Is BRICS the Chinese NAM?

The recently concluded BRICS tamasha in South Africa is reminiscent of several such groups that the world has had since 1950. Only one of them has achieved the coherence needed to make a go of such groups: NATO.

The rest haven’t made any difference to anyone except a few bureaucrats in the foreign ministries of the countries involved and perhaps a handful of think tankers and journalists. Even the G20 thing is a lot of hogwash.

BRICS, a silly gimmicky name if ever there was one, has now been captured by China. This was to be expected. The combined GDPs of the others don’t add up to China’s GDP of $12 trillion. India comes a poor second at maybe $4 trillion. Russia, the other biggie, is now China’s vassal.

The trend towards forming such groups was started by the US after World War II when the former USSR started exporting communism backed by money and arms. The nuclear tests by it in 1950 — the US had done it in 1945 — lent urgency to the formation of anti-USSR groups. By 1954 there were NATO, SEATO and CENTO. The latter two turned out to be useless.

Not to be outdone, our own Jawaharlal Nehru came up with the idea of non-alignment. That was because there was the US on one side, and the USSR on the other.

Narendra Modi has just revived that non-alignment concept by calling the expanded BRICS a ‘non-western’ alliance. China wants to call it an anti-western alliance. The former is geography. The latter is geopolitics.

Following the US, USSR and Nehru, Xi Jingping has also formed other groups. The guy is a real copycat. But his groups are economic.

The most prominent of his copies is RCEP. India refused to join it. Now Xi is playing big bully with small countries that are economically inconsequential. RCEP without India is dead in the water.

India has actually also been quite an aggressive maker of groups that fail. SAARC and BIMSTEC are obvious examples. Now that Xi Jingping has taken over BRICS, he should be prepared for India to do to it what Pakistan did to SAARC, and Bangladesh did to BIMSTEC. Wreck it.

There’s a crucial difference, though. China has money. So it can buy influence, just as the US did when it was outbidding the USSR. But its money is rapidly dwindling. So BRICS will soon go the BRI way. Plop!

Another big difference between NAM and BRICS is that NAM was based on Nehru’s idealism. BRICS is based on China’s pragmatism. NAM was, at its core, a morality school. BRICS will now become a commodity trading hub, mostly for oil, metals and food.

Designed for failure

Given this history it is worth asking why big countries think they will succeed with new groups. The victory of ‘hope over experience’ is an obvious reason but that said, why don’t the big countries acknowledge that their very bigness is a problem?

Another reason is that the group has to be about something other than just money or ideals. NATO succeeded because it was designed as a military alliance. So did the Warsaw Pact.

But while the US and Western Europe didn’t have an economic alliance, the USSR formed the COMECON which was a big zero. China is making that same mistake again and again. It thinks a purely economic alliance like SAARC or BIMSTEC will work. Well, best of luck.

Privately India has always known that BRICS was just a lot of nonsense. I mean, look at the differences between the countries that it represents. And look again at the huge differences between those who will join it after expansion.

Homogeneity is a necessary condition for success, if not a sufficient one. The western hemisphere’s homogeneity has never been in doubt. They are white, Christian, democratic and capitalist.

What matters most is that they are white and Christian. They have the usual wrangles, of course, but in the end they are all the same. That’s what makes Russia making common cause with China a mystery. It’s probably a personal thing, just as Saudi Arabia making common cause with Iran is.

The leaders of these countries have personal grievances, with only the anti-US glue to bind them. It’s like Modi becoming anti-US because it didn’t give him a visa when he was chief minister.

Anyway, perhaps the best way to understand these groups is to see them as n-person games which will never attain the Nash equilibrium, in which no one has any reason to adopt a different strategy from the one they are following. India should ensure that there is always a reason for someone to change his or her strategy and thus deny China the advantage.