By: Atul Aneja
After more than seven months in office, it is clear that US President Donald Trump has decided to mount a full-blown assault on the emerging economies, chiefly targeting three of its heavyweights–China, India and Russia.
All three countries pillar the BRICS–the emerging economy grouping that has seven other constituents including founding members Brazil and South Africa.
India has been the latest victim of Trump’s mercurial angst.
On July 31, the American President slapped a 25 per cent tariff on India, apart from an unspecified penalty for buying Russian oil and military hardware.
Trump also hit out at India for being a part of BRICS. “They have BRICS, which is basically a group of countries which are anti the United States and India is a member of that if you can believe it,” Trump railed on July 31, while speaking at the White House.
By imposing a 25 per cent tariff, Trump, simultaneously, attacked two key emerging economies–India and Russia, while putting the rest of the BRICS grouping on notice.
In his offensive against the BRICS, Trump has accused the grouping of scheming to weaken the dollar–the keystone of the US economy. He had earlier warned that any attempt by BRICS to undermine the dollar would be met with a harsh economic response.
Trump had also earlier announced that from August 1, the US would impose a 50 per cent tariff on products from Brazil, which had recently hosted a successful BRICS summit in Rio. India will host the 2026 BRICS summit, which Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has already announced will have a Global South focus, and will be a memorable event.
The targeting of India and Brazil follows Trump’s vicious attack on Russia and China.
Regarding Russia, Trump served a 10 or 12 days notice to end the conflict with Ukraine or face severe economic consequences.
This has triggered a back-and-forth between Trump and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, widening the rift between Washington and Moscow. In a post on X, a defiant Medvedev mocked Trump’s ultimatum. “He (Trump) should remember two things:
- Russia isn’t Israel or even Iran.
- Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but his own country. Don’t go down the Sleepy Joe road.”
Visibly irked by his feisty response, Trump called Medvedev “the failed former President of Russia who thinks he is still President.” Asking Medvedev to “watch his words,” Trump said, “He’s entering very dangerous territory.”
Among all the emerging economies, Trump is obsessed with targeting China. So far, there has been a ceasefire in the trade war, which had commenced with China retaliating after Trump imposed hefty over- the- top import duties on Chinese products.
As the trade war rolled on, the US at one point raised tariffs to a high of 145% against China, which then hit back with a 125% duty against the U.S.
Subsequently, following talks in Geneva, US tariffs against China were scaled back to 30 per cent, while Beijing allowed US products to get in at 10 per cent. After the London talks that followed in late June, Trump announced that a deal with China had
been signed. But neither the Americans nor the Chinese have revealed any details, signalling that nothing is cast in stone, and the possibility of grand reversal in Trump’s yoyo land is very much possible, if not likely.
“The U.S. and China appear to be easing the chokeholds they had on each other’s economies through export controls on computer chips and rare earth minerals, respectively,” the Associated Press quoted Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University, as saying. “This is a positive step but a far cry from signaling prospects of a substantial de-escalation of tariffs and other trade hostilities.’’
While they may be happy to buy some more time, the battle hardened Chinese are fully aware that Trump has slotted himself in the unipolar and not the multipolar school, which would have allowed co-existence with China and other civilizational states.
Consequently, the Chinese are bound to be preparing for a lengthy phase of intense hostility from the US, hoping that their titanic resistance will yield a more sharply defined multipolar world.
From a Chinese perspective, Trump’s prime focus on the Indo-Pacific, instead of Europe, makes it evident that the US wants to deny Beijing’s emergence as an equal partner, let alone a superior power.
Key officials of the Trump administration have made it plain that they are pursuing the strategic objective of disallowing China to upstage the US as the world’s number one power. For instance, in an interview earlier this year Trump’s defence secretary Peter Hegseth asserted that Washington will counter China’s perceived attempts to topple the US from its number one position in the world.
“They’re (the Chinese) rapidly increasing their defence spending, modern technology, they want to supplant the United States,” Hegseth observed. “We need the defence spending, the capabilities, the weapons and the posture in the Indo-Pacific, which is something we’re very much focused on,” he said, before adding: “We don’t seek that war.”
With the reality check now complete, demonstrating that the emerging economies, especially Russia, India and China are in Trump’s cross-hairs, it is time that RIC leaders, fully aware of the big picture, start brainstorming their way forward.
The first opportunity to agree that they must work together, bury their past differences, and seize the initiative for shaping the global agenda is coming when Modi, Xi and Putin will be under the same tent during the two-day SCO summit that commences in Tianjin on August 31.
Tianjin, in other words, will present an opportunity for a Russia-India-China (RIC) summit on the sidelines of the SCO.
Such a summit, if it materalises, will send a strong symbolic message to the Trump administration that a serious pushback to American bullying is on the way.
During their meeting, the troika leaders can reaffirm, as a principle, their support for a multipolar world as well as the BRICS platform that encapsulates the core of multipolarity.
Second, it is important to convey to the Trump administration that neither the concept of multipolarity nor BRICS is rooted in an anti-American ideology. On the contrary, the United States is very much part of the multipolar world–in fact its strongest pole.
The Americans are therefore welcome in the collective multipolar tent, provided they shed their hegemonistic mindset, and, in principle, accept their role as equal partners with the rest of the poles.
Consequently, Washington’s imagination of a new world order must change, accepting that neither the Americans nor the G-7 collective can singlehandedly drive the global agenda. On the contrary, the collective west must accept that unlike the post war bipolar world or the era of unipolarity that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, global power has subsequently defused. It is currently in the process of permeating civilizational poles, which are, in turn, the primary interlocutors of the Global South.
Third, the RIC can work on a new geoeconomic vision where the BRICS-plus, which includes new members of the grouping such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran and Ethiopia, leveraging their vast resources, technological heft, financial muscle and massive markets can build an autonomous post-west geoeconomic ecosystem.
Fourth, the trio meeting in Tianjin can re-focus some of the past initiatives, which,with the changing political context, may need to be revisited. For instance, India may need to review its refusal to join the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
The RCEP is the world’s largest free trade agreement, encompassing 15 Asia-Pacific countries and covering about 30% of global GDP, trade, and population.
All the 10 ASEAN countries along with China, Japan and South Korea are part of the grouping. India opted out of the RCEP in 2019, but the organisation has kept its doors open for New Delhi’s participation in the future.
Similarly, Russia may need to expand the footprint of its resource rich Far Eastern region focusing more strongly with China and India on the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
President Putin’s special invitation in 2024 to Malaysian President Anwar Ibrahim for the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok was a welcome step. Greater momentum can be added to that initiative with the intent of integrating ASEAN economies with those of Eurasia and BRICS.
Finally, it is about time the RIC began a security dialogue, in view of the rapidly changing big picture. Not long ago, India and China had begun counterterrorism exercises in Kunming between the two militaries. A revival of those drills can send a strong signal about the growing rapprochement between India and China following the 2024 Kazan summit of the BRICS, where Modi and Xi had met after a long gap.
The trio may also consider a trilateral Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) military exercises, and check out if these manoeuvres can open pathways for a border security partnership.
Trump’s weaponisation of tariffs to support the Make America Great Again (MAGA) doctrine is a wake up call to the rest of the world, especially the emerging economies that the hard road of collective self-reliance is their only honourable option to counter the self-centred elite residing in Washington.
Source: www.katehon.com