by PATRICK BOND
The U.S. now assumes leadership of the G20 until the Miami summit ends on December 15, 2026 – but not without having lost some crucial soft power. In the wake of Donald Trump’s farcical attacks on the host of last week’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, might the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (plus Egypt-Ethiopia-Indonesia-Iran-United Arab Emirates) BRICS bloc – maybe alongside some annoyed Europeans – finally stand up straight, and boycott the Florida meeting?
After all, a process of shifting power relations – symbolic and real – is supposedly underway. At the University of South Africa in Pretoria on November 20, two days before G20 leaders met, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs gave a viral speech in which he castigated Trump – as the equivalent of a four-year old throwing tantrums – and proclaimed that U.S. power
“is fading. It’s fading in part because of the BRICS. Because the BRICS are saying we don’t need to be under the thumb of a US empire. That’s what President Lula said when he was hosting the BRICS this summer. And Trump put on a tariff on Brazil because he didn’t like a court proceeding against the preceding president who had tried to make a coup. And so he put on a penalty tariff and President Lula said, ‘We don’t need an emperor and we’re not going to succumb to this kind of pressure.’ So the BRICS, of which you are an esteemed member … have 46% of the world population. Thank you. And 41% of the world GDP. And they can look at the G7 and say, ‘Who are you?’ And that’s what they’re doing. So this is the new phase of geopolitics.”
Sachs’ rhetoric is certainly pleasing, but in a manner reminiscent of a too-brief sugar high. Looking more closely over the past six months, the (aspiring) multi-polar world has provided many examples of the opposite process, suggesting the BRICS’ threat to U.S. imperialism is in fact, fading. Read on if you are worried that Sachs vastly hypes the BRICS, by not digging deeply enough, dialectically, into the devils in the details. Read on if you are worried that the BRICS’ ruling elites can and do behave in neoliberal subimperialist – not anti-imperialist – ways.
“We collapsed the ambitious agenda we had about revitalizing the Global South”
In the most obvious two examples of Trump appeasement syndrome evident in late November, first, there was no punishment whatsoever – e.g. climate taxes (such as a ‘carbon border adjustment mechanism’ on U.S. exports) – announced against his withdrawal from United Nations climate talks, which were hosted from November 10-22 by Brazilian President Lula da Silva in Belém.
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