Lydia Polgreen: We’ve just had a glimpse of the world to come

Last week at a lavish global summit in the Russian city of Kazan, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, once a darling of the West — winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and formerly a staunch ally of the United States — spoke up to heap praise on his host: Vladimir Putin, the bête noire of the rules-based order.

“Allow me to congratulate you on maintaining economic resilience during a difficult period,” Abiy cooed. “This period was not easy for Russia, but under your leadership you have succeeded to maintain the economic resilience which might be exemplary for most of us.”

This might sound to an untrained ear like the kind of empty flattery typically offered at a talking shop of global leaders. But to me, it was a telling bit of theater that hints at the dangerous crossroads at which a world riven by inequality and beset by endless crises finds itself. It was a glimpse of the world to come and how the shifting balance of global power increasingly eludes the West’s grasp.

Abiy is an ambitious nation builder who presides over one of Africa’s fastest-growing economies. He is also increasingly at odds with the West, and his mention of Russian resilience in the face of very tough sanctions was a not-so-subtle shot across the bow. Should the West seek to contain Abiy’s aggressive moves in his strategically vital neighborhood, Abiy’s country has an ally and role model in Putin’s Russia.

Abiy was speaking at the annual summit of the BRICS nations, the largest gathering of world leaders in Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The pomp-filled event was meant to project to the West that its attempt at isolating Putin as punishment for his invasion of Ukraine had failed.

Surrounded by the leaders of some three dozen nations, Putin looked like the cat who ate the canary — a man who reportedly has the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, on something close to speed-dial and has reportedly had private phone calls with the past and possibly future president of the United States, Donald Trump. The secretary-general of the United Nations attended as well, raising eyebrows as he made his first visit to Russia in more than two years. In a news conference at the end of the summit, Putin indulged in some digs at his Western tormentors.

“As you can observe, we continue to live and work normally, and our economy is developing,” he said, trotting out Russia’s growth stats, which the International Monetary Fund says will outstrip other developed economies’ this year. For that he can thank, in no small part, the deals that it has inked with fellow BRICS members, most especially India and China, two of the world’s top three oil importers and a crucial source of trade for Russia in the face of sanctions.

Good luck, Putin seemed to say, with your rules-based order. My friends and I are building a different future.

It was a long way from the first summit of the BRICs, the euphonious acronym coined by Goldman Sachs for the rising beneficiaries and shapers of an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. These powers — Brazil, Russia, India and China, with South Africa added later — first came together in 2009 amid the global financial crisis to ask for a share of power from the Western-dominated world order commensurate with their increasing economic and geopolitical strength. At the time, for most of the powers involved, this was an urgent but relatively friendly set of demands.

The West, for its part, seemed ready to welcome these changes, albeit on its timetable and terms. “There was also always a consensus that multipolarity was both inevitable and desirable, that this wouldn’t really lead to a breakup of the system,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian-German political scientist and expert on the BRICS alliance. “There was no talk of a new Cold War.”

Fifteen years later, the world looks very different. War, pandemic, the climate crisis and more have ravaged the globe. The lift-all-boats-through-globalization ethos of the period at the end of the Cold War is long gone, replaced in many parts of the world by a stark return to an inward-looking nationalism driven by zero-sum self-interest.

In the midst of this turmoil, the demand for reform has gone largely unanswered. The U.S. dollar remains the dominant currency of global trade, and the Group of 7 wealthy, developed economies, if anything, play an even bigger role in shaping the global economy, much to the chagrin of poorer countries. The powerful global financial institutions that hold sway over the lives of billions of people, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, have continued their tradition of being led by Europe and the United States. The institutions created toward the end of World War II that helped ensure global peace remain dominated by the West.

Russia and China, meanwhile, have moved sharply away from the West and joined forces in powerful ways, seeking to unite the developing world against a recalcitrant Western hegemony that makes little room for others to rise. They claim to speak for the “global majority,” a term Putin has begun to use quite liberally of late, though in his case it is clearly a matter of opportunism rather than solidarity.

But he is tapping into a very real set of resentments that I have been hearing about with increasing anger and frustration from leaders, scholars and ordinary people across the global south. They hear from the global north a clear set of messages directed at the poor world: Do not cross our borders. Trade on our terms. (Forget globalization; we’re going to focus on building at home.) Help shoulder the burden of reducing emissions and don’t expect much assistance dealing with climate change despite the fact that we historically caused almost all of the damage. Stand with us on the sovereignty of Ukraine and on condemning Russian indifference to civilian casualties. Listen to our lectures about human rights, democracy and international law, but do not question our support for Israel’s blood-soaked war in the Gaza Strip.

There are, of course, nuances and counterarguments to these perceptions. But it is hard to deny the fundamental truth that the global balance of power does not reflect the actual shape of economic and political might or even tilt toward the inevitable direction of travel of that power — South and East — in the decades to come.

And so it was against this backdrop that Putin gathered the members of the BRICS bloc — newly expanded with Egypt, Iran and the United Arab Emirates in addition to Ethiopia, as well as many aspiring countries, notably Turkey, which is a member of NATO and a one-time aspirant to European Union membership.

It is, to be sure, a rather motley bunch of countries whose interests are varied and quite often at odds. For some new members and aspirants, like Iran and Venezuela, the attraction is clearly to join and perhaps seek protection within China and Russia’s anti-Western axis. But its original members are divided on what the alliance is for. For a couple of the most powerful among the players, the goal is to hedge, to find advantage in whatever arena you can and to remind the West that you have other options.

For all its talk about creating alternative institutions to those dominated by the West, BRICS has made little progress. Its development bank, meant to compete with the World Bank, is relatively tiny. It is no closer to creating an alternative currency to the dollar, though local currency trades among members are on the rise.

India, Brazil and South Africa reject the explicit anti-Western tilt and seek a more flexible, multilateral approach. India of course has long had a deep geostrategic rivalry with China. Their disputed Himalayan border is a dangerous nuclear flashpoint, though on the eve of the summit they reached an agreement that will ease tensions for now. Still, the two countries are in a pitched battle to be the preeminent power in Asia. India is the world’s most populous country and has its fastest-growing large economy, and it has a long tradition of charting its own multilateral course in world affairs, cognizant of its power to shape events.

Watching the summit unfold from afar, it seemed less an effort to lead the world in a new direction than to further weaken the powers leading the current order by playing up the selfishness and hypocrisy of its leaders. The Gaza crisis in particular offered considerable fodder for autocrats like Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who stole his last election and whose violent rule has propelled a fifth of Venezuelans to flee the country, and Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, who smothered his country’s nascent democracy with a coup in 2013. But their cynical opportunism doesn’t lessen the charge of Western double-dealing.

Which brings me back to Ethiopia, a country intimately acquainted with the West’s inconstancy to its own stated principles. In 1935, fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia, one of the only countries in Africa never to be colonized. Ethiopia’s leader, Emperor Haile Selassie, sought the support and protection of the League of Nations, the forerunner to the United Nations.

“Should it happen that a strong government finds it may with impunity destroy a weak people, then the hour strikes for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom,” he declared in a speech before the assembled leaders. “God and history will remember your judgment.”

His plea fell on deaf ears. The league’s failure to protect Ethiopia helped speed the march to a devastating world war. Selassie was right: History did indeed remember the League of Nations’ judgment, and not very kindly.

It might seem ironic that Abiy in his remarks was aligning himself with the aggressor in a contemporary conflict that poses a similar threat to the current global order. But Abiy, like Putin, is an avid student of his country’s imperial history. If Selassie pleaded with the strong to protect the weak, Abiy seems determined not to be weak in the first place.

And yet I do not believe that Ethiopia wants to be on the side of pariahs. It is one thing to complain about the dollar and high interest rates, or roll your eyes at lectures on democracy and human rights from a West that seems either willfully blind to its own double standards or too arrogant to realize it no longer has enough power to carry off its hypocrisy. But I suspect that few of these nations, home to almost half of humanity, would willingly sever themselves from the existing world order in favor of one dominated by China, an economic and strategic superpower in the making, and its junior partner, Russia.

The good news is that there is still time to change the existing order and plenty of important partners willing to engage in that effort. In a few weeks the Group of 20, a club of the world’s biggest economies, will be meeting in Brazil. Many of the leaders who gathered in Kazan will descend on Rio de Janeiro along with other rising powers of the global south, to meet on more even ground with the big powers of the global north.

One leader who won’t be there is Putin: He faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, a battered but enduring symbol of the rules-based order and its aspiration, however imperfectly, to build a more just world. It is hard to imagine a more apt moment, in his absence, for the West to seize the opportunity and begin, genuinely, to cede power to the rest.

Lydia Polgreen writes for the New York Times.