Malaysia to Join BRICS

> Curious to see how the ocean dispute will play into this

India and China were shooting at each other over long-disputed borders a few years ago. BRICS was never a security pact. (To the extent it means anything, it’s analogous to the OECD.)

Hell, it’s easier for me in America to do business with either China or India than it is for them to do business with each other.

Former Malysia PM Dr Mahathir Mohamad wrote the following on Twitter on the Ukraine war:

https://twitter.com/chedetofficial/status/162898188067786342...

In particular the follow up (European's love of war) is hilarious and not an uncommon view in that part of the world.

David Frum being a writer for a US magazine, it seems perhaps worth taking his snickering with a grain of salt.

That is one demented way of looking at it.

i wonder what he said about Malaysia then.

Yeah well, he is an ultra-Neocon and the Neocons said the Ukraine war would not happen (when even Zelensky pleaded for more caution at the 2022 Munich "peace" conference!). Then it did happen, which is probably what they wanted.

Coming from a very pro-Israel guy like Frum that looks more like endorsement for Malaysia having done the right thing.

Also, it is high time for the US Coastal Elites to realise that they're losing the game, and they're losing the game globally, so unless they change their strategy they're going to be in for a hard time in 10-15-20 years, because at some point the money will stop flowing in.

I disagree with that interpretation.

BRICS expansion has essentially blunted it, as every expansion require unanimous support of [edir: the founding] all 5 members.

There's a reason Turkey (opposition from India due to it's military support for Pakistan) and Bangladesh (opposition from China due to Sheikh Hasina's dependence on India for sanction relief) weren't accepted.

Every state that has been accepted in the expansion is a state that has strong economic ties to both China and India, thus canceling out any potential bias.

- UAE's 1st and 2nd largest trade partners are China and India

- KSA's 1st and 2nd largest trade partners are China and India

- Ethiopia's 1st and 2nd largest partners are China and India.

- China is Egypt's largest import market, but India is one of Egypt's largest export market and is Egypt's credit guaranteer.

The addition of Malaysia follows this pattern as well.

BRICS has become as meaningless as APEC, because India ended up doing the same thing that China did to APEC in the 90s when Jiang Zemin unilaterally declared it cannot be a Community like the EC.

As a long as India & Brazil in the group, China can't turn it into an anti-western group without a doubt.

America should take QUAD to the next level ASAP

>It isn’t explicitly anti-American yet.

It is certainly not pro-petrodollar.

Which, given the blood the petrodollar spills, is probably a good thing for billions of people to get behind.

BRICS is something which people seem to have strong feelings about. For india and china who are rivals, BRICS may offer mechanics which enable them to manage their rivalies, especially given what may be seen as the declining influence of the UN (have people noticed that the massive moon landing India is not even a security council member!).

You forget that the EU also started pretty loose and took a while to get going.

This is rapidly turning into a collection of everyone that isn’t strongly west aligned. While it seems directionless for now they do have that in common.

Don’t think it’s safe to dismiss it given direction of travel

It's crazy that a journalistic expression became a real organization thing, and now journalists treat it as if it meant something.

Joining BRICS is akin to joining the "third world": joining it means nothing and even the original meaning it was supposed to represent has long been lost and forgotten.

> So what is this BRICS club exactly

It's called "blunting".

The best way to undermine alliances is to be a part of them and undermine consensus.

China did this to APEC in the 1990s and the WTO in the 2000s, and India is doing the same in BRICS and SCO.

Because this is a zero-sum competition, this means if one is a member of an alliance, the other needs to join as well to blunt their relative advantage.

> Yep it's still the only currency that matters.

That's what the US govt thought when it sanctioned Russia. It only resulted in Russia falling back to their local currency without any significant problems, while making the rest of the world wary of reliance on the US dollar

BRICS is just a rebrand of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_powers

People don’t “hate” the BRICS.

Take away Western purchases of Russian gas for 2 decades and Russia collapses. Take away the encouragement of outsourcing manufacturing from the West to China since the 1980s and the Chinese miracle never happens.

People laugh at BRICS because the BRICS is a joke.

- Brazil is relatively stable but is a largely globally meaningless nation which does little more than export tourism and the Amazon. It’s highly replaceable in the world order.

- Russia is on the verge of collapse. Their strength lay in the appearance of their military strength. But they’ve struggled to defeat a country which didn’t have a military a decade ago and the modern 21st century technology whose sales they’re depending on is failing against Cold War NATO leftovers. They do have natural resources and could have spent the next few decades getting massively rich off selling gas to Germany but they killed that golden goose by starting a land war in Europe.

- India is a country with extremely high potential. Lots of people, enough educated people, etc. However, politics is a disaster, and environmental issues are crushing India. Yet India is poised to take off but their entire growth is based on trading and integrating with the West and yet India keeps ideologically resisting that like it has for half a century and instead aligning with BRICS, whose largest member China is currently fighting a territorial war with India and Indian companies cannot import products and have Chinese websites are banned in India and vice versa.

- China is a one of a kind country. Ridiculously strong manufacturing, extremely capable citizenry, etc. But China is fighting with every neighbor. No one trusts them. Least of all their fellow BRICS member India. And they’re facing a demographic timebomb and despite their economic successes people would much rather emigrate from China than immigrate to it. That’s not a recipe for success a decade+ down the line.

- South Africa is a basket case of an economy. And their politics just got worse. South Africa can enter the conversation when their government becomes capable of delivering widely available drinking water to their population and not have people thirsty because of political corruption.

Because member states like China and Russia are illiberal and left to their own devices pose a risk to global security and human rights. When these illiberal countries band together, the West loses economic and political leverage over them to change their ways.

> Why do Westerners hate the idea of BRICS so much?

Goldman Sachs coined the term BRICS. If the institution worked, we’d see Western finance rushing to join it.

Nobody hates BRICS. It’s just sort of pathetic. As a security consortium, it’s a failure. As a trade consortium, it’s a failure. It talks about a dollar alternative, yet when Russia needed one China and India reverted to their own currencies.

It’s a dumb idea that made sense when Russia could balance India and China. That balance has failed. There isn’t a unified global south.

The article notes that already Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and UAE have joined. So the acronym for now will just remain the original countries I guess. :)

I prefer BRIMSC, that way you hear all the letters.

That's not what the BRICs are best known for; Brazil, Russia, India and China are all best known for being emerging super powers.

I see plenty to disagree with here -- from conflating the 'richest' with the 'most talented' to odd use of parenthesis and quotation marks to conflating brain drain with the flight of capital. Brain drain refers to people with real accomplishments or potential in academia, science, entrepreneurship etc. who aren't necessarily rich.

It happens in EU too

The demographic composition of intra-EU migrants by nationality has remained broadly unchanged: Romanians make up the largest group, accounting for 27 per cent of intra-EU migrants, followed by Poles (12 per cent) and Italians (10 per cent). The main “contributors” to this exodus are the economic powerhouses – Germany and Luxembourg in the EU, but also Switzerland

Note that this already happens to Malaysia. It won’t get better or worse by joining BRICS.

More Western arrogance from people who can't even spell losing. It is so over.

> […] ("Brain drain").

Also: windows (in the case of Russia).

Why do you think they have forgotten? There has never been much of any brotherhood between Islamic nations. Even within Islamic nations, there's usually no brotherhood between classes or between clans.

And the same is sadly true for most cases where you'd expect some global brotherhood.