[When the group’s leaders meet in New Delhi on Thursday, their biggest achievement will have been adding an S: they took on South Africa last year. The five BRICS nations still rank among the fastest-growing economies in the world, and, even if growth has slowed, individually, their global influence continues to rise. But they have struggled to find the common ground necessary to act as a unified geopolitical alliance.]
By Jim Yardley
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Saurabh Das/Associated Press
From left, President Dilma
Rousseff of Brazil, President Dmitri A.
Medvedev of Russia, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of
India,
President Hu Jintao of Chinaand President Jacob Zuma of South
Africa in New Delhi on Thursday.
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The new BRIC era has yet to arrive.
When the group’s leaders meet in New Delhi on
Thursday, their biggest achievement will have been adding an S: they took on South
Africa last year. The five BRICS nations still rank among the
fastest-growing economies in the world, and, even if growth has slowed,
individually, their global influence continues to rise. But they have struggled
to find the common ground necessary to act as a unified geopolitical alliance.
“The real issue for them is to come up with
agreed objectives, and also agree on common actions,” said Brahma Chellaney,
a foreign affairs analyst with the Centre for Policy
Research in New Delhi. “That is a tough nut.”
The BRICS are still a new group, and some analysts
argue that with time they could become a more cohesive alliance. But for now,
they are troubled by internal rivalries and contradictions that have stymied
the group’s ability to take any significant action toward a primary goal:
reforming Western-dominated international financial institutions.
Since its inception, the group has discussed
creating a development bank to rival the World Bank, and on Wednesday a Chinese
official expressed hope that a breakthrough might come this week. Yet to date
the proposal has been stalled, partly over worries that China would dominate
the new institution.
Last year, the five countries could not agree on
a new leader for the International Monetary Fund. Nor have they endorsed a
candidate to replace Robert B. Zoellick as head of the World Bank. (President
Obama recently proposed Jim Yong Kim, president of Dartmouth College.)
In other spheres, the group has been splintered.
National security and terrorism are common concerns, yet the members are not
always in alignment, the most recent division being Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
(Reports in the Indian news media this week indicated that the group might try
to carve out a joint position on Syria.) India is actively lobbying for a
permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, a move China has
resisted endorsing.
“It’s not a policy bloc at all,” said Yasheng Huang, a professor of global economics
and management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s really a
photo op. It is really this idea that the West is no longer or should no longer
be viewed as the only center of gravity.”
Deep internal political and economic differences
complicate the prospects for unity. India, Brazil and South Africa are
democracies and have already used their own separate trilateral group, IBSA, as
a primary platform for coordinating positions on several major diplomatic
issues.
Russia, however, has drifted away from democracy
toward strongman rule under Vladimir V. Putin. China is the world’s largest
authoritarian state and has by far the largest and most powerful economy in
BRICS, which creates a complicated dynamic. China is the heavyweight, and thus
the natural leader of the group, except that it is the political outlier.
As such, distrust is high between India and
China, whose border dispute, which goes back decades, is fueling a quiet
military buildup on both sides. The two countries differ sharply on Pakistan
and the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. Trade is growing
rapidly, but India complains that China has done too little to open its market
to Indian firms. China, meanwhile, is suspicious that India is pursuing a
containment policy, in league with the United States, through its diplomatic outreach
to East Asian nations like South Korea, Japan, Australia and Indonesia.
“The real story is there is a contradiction
between China and India,” said C.
Raja Mohan, a leading strategic affairs analyst in New Delhi. “As
long as you don’t solve that, what collective rhetoric you talk about will have
limited value.”
The BRICS alliance has existed as a concept
since 2001, when Jim O’Neill,
a Goldman Sachs economist, identified Brazil,
Russia, India and China as rising economic powers and argued that they should
play larger roles in global economic policymaking, perhaps by joining the
established Group of 7. Earlier, in the 1990s, Russia had already organized a
triangular group with India and China — known as RIC — but the attention
generated by Mr. O’Neill’s formulation apparently prompted these three to add
Brazil and create a new political club.
The first BRIC summit meeting was held in
Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009, amid the uncertainty of the global economic
downturn, with subsequent meetings held in Brazil and China. Last November, Mr.
O’Neill predicted that the group’s combined economies, now worth almost $13
trillion, would double in the coming decade, eventually surpassing the size of
the economies of both the United States and the European Union.
A consistent theme has been to push for changes
in the monetary system, including advocating an alternate global reserve
currency to reduce the dominance of the dollar. China in particular has used
the group as a platform to promote its currency, the renminbi,
as an international currency.
After arriving on Wednesday, leaders of the five
nations held bilateral talks before attending a state dinner. At Thursday’s
summit meeting, they are expected to announce agreements that would enable the
nations to extend each other credit in local currencies while conducting trade,
sidestepping the dollar, a substantive move if not yet the kind of
game-changing action once expected from BRICS.
Sreeram Chaulia, an
international affairs analyst in India, said many smaller, poorer developing
countries, especially in Africa, are watching to see if the five nations can
evolve into true advocates for non-Western interests or if BRICS merely becomes
a platform for the interests of a new elite.
“At the end of the day, they will have to get
into coordinating their positions on international security and global political
issues,” said Mr. Chaulia, who teaches at the Jindal School of International
Affairs in Sonipat, India. He said many developing countries want a multipolar
world, rather than one dominated by the United States “or, for that matter, by
China.”
Indeed, some analysts see BRICS mostly as an
annual meeting between China and its most important suppliers. Brazil, Russia
and South Africa all sell rising amounts of commodities to China. China lobbied
aggressively to include South Africa in the group at a time when state-owned
Chinese firms were buying up raw materials across Africa.
“I see BRICS as more about China trying to have
more ready access to commodities in Brazil and South Africa,” said Mr. Huang,
the M.I.T. economist, adding that the other countries were then trying to use
the group “to exercise influence on China.”
Finally, even though the group was conceived as
an alternative to American power, none of the five member nations are eager for
confrontation with the United States. As their leaders, including President Hu
Jintao of China, gather in New Delhi, the United States is also quietly in
town. Commerce Secretary John Bryson spoke at a business round table on
Tuesday, bringing along an American trade group to visit the vast industrial
corridor under construction between Mumbai and New Delhi.
“For all five of the BRICS countries,” said Mr.
Chellaney, “their most important relationship is with the United States.”
@ The New York Times
[A spokesman for the NATO-led International
Security Assistance Force, Master Sgt. Russell Bertke, said that the coalition
ran two close-air-support strikes against the attacking Taliban in support of
Afghan forces, but no civilians were killed. “Numerous insurgents were killed
and several vehicles and motorbikes were damaged or destroyed,” he said. The
incident was still under investigation, so authorities did not have information
about guards killed, he said.]
By Rod Nordland
And Jawad Sukhanyar
KABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO supply convoy came under heavy attack by Taliban
insurgents in western Afghanistan, with 37 dead reported in the firefight and
NATO airstrikes that ensued, Afghan officials said Thursday.
The victims included seven private security
guards with two firms guarding the convoy, according to an official at one of
the companies, plus two Afghan National Army soldiers and numerous Taliban.
Fayaz Jailani, the regional operations manager
for GFI Security, said the convoy came under attack late Wednesday night by 70
to 80 insurgents with heavy machine guns and other weapons, killing one guard
from his company and six from a second company protecting the convoy, Aria
Security. The victims were all Afghans, he said.
The attack took place in the Gulistani District
of Farah Province, and the convoy was en route from Herat Province to a NATO
base in Helmand Province, Mr. Jailani said.
The head of security for the Farah provincial
police, Muhammad Ghus Mayaar, said the fighting began Wednesday afternoon and
continued for eight hours, with 28 Taliban attackers killed by the time it
ended.
A spokesman for the NATO-led International
Security Assistance Force, Master Sgt. Russell Bertke, said that the coalition
ran two close-air-support strikes against the attacking Taliban in support of
Afghan forces, but no civilians were killed. “Numerous insurgents were killed
and several vehicles and motorbikes were damaged or destroyed,” he said. The
incident was still under investigation, so authorities did not have information
about guards killed, he said.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Qari Yousuf
Ahmadi, claimed that only five Taliban fighters had been killed by airstrikes,
and that the insurgents had killed 40 guards and Afghan soldiers guarding the
convoy.
“It was a major fight and difficult for
security guards who only have light weapons to resist a Taliban attack,” Mr.
Jailani said. “The Taliban are always stalking NATO convoys. Thank God that the
national army came and fought them.”
Also on Wednesday, two people were assassinated
because of government connections by unknown gunmen in Kandahar City, according
to Zalmai Ayoubi, the spokesman for the governor. One was an official of the
National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence service, and the
other was the father of a security guard in the governor’s office, Mr. Ayoubi
said.
Taimoor Shah contributed reporting from
Kandahar, Afghanistan.