We are facing a new stage, the inauguration of a new long cycle of economic development, intracapitalist dispute and possibilities for growth or stagnation in the redesign of world hegemony.
Driven by China and supported by India and Russia, the integrated Asian economy is the engine of world expansion, seriously threatening Western power, still led by the United States.
In Latin America, the paradox is even greater.
Our regional economies (states, departments and provinces, subnational governments in general) are more linked and dependent on China (and India as well) than on the US.
In terms of financial flow and the settlement of contracts, the dollar continues to be the current currency for both world trade, stability and the funds that provide public finances.
If the dollar decreases in use as an international currency, the Empire loses one of its bases for exercising power – perhaps the most relevant one.
This possibility, of loss of power of the US currency and the growth of BRICS relations with Latin American countries, is the object of this article.
Strengths and internal weaknesses
The Summit of South American Countries, held in Brazil on May 30, 2023, resulted in the formal resumption of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), founded in May 2008, more than a year before the coup d’état in Honduras, which inaugurates the era of lawfare on our continent).
The even more expanded version of UNASUR is CELAC (founded in December 2011, less than one year before the coup against Fernando Lugo in Paraguay), the Community of Latin American States, the broader umbrella of intracontinental relations and which reflect a strategic projection of our National States.
In January of the same year, the 7th CELAC Conference in Buenos Aires marked the return of Brazil for the assembly of this great alliance.
Not by chance, the next event was a meeting between CELAC and the European Union (3rd Summit, in Brussels, July 2023), whose conditions for an alliance, an agreement between blocs, are quite invasive.
It is for this reason that the tangible agreement between Mercosur and the Unified Europe (in the euro zone) did not proceed, considering the demand from Brussels and the European Executive Commission (the unelected de facto government based on the financial power of Frankfurt) to that the countries of the Southern Cone would open up “government purchases” to external suppliers, generating with this measure – if accepted – more unemployment and loss of industries and systemists.
At the 15th BRICS Summit, held in August in Johannesburg (South Africa), an important step was taken, with the endorsement of Argentina’s entry into the bloc (as well as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia and Iran).
Starting in January, the economic alliance will bring together three giants in food production, Brazil, Argentina and Russia (in that order), as well as leaders in oil production and the two engines of the world economy, China and India.
The dimension of what is to come, with non-dollarized financial transactions within the bloc, implies a rigorous analysis.
In the medium-term perspective, the probable results indicate that CELAC can gain momentum with the Union of Southern Countries (UNASUR), the latter with Mercosur, and everything depends on the international projection of Brazil and its strategic ally, the Argentine Republic (under direct threat from the western extreme right to influence his electoral process).
All the calculations of the Lula government imply bringing the future president of the Casa Rosada along, but Brasilia knows that this may not happen and needs a constant policy to promote heavy engineering in Africa (as is happening again through the BNDES in Angola).
On the internal front, in both countries, the situation is delicate.
The pathetic and anti-economic destructive propaganda of neo-fascism operating in Brazil implies that the “productive solution” is the application of the Chilean line (Pinochetism) on a large scale, deepening the primarization of our countries, like huge farms and post-colonial mines, selling grain and ores until the end of time.
In Argentina the preaching of economic suicide is the same.
Therefore, everything that comes in the opposite direction is encouraging, even more so if the economic alliance does not imply interventions in public finances (such as the IMF) or in domestic politics.
In the latter case, the Bolsonaro family and Zionism are at the forefront, projecting the neo-fascist and ultraliberal alliance, through entities such as the Conservative Congress, CPAC, and other outgrowths.
The Vladivostok Economic Forum and the rapprochement with the BRICS
While the United States projects more moralistic discourses, or else exports structural disinformation through dissemination devices commanded by people like Donald Trump or Steve Bannon, economic policies aimed at international partnerships are the strong point of the BRICS member countries.
Such is the case of an important event that will take place precisely in Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, right on the coast of the Asian Pacific and geographically close to the Korean Peninsula.
According to the event’s official page, the 8th East Economic Forum 2023 will take place from September 10 to 13, 2023 in Vladivostok, on the campus of the Federal University of the Far East (FEFU).
According to its organizers: “The Far East Economic Forum is a key international platform for establishing and strengthening ties within the Russian and global investment communities, and for a comprehensive expert assessment of the economic potential of the Russian Far East, the investment opportunities it offers and business conditions in the advanced special economic scope zones”.
The possible – probable – of recent developments and the impact of their results on the BRICS Conference’s importance of the forum in strengthening Russian relations with Latin American countries can be located in this specific part of the event and in the program.
If we observe the central program , in addition to the various opportunities opened up with the debates and possible investments or expansion in a “virtuous cycle” type, we have the following parts directly linked to the BRICS – which expands the space for Latin American countries – starting from the leadership of Brazil and from January 2024, of Argentina.
The meeting in Vladivostok not by chance starts on the same day that the annual G20 meeting ends, in New Delhi, India.
Let’s see what the Forum presents:
- Oil and gas refining: an engine of economic growth.
- Agro and Biotechnology: How to Feed 8 Billion People?
- From molecule to product: the development of deep processing chains of raw materials (focusing on the production of polymers).
- Global Challenges of the Green Agenda: Resilience Test and a Catalyst for Cooperation among BRICS Countries.
- A new political and economic model for the world.
- Maritime Logistics: Strategies for Exponential Growth.
- The World Ocean: Global Opportunities for the Russian Fleet.
- EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia) and BRICS: role in the formation of a new multipolar world.
- Rail Logistics in a New Era: Realities, Challenges and Opportunities.
- Industrial Clusters: The Path to Technological Sovereignty.
A global alternative to Western dominance: the designs and contours of the future
The above topics form a considerable part of the Vladivostok Economic Forum, specifically those issues and debates that transcend Far East integration policies and initiatives and can generate the surplus of power needed to intervene with the BRICS and through them (including new members).
The part of the event’s program specifically related to the BRICS – and, in a broader sense, to Latin America – concerns the urbanization of the megacities of the Global South and Latin American urban areas.
Crossing the financing lines of the New Development Bank (NDB, the Bank of the BRICS) and the needs of living in more sustainable cities, less polluted and polluting, the Forum has in its programming focused on the following:
“The main challenges and the modernization of legislation in the sphere of integrated territorial development, master planning and development of cooperation with BRICS countries will be discussed by participants in the plenary session of the international discussion platform Roscongress Urban Hub at the 8th Eastern Economic Forum to be held from 10 to 13 September in Vladivostok… The EEF is organized by the Roscongress Foundation”.
The Roscongress Foundation has as one of its projects the “Roscongress Urban Hub, an international discussion platform dedicated to the development of research and business cooperation in urban development.
The international partnership is based on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN’s New Urban Agenda.
It was designed to become an intellectual hub for innovative ideas in the urban economy.
The platform opened as part of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in 2023”.
On this same portal we wrote about the São Petersburg Forum and its fruitful effort to bring economic closer to African countries and the African Union itself, through the partnership with Afreximbank (African Export-Import Bank).
Nothing is by chance; The temporality and concomitance of the advance of a new internal hegemony and alliance with Russia in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the Sahel (with an emphasis on Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger) are no coincidence.
Considering the Chinese and Russian cooperation that are advancing on the African continent, and the concrete possibility that the hegemony of the West will be relegated to the background, it seems obvious to us that the projection of US power over Latin America will not fail to affect or operate to not admit this loss.
BRICS and the end of dollar hegemony?
Economics professor Paul Craig Roberts has held key posts in US administration, but as an academic he has studied economic planning on the Soviet model, international political economy, and the relationship between foreign policy and domestic economics.
His considerations regarding the loss of hegemony of the US dollar and the inflationary implications for the concrete society of the still Superpower are directly related to the fate of Latin America.
The non-dollar oil account could be the way out of funding the US Treasury by subordinating entire countries. Let’s see:
Saudi Arabia announced the end of the petrodollar when it began accepting payment for oil in other currencies.
The BRICS are trying to somehow trade with each other without resorting to the US dollar, which effectively ends the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency.
What this means for Washington is that the US will start to have problems financing its large budget and trade deficits.
While the dollar was the world’s currency, foreign central banks held their reserves in US Treasury debt.
As US budget and trade deficits increased, so did the reserves of the world banking system.
The situation will change if a dozen countries that make up about half of the world’s population and 40-45% of the world’s GDP stop using the dollar, the foreign central bank market for US debt shrinks considerably.
Having outsourced its production, the US is dependent on imports.
The decrease in the use of the dollar means a decrease in the supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the exchange value of the dollar and the prospect of rising inflation due to rising import prices.
Can we already measure the loss of US influence in Latin America?
This is the key question… It is possible to scale Washington’s loss of influence over the de facto powers in our societies?
The paradox is the size of the challenge.
On the one hand, economic relations are increasingly turning towards the Asian axis, therefore, closer to the BRICS.
On the other hand, in social relations and opinion production and circulating preferences, our societies are molded in a subordinate way to the United States.
There are several similarities: precarious work, a financialized economy, an absurd business power, the Zionist lobby side by side with neo-Pentecostal Zionism, a cultural war facing a timid and emptied progressivism, as well as the distance that is noticed with Asia and Africa.
Latin America must and can seek its (our) own path of development, without necessarily imitating the political systems of the new partners.
But for that, it will always be necessary to defeat the internal enemy, more concerned with its own income and the subaltern post-colonial condition, than venturing to dispute power in the International System.
This is the challenge of the present time, in the “long 21st century”.
The original article here
