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by Pepe Escobar from TheCradle Website
Photo Credit: The Cradle
The increasingly irrelevant G20 Summit concluded with sure signs that BRICS+ will be the way forward for
Global South
cooperation...
The 3-hour, 30-minute-long face-to-face meeting between Chinese
President
Xi Jinping and his US counterpart
Joe Biden - requested by
the White House - took place at the Chinese delegation's residence
in Bali, and not at the G20 venue at the luxury Apurva Kempinski in
Nusa Dua.
Specifically, Xi told Biden that,
Xi also expressed hope that NATO, the EU, and the US will engage in "comprehensive dialogue" with Russia.
Biden, according to the Chinese, made several points.
The US,
However, the recent record shows Xi has
few reasons to take Biden at
face value...
As much as the G20 is self-described as,
...the G7 inside the G20 in Bali had the summit de facto hijacked by war.
The collective west, including the Japanese vassal state, was bent on including the 'war' in Ukraine and its "economic impacts" - especially the food and energy crisis - in the statement.
What mattered was to blame Russia - for everything...
The Global South effect
It was up to this year's G20 host Indonesia - and the next host, India - to exercise trademark Asian politeness and consensus building.
Jakarta and New Delhi worked extremely hard to find wording that would be acceptable to both Moscow and Beijing.
Still, China wanted changes in the wording.
This was opposed by western states, while Russia did not review the last-minute wording because Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had already departed.
On point 3 out of 52, the statement,
"Russian aggression" is the standard NATO mantra - not shared by virtually the whole Global South.
The statement draws a direct correlation between the war and a non-contextualized,
As for this passage, it could not be more self-evident:
This is ironic given that NATO and its public relations department, the EU, "represented" by the unelected eurocrats of the European Commission, don't do "diplomacy and dialogue."
Fixated with war
Instead the US, which controls NATO, has been weaponizing Ukraine, since March, by a whopping $91.3 billion, including the latest presidential request, this month, of $37.7 billion.
That happens to be 33 percent more than Russia's total military spending for 2022.
Extra evidence of the Bali Summit being hijacked by "war" was provided by the emergency meeting, called by the US, to debate what ended up being a Ukrainian S-300 missile falling on a Polish farm, and not the start of WWIII like some tabloids hysterically suggested.
Tellingly, there was absolutely no one from the Global South in the meeting - the sole Asian nation being the Japanese vassal, part of the G7.
Compounding the picture, we had the sinister Davos master Klaus Schwab once again impersonating a Bond villain at the B20 business forum, selling his Great Reset agenda of,
As if this was not ominous enough, Davos and its World Economic Forum are now ordering Africa - completely excluded from the G20 - to pay $2.8 trillion to "meet its obligations" under the Paris Agreement to minimize greenhouse gas emissions.
The demise of the G20 as we know it
The serious fracture between Global North and Global South, so evident in Bali, had already been suggested in Phnom Penh, as Cambodia hosted the East Asia Summit this past weekend.
The 10 members of ASEAN had made it very clear they remain unwilling to follow the US and the G7 in their collective demonization of Russia and in many aspects China.
The Southeast Asians are also not exactly excited by the US-concocted IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), which will be irrelevant in terms of slowing down China's extensive trade and connectivity across Southeast Asia.
And it gets worse...
The self-described "leader of the free world" is shunning the extremely important APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Bangkok at the end of this week.
For very sensitive and sophisticated Asian cultures, this is seen as an affront.
APEC, established way back in 1990s to promote trade across the Pacific Rim, is about serious Asia-Pacific business, not Americanized "Indo-Pacific" militarization.
The snub follows Biden's latest blunder when he erroneously addressed Cambodia's Hun Sen as "prime minister of Colombia" at the summit in Phnom Penh... (sic)
Lining up to join BRICS
It is safe to say that the G20 may have plunged into an irretrievable path toward irrelevancy.
Even before the current Southeast Asian summit wave - in Phnom Penh, Bali and Bangkok - Lavrov had already signaled what comes next when he noted that,
Iran, Argentina, and Algeria have formally applied:
And then there's the next wave:
It's crucial to note that all of the above sent their Finance Ministers to a BRICS Expansion dialogue in May.
A short but serious appraisal of the candidates reveals an astonishing unity in diversity.
Lavrov himself noted that it will take time for the current five BRICS to analyze the immense geopolitical and geo-economic implications of expanding to the point of virtually reaching the size of the G20 - and without the collective west.
What unites the candidates above all is the possession of massive natural resources:
That's the imperative when it comes to designing a new resource-based reserve currency to bypass the US dollar.
Let's assume that it may take up to 2025 to have this new BRICS+ configuration up and running.
As it stands, BRICS account for 40 percent of the global population and 25 percent of GDP.
BRICS+ would congregate 4.257 billion people:
BRI embraces BRICS+
BRICS+ will be striving towards interconnection with a maze of institutions:
Then there are the close links of BRICS with a plethora of regional trade blocs:
...and last but not least the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the largest trade deal on the planet, which includes a majority of BRI partners.
BRICS+ and BRI is a match everywhere you look at it - from West Asia and Central Asia to the Southeast Asians (especially Indonesia and Thailand).
The multiplier effect will be key - as BRI members will be inevitably attracting more candidates for BRICS+.
This will inevitably lead to a second wave of BRICS+ hopefuls including, most certainly,
Meanwhile, the role of the BRICS's New Development Bank (NDB) as well as the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be enhanced,
All of the above barely sketches the width and depth of the geopolitical and geo-economic realignments further on down the road - affecting every nook and cranny of global trade and supply chain networks.
In the end, it's the G7 that may be isolated by the BRICS+ irresistible force...!
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