Is BRICS the future for a better world? What we do know is that, according to Widding, the last thing the G7 members want to see is a functioning multipolar world of independent states. She explains why.
The rapidly growing BRICS region is quietly being discussed in the media. To give some proportion, the Western world covers barely a billion people. A figure of 800 million people is often mentioned, while the BRICS countries cover around three billion people.
We often hear about the G7, founded in 1973 to unite leaders from the world’s most important industrialized nations. The G7 is an elite economic and political group of countries – France, Italy, Canada, the UK, Germany, the US and Japan.
However, we don’t hear much about BRICS, which was formed in 2009 by Russia, China, India, and Brazil. It was known as BRIC until South Africa joined a year later, at which point the name was changed to BRICS.
Today, BRICS is an association of countries that consider themselves to have many common interests and want to increase their global influence – not least to work together on economic issues. New members are also being accepted on an ongoing basis. The main goal for the coming years is to reshape the global financial system.
A relevant question is how Sweden will be affected by this economic restructuring of the world. Who is talking about it? Has anyone heard our finance minister raise the issue?
After the original BRICS members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – dozens of states have joined at various stages of membership.
Many interesting countries are on the waiting list, such as Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and militarily powerful NATO member Turkey.
This year, despite pressure from the US, populous Indonesia has been unanimously accepted as a full member from previously being a BRICS partner.
The fact that countries such as China and India are both part of BRICS may seem strange given the grave, even deadly, border disputes between these countries. However, perhaps this is a positive example of how long-standing disputes can be addressed through economic cooperation and common goals. New forms of collaboration between the countries were discussed as recently as the Kazan meeting on October 22-24 last year.
The only country that seems to have turned down a BRICS invitation is Argentina, under the newly elected President Milei!
The BRICS organization – led by the two allied superpowers China and Russia – has already emerged as one of the world’s most powerful united forces. It is well on its way to including most of the world’s population and surpassing the ’West’ in every statistical economic parameter except ’GDP per capita’.
For example, its members lead global sales from food production – i.e., all manufacturing – civilian and military, as well as exports of gas and oil products. The BRICS countries claim their strength in their freedom from binding treaties and political rules.
While the West (1/8 of the world’s population) is now in tragic decline due to a crushing “Woke & Green anti-CO2 agenda,” the BRICS have no such “top-down” political governing agenda.
Moreover, the “GDP per capita” gap is rapidly narrowing because BRICS is primarily designed to stimulate the growth of the global economy – for the maximum benefit of the participating member countries.
Perhaps unexpectedly, António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, attended the meeting in Kazan last October. The question is how much respect the BRICS countries really have for the UN, which is now doing its utmost to erase nation-states and give more power to supranational organizations. Unlike the West, BRICS strives for a multipolar world with cooperation between sovereign nation-states.
The Global South does not care about trendy Green-Woke gender agendas – and they do not trust the US-run IMF, World Bank, Swift system or the Davos manipulative WEF and the divisive and grasping EU for that matter.
This growing multipolar global disrespect is unacceptable to the G7 elite – especially to the ruling Western Hegemony in Washington.
Donald Trump is already threatening BRICS members with harsh economic sanctions if they engage in interstate trade alongside the US dollar.
For example, the US will not accept India selling shiploads of potatoes to Vietnam – unless the deal is settled in US dollars. Should India accept payment in a BRICS currency like the Chinese yuan, the US threatens to impose high tariffs on all US imports from Vietnam and India.
Is BRICS the Future for a Better World?
In summary, the elite of the privileged G7 group are trying to maintain their entrenched global hegemony structure – but for the first time in modern history, they are likely to feel challenged by the growing BRICS economic cooperation group.
In the near future, we will likely see a global BRICS currency for international trade, a BRICS-BANK, i.e. “The New Development Bank”, and an alternative to SWIFT for cross-border payment transfers.
There may not be a complete ’de-dollarization’ of world trade, but it is not surprising that the US has already seen BRICS as a serious threat to its hegemonic, unipolar world domination since World War II.
The last thing the G7 members want to see is a functioning multipolar world of independent states, even though they have actively stimulated such a change with numerous confiscations of foreign assets and frequent economic sanctions that have made members of the “Global South” and other states both nervous and pissed off.
Related: The US-led West will react to the path laid out by BRICS 3.0
By Elsa Widding
Elsa Widding (1968-) is a Swedish politician, civil engineer and energy analyst. Widding studied at Chalmers University of Technology in 1988 and graduated in 1996 with a master’s degree in civil engineering.
She was elected as a member of parliament for the Sweden Democrats in 2022. She left the party in 2023 but retained her seat in Parliament until 2026.
Between 1996 and 2005, she worked in the energy industry, first at Norwegian Statkraft and from 1999 to 2005 at Vattenfall. In 2005, she attended INSEAD Business School and then worked at Bure Equity until 2007. Between 2008 and 2010, she worked at the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications and was a company analyst for the state-owned companies Vattenfall, SJ and Green Cargo. 2010-2013, she was Head of Electricity Network Regulation at Fortum.
Widding has written the books “Klimatkarusellen” 2019 and “Sunt förnuft om energi och klimat”, 2022.
Her homepage Elsawidding.website and Youtube-channel