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.