US president Donald Trump‘s mercurial behaviour reminds one of a boy named Calvin in a classic comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. When Calvin looks at a tiger called Hobbes, the boy sees a real tiger while everyone else sees Hobbes as a toy.
Calvin forms a club called “Get Rid of Slimy Girls”, and his main purpose is to exclude his neighbour Susie Derkins from the treehouse. However, when he is forced to let others in, Calvin chooses to move the treehouse.
Trump too keeps shifting the goalpost when it comes to using tariffs as his trump card.
How do you deal with a leader whose presidency has become a “grift machine”?
Noting that we are in the “age of grift”, British journalist Anoosh Chakelian says that if one is “not spotting it” one is “probably on the end of it”.
Global South bloc BRICS is a special target for the whimsical US president. Two BRICS members, Brazil and India, have been targeted with 50% tariff. The Trump administration has now threatened to impose additional tariffs on India if the Trump-Putin peace talks fail.
The unreasonable tariffs are another form of sanctions. Trump is not known for doing his homework before opening his mouth. For one, he has wrongly claimed the United States runs a trade deficit with Brazil. The fact is that Washington has a US$7.4bil (RM31.3bil) trade surplus with Brazil.
Another BRICS member, South Africa, faces 30% tariffs. Trump has cut off aid to this country accusing the government of discriminating against its white minority without any proof. He has already announced that he will not attend the Johannesburg Summit of G20 in November this year. China and Russia are targets of a different kind.
Even before assuming the presidency, Trump had said that BRICS countries trying to create a new currency to replace the US dollar “will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy.”
In his attempt to isolate China, Trump has ended up isolating and antagonising India, supposedly Washington’s strategic ally in countering China, Brazil and South Africa. Now that Putin has refused to play ball on Ukraine, Trump may see him as a villain for not allowing him to “end the Ukraine war” and thereafter claim the Nobel.
Trump’s trashing of BRICS is not really about India, Brazil and BRICS, it is about distraction and perception, and a chance to reconnect and refocus his base.
To Trump, tariff is the “art of the deal”. In fact, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, boasted recently before the media, “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.”
So why is Trump targeting BRICS?
Trump believes BRICS is challenging the existing world order which made America the hegemon. No one now believes that BRICS is merely a bigger talk shop or a meaningless acronym.
Its vision of the new world order has rattled the West. Many Western analysts now argue that BRICS is visualising a world without the West.
De-dollarisation myths are being spread by Trump. The reality is there is no consensus among BRICS on de-dollarisation. What they are attempting is to make national currency viable where possible. A few options are being explored to facilitate intra-BRICS trade. There are few takers for schemes like a gold-backed common currency, dubbed the “Unit.” While most members are wary of China’s yuan, Beijing itself doesn’t want the yuan to be pushed as a reserved currency.
No serious discussion on de-dollarisation has taken place. Member states are aware of the long and tedious process. It took Europe about 40 years to adopt Euro from the first talks to actual coins in pockets – and that was with countries that shared borders and similar systems.
The BRICS currency is a fairy tale. Trump is fearful of losing the dollar’s paramount status.
History tells us that regimes, kings, kingdoms and countries that had the reserve currency status suffered immense economic hardships once they lost that dominance.
Obviously, Trump doesn’t believe in any new world order. He wants only a free-for-all where the strongest strive to prevail and the weaker must accommodate. He refuses to believe that the monetary system established 50 years ago is crumbling. But Trump knows BRICS has begun to hurt the dollar’s global domination which may pave the way for Bretton Woods 3.0.
Trump’s shilly-shallying behaviour and irrational tariffs regime have forced BRICS and other members of the Global South to make what India’s former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao calls “very pragmatic strategic recalibrations.”
All said, the vision of BRICS worries the West, no matter what they say. The West’s Holy Empire is crumbling.
The magnitude of the crunching and grinding of geopolitical plates that we see today has no precedent. Trump may be hoping his policy would bring BRICS members to their knees. It may end up as BRICS’ new building blocks. — The Statesman/ANN
