Things change over time. China and India have been having multiple talks over the last few years (after the Galwan incident) to resolve their border dispute. The ceasefire has lasted for decades now. Neither country wants war. Of course there will always be a dispute, but a long long term line of actual control will be determined and respected by both sides without giving up their respective claims.
India-China relations have been normalizing in the aftermath of the Galwan crisis in 2020, but India and China are direct competitors for influence in plenty of countries across the Indo-Pacific Region (eg. Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Tanzania, KSA, Iran).
Furthermore, China will continue to back Pakistan no matter what - there is too much Chinese investment in Pakistan that makes it difficult to write off the relationship. As long as Pakistan and China remain extremely close economic and defense partners and India has a competitive relationship with Pakistan, there will always be the fear of a 2 Front War.
Even before the Galwan crisis, the relationship was precarious. The only difference was the Chinese private sector was allowed to operate, before being forced out of India - causing Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Oppo, Byd, etc to lose a MASSIVE market for them to the expense of Japanese, Korean, American, and Indian competitors.
Normalization basically means rolling the clock back to 2020 and preventing a war from accidentally sparking because of a mutual lack of disciple from soldiers on the frontline, but Chinese companies are still shit out of luck to operate, now that they mostly sold their Indian operations to Indian conglomerates like Reliance Group, Tata Group, etc.
Both are mutually heavily dependent on China and India economically and politically, so it makes perfect sense that they were included. Most of the countries added are those where at least 2 of the BRICS are coexisting economically or politically.
They're in it for their own interests. That's almost always the case, but in this case, many of those interests are conflicting. OTOH, it's a good thing that China has some opposition there.
With the rise of China, and the technological expertise Russia has always had, a multipolar world is possible in a way it wasn’t 50 years ago. Labor, capital, and technology are available within that bloc, undercutting the effect of any western sanctions. And with the US seeming to be up to its usual tricks, the motivation for inclusion seems to be higher. E.g. Bangladesh applied to the union, though unsuccessfully this round, and given the US recently helped overthrow the popular democratic PM next door, it’s hard to blame them. https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cyph...
Russia is good at some things and bad at other things. The S-400 missiles use a SPARC-derived CPU designed by Elbrus but made by TSMC in Taiwan. Russia is world-beating in nuclear, they are the only people who build LWRs on an n-th of a kind (NOAK) basis and have a working fast reactor that is quite a beautiful machine with no drama. They will build a reactor in your country, supply fuel and then take it away.
The vast majority of their country is a frozen wasteland, and they desperately needed Crimea to have a decent warm water naval base. They have decent mineral resources and have shared borders with several important countries, but that is about all that is strategic about their geographical location.
I’m talking more about the fact that Russia has certain “civilizational milestone” technologies most countries don’t have: space flight, the full stack of aircraft, nuclear, etc. Other countries have to get those technologies from the west.
so-so. they dropped behind everybody last time i checked. also amount of various failures rising
>the full stack of aircraft
military - maybe. for some values of "military". civilian - made from foreign parts. those that are sourced from russian parts they still can't produce them
I don't want to start a flamewar or hair-splitting over this issue, but somehow, especially after the Bucha massacre, including the adjective “civilizational” in the context of Russia somehow doesn't feel right. Just “milestone technologies” sounds more apt.
> Ironically, India and Russia had at first planned to jointly design and launch Chandrayaan-2, after the historic discovery of water by ISRO’s first lunar probe in 2011. Differences arose between their space agencies over the configuration of Chandrayaan-2. While ISRO was keen on a lander and rover, its Russian counterpart felt a lander would suffice, according to Dr. Annadurai.
> The upshot: ISRO reconfigured the spacecraft and hoisted it as its first probe to Mars (Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM) in November 2013, while its Russian counterpart teamed up with the Chinese space agency for a voyage to the Moon. The Russian lander, however, was lost during a midcourse correction, he added.
They are lagging behind because the breakup of the USSR, and their subsequent experiment with "capitalism" really damaged their economy and local industries. That disruption, stagnation, and even shutdown of many local industries lead to the loss of IP, scientific manpower and neglect of R&D for sometime. It is only in the last decade or two now that some economic stability has returned to Russia and it started focusing on R&D again.
It is however difficult to say if they can catch up. When India once setup their own foundry to build and produce chips, they were at one point equivalent to the Taiwanese in chip process node. But they shut it down after a fire. Now more than 2+ decades later, even if India setups another fab, who knows how many decades it would take India to catch up with Taiwan.
There are other complex issues - one of the reasons India decided to shutdown the fab was because they require an incredible amount of pure water. India is afraid that diverting water to fabs would hinder its agricultural production and curtail its ability to feed its billion+ population. (India was once dependent on food imports and it was a horrible political experience due to the unfair demands made on India for it).
I find it funny how antagonistic the West is against BRICS; the West has ignored the Global South for far too long, and worse, depletes those countries of resources and getting rich off of them. Countries have now seen that they can't rely on the US not to meddle.
Look at what America did to their ally South Africa, the ambassador accused us without proof and our currency dropped like a rock. The US also had its army in Syria protect private military contractors who protect US companies extracting oil from Syria. They're hypocrites as China is their biggest trading partner. France produces 70% of its electricity from nuclear and gets the majority of its fuel from Africa. And West Africa is just as poor as it left them.
India and China having border skirmishes don't make them sworn enemies of each other. In fact, China is one of India's largest trading partners. The US and Canada even has border disputes; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixon_Entrance.
Also, it's not a military bloc. And you can understand why the Global South countries would want this alliance to grow their economies and be less reliant on Western imposition. On average, African countries loans cost 4% more than America and 8% more than Europe, they're being taken advantage of and their natural resources depleted.
And now those countries want to come together to build up their economies through the New Development Bank which aims to increase local currency borrowing to 30%.
The BRICS countries constitute more than 50% of the population and 26% of the world's nominal GDP but have only 14% of the IMF's voting rights.
They aren't looking to unsettle the dollar, but be less reliant on it.
Good luck teaming up with Russia and borrowing from China. Montenegro has made a similar venture. It didn't go all that well, now they are doing it again.
What I don't understand is South Africa relying on Ukrainian grain and teaming up with Russia while there is widespread violence against farmers.
>They aren't looking to unsettle the dollar, but be less reliant on it.
The prominence of the dollar, aside from US productivity and scale, and the reasons why it is the most exchanged currency in the world, is due to its stability, or in other words, how well it holds value over time. That's pretty much it.
However, "that's pretty much it" rather understates the difficulty of achieving the same thing in currencies of countries that lack fiscal transparency, political stability and have higher levels of corruption and volatility in banking sectors.
It's not a secret formula. If the BRICs countries succeed in the political reforms needed to establish currency confidence in their alternate reserve to which investments can be pegged, the world might be a better place. So here's hoping.
> France produces 70% of its electricity from nuclear and gets the majority of its fuel from Africa
Over 82% of French uranium production is outside of Africa, in countries like Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, and Russia.
Gell Mann amnesia pretty much says that if you can't get basic facts right, then you should probably question the rest of your "analysis" too.
> African countries loans cost 4% more than America and 8% more than Europe
But also, this is too good. Basic financial literacy tells you that the risk of a loan is included in its interest rate to pay for the chance of default. How much of the African sahel is currently under active coups and civil wars in the past couple years?
France owns those mines in niger (Orano I think). They are not "good political relations"
The uranium mined from France itself is of low quality and uranium from AU/CA has too high shipping charges.
Also 30% of uranium to France came from Niger in 2022. For EU as a whole (I think) it was closer to 40%
No, 2022 was 20% from Niger [0], and EU is 25% [1].
I'll also correct my stats for the latest 2022 year, in which 64% was outside Africa. It fluctuates moderately, like Namibia greatly increasing last year.
GP is right that France is playing plenty to keep things smooth with Niger. Niger's entire export economy is based purely on uranium. Meanwhile, to France, it's just the 7th largest global supplier of one commodity. What we're seeing is the foolish hubris of certain people in Niger trying to crank out more profits (the only ones they have), failing to realize that there are six other bigger suppliers in this market. The prices get set fairly, they just don't like it because they have nothing else to further their standard of living, until they actually build a functioning economy. They're antagonizing the hand that feeds them, and if you don't do mutual beneficial trade, France will seek stable supplies elsewhere, while Niger suffers the opposite of what they unfairly wanted.
It's a stupid and tired myth that every successful association must be very tight, military not just economic, with a special new currency, zero differences of opinion between the members, etc. This is a strawman that people like to kick around and ridicule anything less than that, but what is currently happening in reality is much more nuanced and interesting.
Countries in the [global] south don’t want to be told who to support, how to behave and how to conduct their sovereign affairs.
Other integration frameworks that exist globally have been blinded by the hegemonic vision put forward by the US government.
I don't think the above quoted reasoning applies only to countries that want to join the BRICS group but even US "allies" could feel the same way. For example, it's pretty clear the US seems to have control over NATO.[1] A number of recent events show that the US does not respect its allies in Europe and has hegemonic control over them. Another example is the privacy destruction and espionage slipped into Child Safety Bills that 'coincidentally' are proposed at the same time in the US, EU, and UK.[2][3][4]
> For example, it's pretty clear the US seems to have control over NATO.
The whole point of NATO is for weaker countries to hand over the reins of their military in exchange for being under the US nuclear umbrella. The only two NATO countries that don't need the alliance as much are UK and France because they have their own WMDs together with delivery vehicles. Which is why France is always considered to be rebellious within NATO (and also because of cultural reasons, since the US-UK special Wasp relationship is a natural rival to the traditional French continental hegemony).
The second order effect of NATO is to keep nuclear non proliferation down within nuclear latent European countries like Germany. Most of the richer countries in the EU (and even some of the poorer ex Soviet states) are more than capable of developing functional nuclear weapons or delivery vehicles. Without NATO, the US-EU relationship would look a lot more different.
The US, by and large, wants to spend less military on Europe. Most NATO countries are not ponying up the required 2% GDP, so it's costing the US. Meanwhile, when the US pulls some troops from Germany, there is uproar there, because we moved them to Poland, who actually spends on defense and has enormously favorable opinion of US involvement. You know, because their lives depend on it, from you know who...
I think it is a bit more than just militarily being told who told support or spying/privacy. The west will frequently threaten to cut off aid to Africa if they don't accept certain social policies. I'm not sure if any aid has actually been cut off yet, but there is a constant pushing for it.
yes I agree but the US does that to European countries and other allies also.
Even militarily that overlaps strongly with energy policy. Although the verdict is still out on who blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the US did say it was opposed to it despite it being sovereign European energy provider's decision to partner with Russia.[1] The US said they would not allow the pipeline to happen. That's pretty clear foreign meddling in Germany's affairs. Again, that includes the possibility you think the pipeline is a bad idea.
On social policies, the US has pressured allies to align with its own views with Hungary[2] who is a NATO member, Poland[3], and Japan[4] recently.
A group of hypocrites I say! Their main goal is not aligning with major world powers but China and Russia are leading them. It's an anti-western thing.
History will look back at this era as the end of aid based diplomacy. The US should seriously reconsider all foreign aid programs to countries with regimes hostile to the US like this.
This group would not have existed if the US led west did not insist on its ways and democracy and "human rights" (quotes because of the hypocrisy and western lens applied to the definition of what a human right is) being a preconditon of doing business or friendly diplomatic relations. So in a way I can't blame them for ganging up like this but the nice guy approach of the west has clearly failed.
This is the ultimate flaw of the liberal world order, it's imposition of superior ways over supposed inferior colonies. Make no mistake, there is no such thing as neutrality, India is right to be concerned because the economic leverage they sought out from this bloc is turning out to be a politicial alliance. Brazil and SA should be very concerned as well. So long as China is in the mix, this will end up badly for the whole world.
> Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money
BRICS countries want to become less reliant on the dollar, but lack the main things propping the dollar up which are lack of corruption and overwhelming military might.
54 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadFurthermore, China will continue to back Pakistan no matter what - there is too much Chinese investment in Pakistan that makes it difficult to write off the relationship. As long as Pakistan and China remain extremely close economic and defense partners and India has a competitive relationship with Pakistan, there will always be the fear of a 2 Front War.
Even before the Galwan crisis, the relationship was precarious. The only difference was the Chinese private sector was allowed to operate, before being forced out of India - causing Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Oppo, Byd, etc to lose a MASSIVE market for them to the expense of Japanese, Korean, American, and Indian competitors.
Normalization basically means rolling the clock back to 2020 and preventing a war from accidentally sparking because of a mutual lack of disciple from soldiers on the frontline, but Chinese companies are still shit out of luck to operate, now that they mostly sold their Indian operations to Indian conglomerates like Reliance Group, Tata Group, etc.
I saw a twitter video of it about a year or so ago, it's pretty intense.
...used to have. For several reasons they're lagging behind now and the war isn't helping.
They are idiots for allowing the tech to be produced overseas. It's the only true bargaining chip they have aside from their strategic location.
The vast majority of their country is a frozen wasteland, and they desperately needed Crimea to have a decent warm water naval base. They have decent mineral resources and have shared borders with several important countries, but that is about all that is strategic about their geographical location.
so-so. they dropped behind everybody last time i checked. also amount of various failures rising
>the full stack of aircraft
military - maybe. for some values of "military". civilian - made from foreign parts. those that are sourced from russian parts they still can't produce them
I don't want to start a flamewar or hair-splitting over this issue, but somehow, especially after the Bucha massacre, including the adjective “civilizational” in the context of Russia somehow doesn't feel right. Just “milestone technologies” sounds more apt.
> Ironically, India and Russia had at first planned to jointly design and launch Chandrayaan-2, after the historic discovery of water by ISRO’s first lunar probe in 2011. Differences arose between their space agencies over the configuration of Chandrayaan-2. While ISRO was keen on a lander and rover, its Russian counterpart felt a lander would suffice, according to Dr. Annadurai.
> The upshot: ISRO reconfigured the spacecraft and hoisted it as its first probe to Mars (Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM) in November 2013, while its Russian counterpart teamed up with the Chinese space agency for a voyage to the Moon. The Russian lander, however, was lost during a midcourse correction, he added.
- https://www.rt.com/india/581733-india-lands-on-the-moon/
They are lagging behind because the breakup of the USSR, and their subsequent experiment with "capitalism" really damaged their economy and local industries. That disruption, stagnation, and even shutdown of many local industries lead to the loss of IP, scientific manpower and neglect of R&D for sometime. It is only in the last decade or two now that some economic stability has returned to Russia and it started focusing on R&D again.
It is however difficult to say if they can catch up. When India once setup their own foundry to build and produce chips, they were at one point equivalent to the Taiwanese in chip process node. But they shut it down after a fire. Now more than 2+ decades later, even if India setups another fab, who knows how many decades it would take India to catch up with Taiwan.
I'd say it's definitely worth trying anyway. Maybe even more than the space program.
Obviously being part of KAOS is much more important to them.
Anatomy of a failed state.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-62053991
Look at what America did to their ally South Africa, the ambassador accused us without proof and our currency dropped like a rock. The US also had its army in Syria protect private military contractors who protect US companies extracting oil from Syria. They're hypocrites as China is their biggest trading partner. France produces 70% of its electricity from nuclear and gets the majority of its fuel from Africa. And West Africa is just as poor as it left them.
India and China having border skirmishes don't make them sworn enemies of each other. In fact, China is one of India's largest trading partners. The US and Canada even has border disputes; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixon_Entrance.
Also, it's not a military bloc. And you can understand why the Global South countries would want this alliance to grow their economies and be less reliant on Western imposition. On average, African countries loans cost 4% more than America and 8% more than Europe, they're being taken advantage of and their natural resources depleted.
And now those countries want to come together to build up their economies through the New Development Bank which aims to increase local currency borrowing to 30%.
The BRICS countries constitute more than 50% of the population and 26% of the world's nominal GDP but have only 14% of the IMF's voting rights.
They aren't looking to unsettle the dollar, but be less reliant on it.
What I don't understand is South Africa relying on Ukrainian grain and teaming up with Russia while there is widespread violence against farmers.
https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/chinese-influence-in-...
"It was introduced in the 2001 publication, Building Better Global Economic BRICs by then-chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Jim O'Neill."
The prominence of the dollar, aside from US productivity and scale, and the reasons why it is the most exchanged currency in the world, is due to its stability, or in other words, how well it holds value over time. That's pretty much it.
However, "that's pretty much it" rather understates the difficulty of achieving the same thing in currencies of countries that lack fiscal transparency, political stability and have higher levels of corruption and volatility in banking sectors.
It's not a secret formula. If the BRICs countries succeed in the political reforms needed to establish currency confidence in their alternate reserve to which investments can be pegged, the world might be a better place. So here's hoping.
Over 82% of French uranium production is outside of Africa, in countries like Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia, and Russia.
Gell Mann amnesia pretty much says that if you can't get basic facts right, then you should probably question the rest of your "analysis" too.
> African countries loans cost 4% more than America and 8% more than Europe
But also, this is too good. Basic financial literacy tells you that the risk of a loan is included in its interest rate to pay for the chance of default. How much of the African sahel is currently under active coups and civil wars in the past couple years?
They can sell it cheaper to somebody else if they aren't happy, the list of potential clients isn't that big though.
The uranium mined from France itself is of low quality and uranium from AU/CA has too high shipping charges. Also 30% of uranium to France came from Niger in 2022. For EU as a whole (I think) it was closer to 40%
I'll also correct my stats for the latest 2022 year, in which 64% was outside Africa. It fluctuates moderately, like Namibia greatly increasing last year.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-sees-no-immediate-ri...
GP is right that France is playing plenty to keep things smooth with Niger. Niger's entire export economy is based purely on uranium. Meanwhile, to France, it's just the 7th largest global supplier of one commodity. What we're seeing is the foolish hubris of certain people in Niger trying to crank out more profits (the only ones they have), failing to realize that there are six other bigger suppliers in this market. The prices get set fairly, they just don't like it because they have nothing else to further their standard of living, until they actually build a functioning economy. They're antagonizing the hand that feeds them, and if you don't do mutual beneficial trade, France will seek stable supplies elsewhere, while Niger suffers the opposite of what they unfairly wanted.
Other integration frameworks that exist globally have been blinded by the hegemonic vision put forward by the US government.
I don't think the above quoted reasoning applies only to countries that want to join the BRICS group but even US "allies" could feel the same way. For example, it's pretty clear the US seems to have control over NATO.[1] A number of recent events show that the US does not respect its allies in Europe and has hegemonic control over them. Another example is the privacy destruction and espionage slipped into Child Safety Bills that 'coincidentally' are proposed at the same time in the US, EU, and UK.[2][3][4]
[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/joe-biden-blocked-ben-...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/08/eu-lawyers-pla...
[3]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/140...
[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/08/whatsapp-...
The whole point of NATO is for weaker countries to hand over the reins of their military in exchange for being under the US nuclear umbrella. The only two NATO countries that don't need the alliance as much are UK and France because they have their own WMDs together with delivery vehicles. Which is why France is always considered to be rebellious within NATO (and also because of cultural reasons, since the US-UK special Wasp relationship is a natural rival to the traditional French continental hegemony).
The second order effect of NATO is to keep nuclear non proliferation down within nuclear latent European countries like Germany. Most of the richer countries in the EU (and even some of the poorer ex Soviet states) are more than capable of developing functional nuclear weapons or delivery vehicles. Without NATO, the US-EU relationship would look a lot more different.
Even militarily that overlaps strongly with energy policy. Although the verdict is still out on who blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the US did say it was opposed to it despite it being sovereign European energy provider's decision to partner with Russia.[1] The US said they would not allow the pipeline to happen. That's pretty clear foreign meddling in Germany's affairs. Again, that includes the possibility you think the pipeline is a bad idea.
On social policies, the US has pressured allies to align with its own views with Hungary[2] who is a NATO member, Poland[3], and Japan[4] recently.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/statedept/videos/under-secretary-nu...
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administration-weaponizes-dip...
[3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-ambassador-marches-in...
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/world/asia/rahm-emanuel-j...
History will look back at this era as the end of aid based diplomacy. The US should seriously reconsider all foreign aid programs to countries with regimes hostile to the US like this.
This group would not have existed if the US led west did not insist on its ways and democracy and "human rights" (quotes because of the hypocrisy and western lens applied to the definition of what a human right is) being a preconditon of doing business or friendly diplomatic relations. So in a way I can't blame them for ganging up like this but the nice guy approach of the west has clearly failed.
This is the ultimate flaw of the liberal world order, it's imposition of superior ways over supposed inferior colonies. Make no mistake, there is no such thing as neutrality, India is right to be concerned because the economic leverage they sought out from this bloc is turning out to be a politicial alliance. Brazil and SA should be very concerned as well. So long as China is in the mix, this will end up badly for the whole world.
* https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1665053372402081792