00:00Welcome, Eduardo, to From the South, once more.
00:04Thank you very much for the invitation. Really glad to be here.
00:07Eduardo, this BRICS Little Summit is taking place in a context of geopolitical turbulence, we can say.
00:13So how important is, what does it represent, the growing strength of the BRICS in terms of the distribution of
00:20power in the world right now?
00:23Well, I would say that, first of all, maintaining the BRICS unity is itself very politically significant.
00:31We know that one of the major outcomes of this summit is that the BRICS countries managed to reach an
00:39unanimous declaration, the New Delhi Declaration.
00:42This is very significant because we know that they managed to reach this declaration, despite the very significant political differences
00:51among them.
00:52We know that the BRICS are not a military alliance, it's not an ideological bloc against the Western world.
01:01And we know that a lot of the countries in the BRICS have very different foreign policies and sometimes even
01:09contradictory interests.
01:10So, in a certain way, managing to have a declaration, managing to maintain unity, is itself a very significant message.
01:22We know that the axes of this declaration are built around sovereignty, around the opposition of the unilateral coercion,
01:33like financial coercion, economic coercion, which is one of the main axes of war tensions today.
01:44There was also a very important message around the need of reforming global governance in the UN, in the EMF,
01:52in very different international institutions.
01:57In terms of the UN, in terms of the UN, in terms of economic growth, in terms of trade, is
02:09much bigger than it was decades ago.
02:12So, the global governance needs to reflect that change.
02:16There were many issues that were treated, and I would say that mainly one of the biggest and the most
02:24important ones was this challenging of the unilateral power of economic coercion.
02:30We can have a lot of interpretations also of how this was framed in the context of the Iranian war
02:39against the U.S. and Israel,
02:42where this unilateral economic coercion has been deployed in a very concerning way.
02:49But this is not only against Iran.
02:52We have seen this against Russia.
02:54We have seen this in this moment.
02:56We are seeing a very critical dynamic around this unilateral economic coercion against Cuba,
03:02which is provoking a huge humanitarian crisis.
03:06So, in a certain way, this summit of the BRICS countries has been pushing towards more and more the framing
03:15of a multilateral world,
03:18which is not a union against the Western world.
03:22It is a union that is positioning the need of international law, disposition in the need of do not allowing
03:30that one country or very few countries in the Western world
03:34could have this power to violate international law and try to impose their will upon other countries.
03:44Eduardo, as you were saying, one of the key elements is that BRICS continues to maintain its unity.
03:49And we see this because when you see the members of BRICS, there are different political positions, different interests, different
03:55cultures even.
03:57So, how has BRICS managed to achieve this to maintain the unity of the bloc?
04:01And also, how it will represent going forward to this new international model that is trying to be built?
04:09Well, I do believe that even if there are many confrontations and different ideological and political differences inside the BRICS,
04:18what is uniting this organization right now, this alliance, is the fact that all of the members know that a
04:28world which is being ruled by just a few Western countries,
04:34a world where countries like the United States, because of the hegemonic power of the dollar,
04:42because of its willing to impose their interest to other countries by weapons, by the war,
04:52is not a world that is benefiting any of the BRICS countries.
04:58We know that it's not in the benefit of any of those countries,
05:02even if they could have some contradictory interests between them,
05:07having a unique world-ruling hyper-concentrated power in the United States with very few Western allies
05:20is not something that can be positive for the country and for the people of those countries.
05:27So, even if there is this big difference, we can say that there are two things.
05:32The first is the fact that this multilateral world is emerging,
05:38not only because of political willingness of some presidents or some governments that have started to build alliances.
05:48In fact, there is a material reality, an economic reality behind that,
05:53and this reality is the fact that many of the production of the Western world
05:59has already been delocalized to other continents.
06:04The hegemonic power of the United States that was uncontested decades ago today
06:11is clearly diminished against the productive power of China, for example, India,
06:20the energetic strategic power that Russia has in the world, for example.
06:26And this, even if there was not the BRICS, this is a historical shift in the world which has a
06:34material basis.
06:35Now the BRICS are trying to translate this material shift into a political shift
06:42because when this material shift started, the United States, seeing themselves losing this power,
06:51started to try to impose a countermeasure to the advancement of this new material world.
06:59And this goes through the tools of the United States have,
07:05which is today is war, is economic warfare, economic coercion, weapons, the military industry,
07:14and that's what is putting in risk all the people in the world right now.
07:18So that's why the BRICS are trying to translate this material shift,
07:23which is a productive and economic shift, into a political shift
07:27to try to diminish the risk for all the people in the world of war,
07:33of economic tensions that could lead to, some say, even a third world war
07:42that could be happening if the United States continue this strategy of militarization to impose their will.
07:50You've made reference on several occasions on the topic of economic pressure,
07:55and we can see that reflected in the unilateral illegal sanctions that Western nations impose on many global South nations.
08:02And this gives rise to one of the main topics of discussion as well that we can see within BRICS,
08:07which is the creation of alternative payment methods,
08:10and also the possibility of trading among member states between their local currencies.
08:16If this were a shift, if this were created in a platform or in some other way that is concrete,
08:22how powerful would this be for the disruption of power,
08:25since it takes away the power of the sanctions from the U.S. dollars that Western nations,
08:31especially the United States, impose on the world?
08:35Well, something that's very interesting here is that right now the BRICS are not, for example,
08:41discussing a BRICS currency.
08:44In fact, what they are pushing is something which is more structural,
08:48which is a gradual shift to another economic and financial infrastructure
08:55that could allow international trade, for example, between national currencies.
09:03Today, we all know that the dollarization of our financial system
09:07imposes a lot of the trade between countries that have nothing to do with the United States
09:15to go through the dollar system.
09:18So today, what the BRICS are pushing forward and what they are building
09:23is exactly the possibility to make a real trade exchange between two countries
09:30happening between their own currencies without having to go through any intermediary,
09:38and in this case, the monopolic power of the U.S. dollar.
09:43What is interesting here is that we are seeing in a certain way
09:48this advancement of the understanding that an economic shift in the material world
09:57has already been happening.
10:00As I was saying, the productive decentralization of the world to the Asian world, for example,
10:09the production of some of the most important minerals of the world that are in this moment
10:17being the basis for the new technologies are placed in Africa, are placed in Latin America.
10:23And the fact of trying to build another economic system that can allow any country
10:30to exchange in their own national currencies is exactly the idea of translating this productive reality
10:41into a financial reality that can, in a certain way, take out the economic power
10:49of the monopoly of this exchange that was being built around the U.S. dollar.
10:57Now, the tension is going to be that we are already seeing the U.S. threatening a lot of countries
11:06of doing this kind of advancement.
11:09We have seen that very clearly in the Middle East.
11:12We have seen that, for example, in the case of Cuba, where a lot of countries
11:16are being not only punished or threatened if they want to make any material trade
11:26with the Caribbean island, but it is also a military threat that is being held.
11:34So, obviously, this is a very big step around taking out this economic war instrument of the U.S. dollar.
11:47The big question is going to be what is going to be the answer,
11:50because the United States has already shown that they are ready to translate this pressure
11:56into a war pressure, where it is the weapons that are speaking,
12:02and not only economic instructions, let's say.
12:07Thank you, Eduardo, for all your information and inputs here from the South
12:11during this important leader summit of the BRICS in India.
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