles apart ideologically, and neither expects the other to embrace the same worldview.
Most importantly, China and Russia work hard to avoid frictions because they have no desire to see these exploited by third parties and also because they understand rightly that they are destined to be neighbours.

If history has taught them anything, it is that it’s much better to be good neighbours than to be at each other’s throats.
Russia is aware of this flawed assumption on the part of the policy wonks in the US State Department and National Security Council but in a true fashion of the Russian maskirovka (deception) it continues to beguile US and European policy makers into believing the flawed assumption was a reality.
And that is why many western analysts and policy makers continue to believe even up to the point when the Ukraine war broke out in 2022 and until today that Sino-Russian rapprochement has no deep root and is just the result of good personal chemistry between Putin and Xi Jinpeng.
What actually happened was despite his intensive rapprochement with the US and the West, it was Mikhail Gorbachev who delivered complete normalisation with China in 1989, which became one of his more lasting legacies.
He sensibly realised that China was Russia’s inescapable neighbour and that good relations with China mattered just as much as rapprochement with the West.
Indeed, Gorbachev redoubled his efforts at courting China post-Tiananmen, when much of the West condemned Beijing’s brutal crackdown against democratic activists.
As a result, today there is a broad policy consensus in Russia about the desirability of keeping Sino-Russian relations on a positive trajectory in political and economic terms.
This consensus started by Gorbachev continues to develop in a generally unbroken pattern from Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Putin, and from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, and then to Xi that had escaped the attention of many US foreign policy advisers.
Thus when Yevgeny Primakov became Prime Minister in 1999, it was easy for him to enunciate what is known as the “Primakov Doctrine”, which promoted Russia, China and India as a “strategic triangle” to counterbalance the US.
The move was interpreted by some observers as an agreement to fight together against ‘colour revolutions’ in Central Asia.
However, what is more important is that Primakov gained respect at home and abroad, with a reputation as a tough but pragmatic supporter of Russia’s interests and as an opponent of Nato’s expansion into the former eastern bloc.
He was also famously an advocate of multilateralism as an alternative to US global hegemony following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
On March 24, 1999, Primakov was heading to the US for an official visit. Midway over the Atlantic Ocean, he learned the combined forces of Nato had started bombing Serbia, a close ally.
Primakov immediately ordered the plane to turn around, and returned to Moscow in a manoeuvre dubbed as “Primakov’s Loop”.

His decision was in sync with what he had set out to achieve. In 1996, as Foreign Minister he had presented before the Kremlin elites a plan to develop a strategic three-way pivot between Russia, India and China.
This doctrine of multipolarity would be an alternative to the US-imposed unipolarity of the post-Cold War period.
Rakesh Krishnan Simha writing in Modern Diplomacy on June 30, 2015 – four days after Primakov died – said although it was not conducive then at “selling an idea as radical as uniting three disparate countries in a strategic embrace”, yet his idea was accepted because of its simplicity, just like most great ideas.
And this is despite “Kremlin then was crawling with pro-western Muscovites, many of whom were rotten to the core and in the pay of motley American think tanks (read: spy agencies)”.
Its simplicity lies firstly in the fact that Russia must end its subservient foreign policy guided by the US. Secondly, he emphasised the necessity of renewing old ties with India and fostering the newly discovered friendship with China.
Primakov also argued that a Russia-India-China (RIC) troika in a multipolar world would allow some protection for free minded nations not allied to the West.
If Gorbachev is credited with the rapprochement with China, it was Primakov that began the rapprochement with India.
In 1998, Primakov visited India and pushed the proposal for creating the RIC strategic triangle.
The then new Russian leadership under Vladimir Putin had reversed the Boris Yeltsin era drift in Russia-India ties, signed a major strategic partnership treaty and established the institution of annual summit meetings.
Fourteen years after Russia had abandoned its old ally, Indians heard friendly voices emanating from Moscow. “India is number one,” Putin said, referring to India’s primacy in the subcontinent.
To be sure, the troika took a long time to reach a basic agreement. A key reason for not getting early traction is the India-China border dispute, which has spun off an Asian version of the arms race between the two giants.
In any trilateral partnership, the weakest member – in this case India – acquires prestige and power out of proportion to its actual strength.
Beijing – which has traditionally viewed India as weak, divided, slavishly pro-West and above all as a potential strategic rival – clearly did not want to help India achieve that status.
Initially, RIC leaders only met on the sidelines of global summits. “Once the format was underway in 2003, broadening it to include Brazil did not present insurmountable challenges,” write Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Christopher Marsh in ‘Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors, and Sectors.’

It wasn’t until 2012 – coinciding with India successfully testing long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching China’s eastern seaboard that RIC talks took off.
Finally, the February 2015 meeting in Beijing imparted a fresh momentum, with China endorsing Russia’s move to include India in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
According to policy analyst Ariel Cohen of the US-based Heritage Foundation, large as its scope is, Primakov went beyond RIC.
“The Primakov doctrine is designed primarily to dilute America’s strength and influence while increasing Russia’s influence and position in the Middle East and Eurasia,” Cohen said.
“Primakov has shown himself to be a master at exploiting anti-American sentiments of the Iranian Shiite establishment, the Arab nationalists, and even the French foreign policy elite.”
He even took on the American hawks (neo-cons) when in a 2006 speech he thundered: “The collapse of the US policies pursued in Iraq delivered a fatal blow on the American doctrine of unilateralism.”
“Having captured more and more countries Nato has approached our borders, and this cannot fail to make us uneasy,” Primakov added.
“All the more so Nato extension is accompanied by anti-Russian rhetoric, as well as aggressive policies pursued by the US in the former Soviet republics.
“Moscow cannot fail to regard all this as activities bred by the displeasure of certain circles in the West by the fact that restoring its enormous prospective potential, Russia is regaining its status of a superpower.
In a sideswipe at Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, Primakov said Russia would not accept the division of the world based on civilisation-related and religious principles, but would instead pursue its own policies, “cooling hotheads who fail to learn their lessons in Iraq but are all ready to repeat pernicious combat techniques against unwanted regimes”.
In fact, his defining credo was: “Those who do good will be rewarded. Life gets even with those who do bad.”
Primakov’s legacy was best summed up by current Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: “The moment he took over, the Russian Foreign Ministry heralded a dramatic turn of Russia’s foreign policy. Russia left the path our western partners had tried to make it follow after the breakup of the Soviet Union and embarked on a track of its own.”
Pointing to the success of Brics, which emerged from the RIC troika, Lavrov said the line of countries eager to join the five-member group “keeps getting longer”.

The G20 or Group of 20 is an intergovernmental forum comprising 19 sovereign countries and the EU. It comprises most of the world’s largest economies, including both industrialised and developing countries.
At the recently concluded G20 summit in India which was held in September, the African Union (AU) was added as a member, turning the G20 into G21.
For many years the AU was relegated to an “invited international organisation” while the EU was a permanent member of G20 from day one.
It was only in the wake of Russia’s success in reaching out to the African nations recently (dubbed as “charm offensive” by the US and its allies), and its President Vladimir Putin declaring Africa as the future engine of global growth that the entry of AU in G20 becomes palatable to the west.
However, despite this diversity of membership, the birth of the G20 in 1999 took place in the “womb” of the G7 group of advanced economies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US).
Taking into account too that 1999 was the year Nato for the first time expanded its wing to the east, it is no surprise then that the G20 in a way is subservient to the wishes of the unipolar world led by the US and its western allies.
Although major issues related to the global economy such as international financial stability, climate change mitigation and sustainable development were always discussed at the G20 summit, these were always from the perspective of the west which lorded over its deliberation.
The March 2014 G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia was quite interesting because it was the first sign of “revolt” of the Global South against the US and western’s domination of G20.
At that summit, former Australian foreign minister Julie Bishop proposed to ban Russia from the summit over its annexation of Crimea.
The Brics foreign ministers subsequently reminded Bishop that “the custodianship of the G20 belongs to all member states equally and no one member state can unilaterally determine its nature and character.”
But that was an exception to the rule of western dominance in the G20.
Last year the Ukraine war became a divisive factor in the G20 summit held in Indonesia with the US and its western allies having a say in the final statement where Russia was condemned, despite protests from Russia and its allies.

Prior to this year G20 summit, host India came under tremendous pressure from the US secretary of state Anthony Blinken to include condemnation of Russia in the Ukraine war again in the final statement.
Blinken also “threatened” India that if condemnation of Russia did not make its way in the final statement, then the US would not agree to the issuance of any statement at all, which will reflect badly on India as the host country because for the first time there wouldn’t be any statement in a G20 summit.
In fact at the G7 summit held earlier this year before the G20 summit, India and Brazil were invited to attend with the purpose of kowtowing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Lula da Silva to agree to a final statement of G20 that condemns Russia.
But Modi turned the table on the G7 leaders by stressing that both the G7 and G20 are not platforms to discuss the Ukraine war. “Why are you discussing the Ukraine war?” Modi thundered at the G7 leaders including Joe Biden.
The proper platform to discuss this issue, Modi reiterated, would be the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly, adding further that the Ukraine war is for Russia and Ukraine to settle it among themselves and that G20 should concern itself only on the humanitarian aspect of the war.
As for President Lula, he was told that apart from meeting the G7 leaders, they had also arranged for him to meet one-on-one with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine who was also invited to the G7 summit so that Modi can hear directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, what the Ukraine war is all about.
But at the appointed time, Zelensky didn’t turn up for the meeting after Lula had waited for some time.
Disgusted with this snub from Zelensky for breaking protocols without any advance notice, Lula left the G7 meeting without even being bothered to be present at the meeting with the heads of the G7.
More dramas were to come as the date of the G20 summit approaches.
Firstly, Putin announced that he would not be present at the Summit and will send his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to represent him.
This started tongues wagging among the global mainstream media that all is not well between Russia and India, perhaps a trade dispute over using the rupees or the trading of oil between the two countries where the discount offered by Russia is no longer a hefty one.
Before even this tongue wagging subsided, it was China’s turn to announce that Xi Jinping would also not attend the G20 summit, and will send his Prime Minister Li Qiang to represent him, raising the noise decibels much higher among the tongue waggers.
Although it can be clearly seen that the reason for Xi’s absence is to avoid meeting President Joe Biden whom he distrusts and considers very rude for his uncouth remarks on Xi, this did not stop the tongue wagging global mainstream media from speculating that it is the border disputes between India and China that is the cause for Xi’s absence, thereby implying relations between both countries had gone downhill.
“Pandemonium” later broke out when the global mainstream media finally got it – China’s publication of its newest official map which shows part of Russia and India under Chinese territory in this map.
To the global mainstream media this means it is the breakdown of the Russia-India-China troika that’s behind Brics.
Taking this cue from the media, both the US and EU gloatingly said that they planned to take advantage of this “power vacuum” caused by Xi and Putin’s G20 absence to rally and woo allies to their cause.

Other than exerting their influence on the final statement to include the condemnation of Russia in the Ukraine war, Brussels, according to Bloomberg, is looking “to seize the moment… to show that it is serious about redefining its partnership with Africa, despite the troubled legacy of colonialism” and therefore will endorse the African Union’s (AU) bid to become a permanent member of the group.
But the problem with this is Russia is also interested in the AU becoming a member of the G20, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov saying way back in June that it’s going to happen soon, and “with active backing” from Moscow.
As for the US it will be about Biden unveiling a series of ambitious new infrastructure projects aimed at helping poorer nations, whose centrepiece is a planned “economic corridor” connecting India, the Middle East and Europe through rail and shipping lines.
“This is a big deal,” Biden said, branding it as the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment – a response to the “Belt and Road Initiative” that China has used to expand its influence with smaller nations that need investment dollars.
By raising public and private capital for this project, Biden and US allies are looking to peel away some weaker countries from China, giving them a source of funding that doesn’t make them beholden to Beijing.
But the funny thing about this is that the US is well known as a country with “broken infrastructures”.
It is not so much that the US is broke and therefore cannot come up with the funds for good infrastructures to replace all the moribund infrastructures it now has, but rather the available funds are used to finance Project Ukraine and many other regime change adventures.
And good monies will now be thrown for this Global Infrastructure and Investment scheme.
Also its education system requires a much needed fixing for it to come up with more skilled technicians and engineers.
Of course in the past the US had all these but a sense of complacency in these areas have already allowed countries like China, Russia and India to catch up.
Now the US excels only at its best in matters of sophisticated finance and banking, and that’s why it is very good at imposing economic and financial sanctions on other countries.
But even this knowledge on sanctions is on the wane as shown by the miserable failure of its sanctions on Russia and the unravelling of its oil price cap on Russian oil.
It needs to focus more on acquiring knowledge on how to prevent its sanctions from boomerang on its own economy.
But in the end it is the Russia-India-China Troika which has the last laugh. The final statement did not contain a condemnation of Russia, and the AU was accepted a member of the G20, the minimalist result that has made Russia, China and India very happy.
Most of the other G20 countries were also very happy with the final statement.
India’s deft handling of the G20 was praised by many countries because under very difficult and stressful condition it has managed to make everyone in the G20 very happy with the exception of the US, its western allies and the global mainstream media.
But what are we to make out of the many dramas that occurred before the G20 summit? Could all these happenings due to perhaps the outcome of the successful execution of the Russian maskirovka (deception) mixed with Indian and Chinese maskirovkas.

In your editor’s opinion, the important lesson in all these is the plain fact that many countries are just sick and tired with the black and white policy of the US and the collective west encapsulated in the expression of “you are either with us, or against us”, with the implication that if it is the latter, be prepared for our response.
What most countries want is that when two countries are at war, be a peacemaker to pacify them, but if you can’t do this, then don’t instigate other countries to take sides.
Other countries should either have the right to remain neutral i.e. having good relation with both the warring sides, or take side on their own without any coercion, overt or covert from powerful countries or blocs.
This in essence is what a multipolar world order is all about.

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The original Bric alliance has its roots in the Russia-India-China (RIC) strategic triangle, which was envisaged by Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov in the 1990s.

Fifty years after Henry Kissinger’s game-changing secret visit to China which led to the Sino-US rapprochement and became a key turning point of the Cold War, important voices have called for a readjustment of the US’s confrontational approach to Russia in a bid to play Moscow as a card against Beijing.

The argument hinges on a seeming power disparity between a declining Russia and its ambitious and much more powerful neighbour, China.

Hence, the proposed US approach to the Sino-Russian relationship rests on the assumption that Russia resents its junior position vis-à-vis an ever more powerful China, and that such resentment and Moscow’s mistrust of Beijing’s intentions can be profitably exploited.

But this is a flawed assumption. It was true only in the late 1950s up to 1970s when relation between China and Russia were very bad.

Unlike in the past, the Sino-Russian relationship is now no longer hierarchical and does not require Russia’s unquestioning deference to China’s wishes or vice versa.

The two countries are miles apart ideologically, and neither expects the other to embrace the same worldview.

Most importantly, China and Russia work hard to avoid frictions because they have no desire to see these exploited by third parties and also because they understand rightly that they are destined to be neighbours.

If history has taught them anything, it is that it’s much better to be good neighbours than to be at each other’s throats.

Russia is aware of this flawed assumption on the part of the policy wonks in the US State Department and National Security Council but in a true fashion of the Russian maskirovka (deception) it continues to beguile US and European policy makers into believing the flawed assumption was a reality.

And that is why many western analysts and policy makers continue to believe even up to the point when the Ukraine war broke out in 2022 and until today that Sino-Russian rapprochement has no deep root and is just the result of good personal chemistry between Putin and Xi Jinpeng.

What actually happened was despite his intensive rapprochement with the US and the West, it was Mikhail Gorbachev who delivered complete normalisation with China in 1989, which became one of his more lasting legacies.

He sensibly realised that China was Russia’s inescapable neighbour and that good relations with China mattered just as much as rapprochement with the West.

Indeed, Gorbachev redoubled his efforts at courting China post-Tiananmen, when much of the West condemned Beijing’s brutal crackdown against democratic activists.

As a result, today there is a broad policy consensus in Russia about the desirability of keeping Sino-Russian relations on a positive trajectory in political and economic terms.

This consensus continues to develop in a generally unbroken pattern from Gorbachev to Boris Yeltsin to Putin, and from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, and then to Xi that had escaped the attention of many US foreign policy advisers.

Thus when Yevgeny Primakov became Prime Minister in 1999, it was easy for him to enunciate what is known as the “Primakov Doctrine”, which promoted Russia, China and India as a “strategic triangle” to counterbalance the US.

He was also famously an advocate of multipolarity as an alternative to US global hegemony following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

Rakesh Krishnan Simha writing in Modern Diplomacy on June 30, 2015 – four days after Primakov died – said although it was not conducive then at “selling an idea as radical as uniting three disparate countries in a strategic embrace”, yet his idea was accepted because of its simplicity, just like most great ideas.

Its simplicity lies firstly in the fact that Russia must end its subservient foreign policy guided by the US. Secondly, he emphasised the necessity of renewing old ties with India and fostering the newly discovered friendship with China.

Primakov also argued that a Russia-India-China (RIC) troika in a multipolar world would allow some protection for free minded nations not allied to the West.

If Gorbachev is credited with the rapprochement with China, it was Primakov that began the rapprochement with India.

In 1998, Primakov visited India and pushed the proposal for creating the RIC strategic triangle.

Thus, 14 years after Russia had abandoned its old ally, Indians heard friendly voices emanating from Moscow. “India is number one,” Putin said, referring to India’s primacy in the subcontinent.

To be sure, the troika took a long time to reach a basic agreement. A key reason for not getting early traction is the India-China border dispute, which has spun off an Asian version of the arms race between the two giants.

Initially, RIC leaders only met on the sidelines of global summits. “Once the format was underway in 2003, broadening it to include Brazil did not present insurmountable challenges,” write Nikolas K. Gvosdev and Christopher Marsh in ‘Russian Foreign Policy: Interests, Vectors, and Sectors.’

Finally, the February 2015 meeting in Beijing imparted a fresh momentum, with China endorsing Russia’s move to include India in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

Primakov’s legacy was best summed up by current Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov: “The moment he took over, the Russian Foreign Ministry heralded a dramatic turn of Russia’s foreign policy. Russia left the path our western partners had tried to make it follow after the breakup of the Soviet Union and embarked on a track of its own.”

Pointing to the success of Brics, which emerged from the RIC troika, Lavrov said the line of countries eager to join the five-member group “keeps getting longer”.

The RIC troika in Brics could also be behind G20 transformation to a more relevant G21.

At the recently concluded G20 summit in India which was held in September, the African Union (AU) was added as a member, turning the G20 into G21.

For many years the AU was relegated to an “invited international organisation”while the EU was a permanent member of G20 from day one.

It was only in the wake of Russia’s success in reaching out to the African nations recently (dubbed as “charm offensive” by the US and its allies), and its President Vladimir Putin declaring Africa as the engine of global growth that the entry of AU in G20 becomes palatable to the west.

Last year the Ukraine war became a divisive factor in the G20 summit held in Indonesia with the US and its western allies having a say in the final statement where Russia was condemned, despite protests from Russia and its allies.

Prior to this year G20 summit, host India came under tremendous pressure from the US secretary of state Anthony Blinken to include condemnation of Russia in the Ukraine war again in the final statement.

Blinken also “threatened” India that if condemnation of Russia did not make its way in the final statement, then the US would not agree to the issuance of any statement at all, which will reflect badly on India as the host country because for the first time there wouldn’t be any statement in a G20 summit

In fact at the G7 summit held earlier this year before the G20 summit, India and Brazil were invited to attend with the purpose of kowtowing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Lula da Silva to agree to a final statement that condemns Russia.

But Modi turned the table on the G7 leaders by stressing that both the G7 and G20 are not platforms to discuss the Ukraine war. “Why are you discussing the Ukraine war?” Modi thundered at the G7 leaders including Joe Biden.

The proper platform to discuss this issue, Modi reiterated, would be the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly, adding further that the Ukraine war is for Russia and Ukraine to settle it among themselves and that G20 should concern itself only on the humanitarian aspect of the war.

As for President Lula, he was told that apart from meeting the G7 leaders, they had also arranged for him to meet one-on-one with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine so that he can hear directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, what the Ukraine war is all about.

But at the appointed time, Zelensky didn’t turn up for the meeting after Lula had waited for some time.

Disgusted with this snub from Zelensky for breaking protocols without any advance notice, Lula left the G7 meeting without even being bothered to be present at the meeting with the heads of the G7.

More dramas were to come as the date of the G20 summit approaches.

Firstly, Putin announced that he would not be present at the Summit and will send his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to represent him.

This started tongues wagging among the global mainstream media that all is not well between Russia and India, perhaps a trade dispute over using the rupees or the trading of oil between the two countries where the discount offered by Russia is no longer a hefty one.

Before even this tongue wagging subsided, it was China’s turn to announce that Xi Jinping would also not attend the G20 summit, and will send his Prime Minister Li Qiang to represent him, raising the noise decibels much higher among the tongue waggers.

Although it can be clearly seen that the reason for Xi’s absence is to avoid meeting President Joe Biden whom he distrusts and considers very rude for his uncouth remarks on Xi, this did not stop the tongue wagging global mainstream media from speculating that it is the border disputes between India and China that is the cause for Xi’s absence, thereby implying relations between both countries had gone downhill.

“Pandemonium” later broke out when the global mainstream media finally got it – China’s publication of its newest official map which shows part of Russia and India under Chinese territory in this map.

To the global mainstream media this means it is the breakdown of the Russia-India-China troika that’s behind Brics.

Taking this cue from the media, both the US and EU gloatingly said that they planned to take advantage of this “power vacuum” caused by Xi and Putin’s G20 absence to rally and woo allies to their cause.

But in the end it is the Russia-India-China Troika which has the last laugh. The final statement did not contain a condemnation of Russia, and the AU was accepted as a member of the G20, the minimalist result that has made Russia, China and India very happy.

India’s deft handling of the G20 was praised by many countries because under very difficult and stressful condition it has managed to make everyone in the G20 very happy with the exception of the US, its western allies and the global mainstream media.

But what are we to make out of the many dramas that occurred before the G20 summit? Could it be perhaps the outcome of the successful execution of the Russian maskirovka (deception) mixed with Indian and Chinese maskirovkas?

The important lesson in all these is the plain fact that many countries are just sick and tired with the black and white policy of the US and the collective west encapsulated in the expression of “you are either with us, or against us”, with the implication that if it is the latter, be prepared for our response.

What most countries want is that when two countries are at war, be a peacemaker to pacify them, but if you can’t do this, then don’t instigate other countries to take sides.

Other countries should either have the right to remain neutral i.e. having good relation with both the warring sides, or take side on their own without any coercion, overt or covert from powerful countries or blocs.

This in essence is what a multipolar world order is all about.

Regards,

Jamari Mohtar

Editor, Let’s Talk!

* Read our op-eds published by several news portals about the sanctions war imposed on Russia and the Black Sea Grain Initiative:

https://www.khmertimeskh.com/501353891/russia-has-already-won-the-sanctions-war/

https://www.themalaysianinsight.com/s/452383

https://www.thesundaily.my/local/black-sea-grain-initiative-hits-a-snag-BH11259448

https://www.businesstoday.com.my/2023/07/14/the-global-whammy-of-rising-food-inflation/

https://www.malaysiakini.com/letters/672259

https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnists/2023/09/949912/russia-has-already-won-sanctions-war