In the last few weeks, we have had two contrasting developments: There was the G7 Annual Summit in Italy in early June. This was a dismal affair marked by great disappointment on the part of centrist governments at the triumph of the far right in European Parliament elections and their confusion over what to do with Ukraine. More recently, the triumph of the far right in the snap elections in France and US President Biden’s spectacular meltdown in the debate with Donald Trump have pushed the West to the edge of panic.

In contrast, BRICs announced its expansion in a meeting in Russia. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) joined the group starting in this year, and some 42 other countries are slated to join the organization in the near future. There could be no greater contrast than that between a confident, expanding BRICS and a disoriented G7 desperately hanging on to preserve its monopoly over global economic decision making.

The BRICS’ confidence has contrasted not only with the despondency of the G 7 but also with the crisis of the multilateral economic institutions that the G 7 control, at the center of which are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While the BRICS institutions like the New Development Bank are relatively new and have a long way to go as development institutions, they hold a lot of promise for the global South, since the US and European governments have prevented real reform of the IMF and World Bank and continue to impose debt-creating and impoverishing structural adjustment policies. This is especially the case today, as so many countries are facing a new debt crisis.

What led to the crisis of the old order?

The emergence of the BRICs and their promise of a new world order must be seen in the light of several major developments over the last 25 years:

The US disastrous engagement in the Middle East that ended in the collapse in Afghanistan in 2021. The rise of China and its supplanting the US as the most dynamic economic powerhouse, resulting in China accounting for 28 per cent of global growth from 2013 to 2018. (In fact, by some measures, like Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), China is now the world’s biggest economy.) China is becoming an alternative source of investment and aid for developing countries, with the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative becoming a main avenue of Chinese engagement with the developing world.

But perhaps equally important as investment and aid it offers has been the model of state-led development that China provides, which is seen as far more attractive than the free-market-led neoliberal model the West offers. One cannot argue with success: a 10 percent average growth rate over thirty years; and the creation from nothing of over 37,900 kilometers of high-speed rail since the beginning of the 21st century, an engineering feat that contrasts with the US, which has only 730 kilometers.

China’s scientific advances

And one must not forget the achievements of Chinese science. On this, let me quote the Economist, which is a supporter of free-market economics and so cannot be accused of a pro-Chinese bias. “For centuries the West sniffed at Chinese technology. Self-regarding Europeans struggled to accept that such a far-flung place could possibly have invented the compass, the crossbow and the blast furnace. In recent decades, as China joined the world economy, its rapid catch-up and abuse of Western intellectual property meant that it was more often an imitator and a thief than an innovator. Meanwhile, its science was disparaged, partly because it encouraged researchers to churn out high volumes of poor-quality scientific papers.

“It is time to lay these old ideas to rest. China is now a leading scientific power. Its scientists produce some of the world’s best research, particularly in chemistry, physics and materials science. They contribute to more papers in prestigious journals than their colleagues from America and the European Union and they produce more work that is highly cited. Tsinghua and Zhejiang universities each carry out as much cutting-edge research as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Chinese laboratories contain some of the most advanced kits, from supercomputers and ultra-high-energy detectors to cryogenic electron microscopes. These do not yet match the crown jewels of Europe and America, but they are impressive. And China hosts a wealth of talent. Many researchers who studied or worked in the West have returned home. China is training scientists, too: more than twice as many of the world’s top AI researchers got their first degree in China as in America.”

I focus on China because its rise has been the key factor that has created the possibilities for a multipolar, deglobalized world by providing an alternative source of resources for the global South. This is not to deny that other countries have also contributed to this process of creating space for the global South. And this is also not to deny that China’s relations with the global South is problem-free.

The end of the post-post Cold War era

So are we finally on the way to a prosperous multipolar world? Not if the US can help it. Over the last eight years, Washington has shown, first under Trump and now under Biden, that it is not going to accept N°2 status. And that it is prepared to resist this fate by force if necessary. The US has declared that the Post-Post-Cold War era of relative harmony is over and has tagged China as the principal threat to its hegemony.

To stop China, it has created an anti-China alliance consisting of its Western European allies and itself. This is, for all intents and purposes,the same alliance that is currently confronting Russia in Ukraine. The US says it and its allies are fighting for democracy against authoritarianism. However, their aim, which is very transparent in the global South, is to preserve western global hegemony. Washington has also declared technological war on China, preventing its corporations from providing advanced chip technologies to Chinese firms.

Military containment

More distressing and alarming is the fact that the US has chosen to contain China by military means, a dimension where it enjoys absolute superiority over China. China is now surrounded by hundreds of US bases and facilities from South Korea to Japan to Okinawa to Guam to the Philippines, including the massive floating base off the China coast called the US Seventh Fleet. The latest additions to these bases are four more bases in the Philippines to the five in that country that the US already has. The purpose of this buildup is to make the Philippines a launching pad for the military containment of China.

The South China Sea is now filled with warships performing naval “exercises,” among the latest visitors being vessels from France and Germany, US allies that have been dragooned from NATO’s traditional area of coverage to contain China. US and Chinese ships have been known to play “chicken,” that is, heading for each other, then swerving at the last minute. A miscalculation of a few feet can result in a collision, which has the potential of escalating to a higher form of conflict since there are no rules of the game in this maritime Wild West. Fears that the South China Sea can be the next site of armed conflict after Ukraine and Gaza are not groundless.

Washington’s anti-China posture is now being expressed in militaristic terms by its generals. Particularly alarming has been the recent leaked memo from Gen. Mike Minihan, who leads the US Air Mobility Command, declaring, “My gut tells me [we] will fight in 2025.” Minihan, it bears noting, is not the first member of the US command to predict conflict with China in the near future. Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, said in October 2022 that the United States should prepare to fight China either sometime that year or in 2023. Even earlier, the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Philip Davidson, said that the Chinese threat to Taiwan would “manifest” in the next six years, by 2027.

Southeast Asian countries have been worried about the US military push to contain China, which has involved getting US allies like the Philippines, Japan, and South Korea to coordinate their defense strategies more closely with each other and with the US. Despite its differences with China, the secretary general of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Nguyen Phu Trong, has declared that assured Chinese President Xi Jinping that his government would continue to hew to its “Four Nos” approach to foreign policy in the region: that is, that Vietnam would not join military alliances; would not side with one country against another; would not give other countries permission to set up military bases or use its territory to carry out military activities against other countries; and would not use force—or threaten to use force—in international relations.”

There is that line in Gramsci’s writings that perfectly captures what the world is going through: ‘‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.’’ And there is that line in a poem about old age by the poet Dylan Thomas that I think captures the mood of the US as it sees its century-long hegemony challenged by the rise of China and the BRICS:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day,
Rage, rage against the dying of light.

The US is raging, desperately determined that the new world order must not come about. More than ever we need a global coalition of governments and civil society to ensure we get there without the world blowing up.

This article is based on a talk delivered by the author at a conference sponsored by Progressive International at the University of Campinas in Brazil in late June 2024.