Rise of BRICS Signals Decline of US as Unipolar Superpower

The BRICS summit in South Africa promises to be a milestone in the history of the group of emerging economies. Dr. Linwood Tauheed, associate professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, said it also marked the end of US hegemony.

The likely expansion of the BRICS group of nations is a sign that the developing world is rejecting Washington's demands for subservience, says a US economist.

The 15th BRICS summit will be held at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa's financial capital, from August 22 to 24, where leaders from the five leading emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa itself — will gather.

Western attempts to disrupt the meeting have had limited success. Russian president Vladimir Putin will attend by video link and be represented in person by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

That decision was taken after opposition groups threatened legal action enforce an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for his arrest over Ukrainian claims that Moscow was guilty of child trafficking for evacuating children from front-line areas of regions that voted in 2022 to join the Russian Federation.

Dr. Linwood Tauheed told Sputnik that Washington's ever-increasing unilateralism was a symptom of its declining hegemony as a unipolar superpower.

"This rule based order, that the US State Department is pushing forward, is intended to go outside of the already established United Nations structure and the structure of international law in general," he said. "That structure was becoming less and less able to be manipulated or controlled by the US. And so the US has attempted to create an alternative to international law and to the UN charter."

"If you can get countries to recognize that there is such a thing as a a rules based order, then there's no need for a UN. There's no need for the International Court," Tauheed stressed.

But most nations are unhappy with that paradigm — even including some of Washington's NATO allies.

"The question is who is making the rules? The US is making the rules. European countries are following those rules to their detriment," Tauheed said.

"The majority of the world is not following those rules and is looking for ways of of uniting and cooperating with each other," he continued. "We have the BRICS and we have the BRICS Plus, about 44 other countries are wanting to join the BRICS. They represent a majority of the world's production in terms of GDP."

Furthermore, the US is increasingly falling short of its post-Cold War goal of military 'Full Spectrum Dominance'. The economist noted that China had bolstered its military with a host of new arms and equipment.

"But their weapons are one-tenth the cost of the US weapons. The $850 billion US federal military budget is about 85 billion in China," Tauheed pointed out. "They get more 'bang for their buck'. They don't have a lot of waste, fraud and abuse and therefore they can get weapons created at a much lower cost."

At the same time, Beijing is playing the role of peace mediator around the world.

"The beginning of friendship again between Saudi Arabia and Iran was facilitated by the Chinese," Tauheed underlined. "The Chinese are not only flexing their muscles economically, but also diplomatically around the world, ending in the wars that the US could have stepped in and and ended, but instead fueled the fires."

In contrast to the US and its demands for all nations to adopt its model of government, BRICS is "open to cooperation with or with all countries, not just countries that are pursuing particular economic ideology," the academic said.

Ahead of the summit, Putin has written an article lauding decades of cooperation between Africa, the Russian Federation and its predecessor the USSR.

"South Africa's involvement in joining the BRICS is is emblematic of that," Tauheed said. "South Africa was was was helped in its struggle by Russia, either directly or through Russia's support of Cuba. Cuba providing not only soldiers in the struggle, but also social, medical and other kinds of other kinds of aid."

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