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Will BRICS create a new Yalta?

Автор публикации: Tim Anderson
Дата публикации: 2024-12-11

Will BRICS create a new Yalta?

Tim Anderson

 

There can be no doubt that BRICS presents the major challenge to Washington’s dream of world dominance, even though a small army of Anglo-American writers try to deny it. Comparisons are being made with the Yalta Conference, at the end of World War Two, where Anglo-America and the Soviet Union defined areas of influence. But in all the hyperbole, some new myths have been created to combine with old myths.

 

Myth 1: The Yalta conference of February 1945 gave too much influence to Stalin.

The “Atlanticist” argument these days is that US President Roosevelt allowed too much influence to the Soviet Union, especially over Eastern Europe, even though most of those regimes collaborated deeply with Nazi Germany in the slaughter and dispossession of Russian and Soviet peoples. In fact, the Yalta agreement mainly facilitated the US military occupation of Europe and large parts of East Asia, an occupation which persists to this day. During the anti-communist hysteria of the Cold War they did their best to make Stalin some sort of moral equivalent to the western imperialist Adolf Hitler. The Yalta agreement mainly helped lay the basis for an Anglo-American dominance, for the rest of the 20th century.

 

Myth 2: The Russian SMO in Ukraine disqualifies Russia from a role in any revised world order

US media networks tried to run down the importance of the BRICS summit in Kazan, saying that Russia’s global influence and its claim to act as “as a counterbalance to the West” was “shadowed by Ukraine”. In fact Russia’s SMO in Ukraine was a statement of independent political will which has rallied the global south to BRICS. Most of the world had waited for some new force which would finally stand up to Washington, the would-be dictator of the world.

 

While it is true that very few countries initially backed Russia’s SMO at the UN, many abstained and most came to accept and even admire Russian strength and resilience. The SMO came to be seen as an internal Russian matter, not an aggressive imperial move like the US invasion of Iraq but rather an act of resistance to US world dominance.  As even the US state media recognises, a flood of applications to join BRICS – especially from Africa, Asia and Latin America - came in after February 2022, such that the SMO now marks a turning point in international history.

 

Myth 3: BRICS is an attempt by Russia and China to dominate the world order but it is too weak to challenge the USA / NATO / G7

The aspiring global dictatorship in Washington views any challenge to its hegemony as a rival trying to occupy its throne. For that reason it fears China and tries to divide and weaken any independent state or alliance, indeed any alternative ‘pole’ of power. It sees BRICS as a possible vehicle for Russian of Chinese imperial power and does not understand that multipolar aims are more modest, to create alternatives to the US monopoly and, in particular, to the SWIFT system and dollar dictatorship. The BRICS summit in Kazan, for example, spent quite some time on proposed reforms to the existing US dominated institutions, the IMF, World Bank and WTO. BRICS certainly does aim to break the monopoly of the dollar, since the US chose to weaponise the dollar against virtually all independent nations.  

The current argument from tame western analysts is that the BRICS is too weak to reshape the global order, as it is internally divided.  They point to the supposed lack of prestige of Russia, to China-India tensions and to Brazil’s current maneuvers against Venezuela. All this is a ‘divide and rule’ game the Anglo-Americans have played for centuries. It is also a challenge for BRICS: for clarity of purpose and greater unity.

 

The Anglo-American super-sized share of the world was never enough. As President Putin said “Over the long centuries of colonialism … they got used to being allowed everything [and] to spitting on the whole world”; it is time for a change. But if BRICS is to create a new Yalta it will not be another divide of the world into slices for big powers. Rather it must be to remove the asphyxiating Anglo-American boot from the neck of the independent peoples of the world, allowing them to breathe free from coercion, blockade and new forms of colonialism.