'BRICS countries are saying "we have arrived and are rapidly growing"'

CGTN Europe

CGTN Europe spoke to a  US economist Jeffrey Sachs, who is also a public policy analyst and former senior United Nations adviser.

Transcript

00:00Jeffrey Sachs is an economist, public policy analyst, and a former senior UN advisor.

00:05Joining us now, Jeffrey, how important is BRICS?

00:10BRICS is very important.

00:12The BRICS countries, if you add their population, reach about 50 percent of the world.

00:20Compare that with the United States and the European Union,

00:23which added together have about 800 million people or 10 percent of the world population.

00:33So the show was run by that 10 percent for even for centuries, one could say,

00:39the North Atlantic countries, the European imperial powers, the United States after World War II.

00:46And what the BRICS countries are saying is, no, no, we have arrived.

00:51We are sophisticated. We are rapidly growing.

00:55We are in the technological forefront.

00:58And that 10 percent will no longer tell us or the rest of the world what to do.

01:04So this is the birth, certainly, of multipolarity, which means different poles of power.

01:12But importantly and very interestingly, the BRICS are saying they want more than multipolarity,

01:18different power structures and centers.

01:21They want multilateralism, which means truly a rule of law that applies to the United States, too,

01:29that applies to Europe, too, something that applies for all countries in the world,

01:34not just the ones that were formerly the dominated countries.

01:37We are just days away from Donald Trump's global tariff deadline that has rattled everyone.

01:44What is the influence of a group like BRICS?

01:46After all, it's not even a formal trading bloc like the EU.

01:48What can it do?

01:51Basically, Trump is making the case for the BRICS because Trump is not an isolationist.

01:58He's a complete unilateralist and he imagines the United States can do what it wants and threaten

02:06anybody and bomb when it wants to, can put on sanctions when it wants to, can put on tariffs

02:11when it wants to, irrespective of international law.

02:15Sanctions themselves have been declared year after year against international law by an overwhelming

02:21vote of the U.N.

02:22general assembly with the BRICS countries are saying is we want a rule of law, not the United

02:29States doing whatever it wants.

02:32So as Donald Trump takes these unilateral actions, it strengthens the case for the BRICS countries,

02:40which are now 10 in the core of the membership.

02:45Saudi Arabia is kind of in, not quite in.

02:49So it's 10 plus another 10 partners.

02:53And they're saying we want systematic rules that everybody obeys, including the former

03:04dominating countries.

03:06So it's interesting.

03:08Iran, which of course is one of the newer members of BRICS, has just recently been bombed

03:14by Israel and the United States.

03:15And while you're telling us about the growing power, really, of BRICS, how does BRICS help

03:24a country like Iran currently?

03:27Well, we saw that that was a very short, live, violent war, so-called 12 days.

03:36It was a war started with impunity, I have to say, by Israel, just unilaterally.

03:44The United States joined in.

03:45But it stopped quickly.

03:47And one of the reasons it stopped quickly was Iran was doing a lot of damage to Israel in

03:55its missile attacks.

03:57The fact of the matter is, no matter how much bombast one hears from Washington, Washington

04:03does not dominate anymore.

04:06And that's really what the BRICS are signifying.

04:10Iran had the strong diplomatic support of Russia and China.

04:16It had its own means to respond.

04:20That is a kind of deterrence.

04:22And in the end, this is why the BRICS signified the true balancing of what were the dominant

04:30powers of the world until the last 20 years or so.

04:34China, of course, is the world's second largest economy, the powerhouse, surely, economically

04:39in BRICS.

04:40What does China get from being a member?

04:43Well, first of all, China's larger than the U.S. economy.

04:46It measured at a common set of prices.

04:49So this is a technical detail.

04:51But when we talk about output measured at purchasing power parity, which the IMF, for

04:58example, reports, China is about 30 percent larger than the U.S. economy now in industrial

05:04production, far larger than the United States economy.

05:07But China knows that the U.S. doesn't like rivals.

05:13So the U.S. wants to gang up on China, wants to bring Europe into an anti-China coalition.

05:21Well, China's got lots of friends in the world because it is the main trading partner of more

05:25than 100 countries around the world.

05:28And the BRICS countries are partners with China.

05:31And as I've said, they constitute about half the world population.

05:35So the BRICS is a very helpful club for China, for Russia, for India, because it signifies

05:46their arrival as major powers in the world that aren't going to be dominated or pressured

05:53in the old fashioned way by Europe and the United States.

05:56Thank you so much for your insights.

05:58Jeffrey Sachs, an economist, public policy analyst and a former senior U.N. advisor.

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