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Move over SCO and BRICS! Goldman Sachs, the global investment bank that talked about “dreaming with the BRICS” two decades ago, now has a new idea – the “swing states” that will shape the global balance of power. Unlike the BRICS and SCO, whose prominence can only be waned in Indian strategic calculus, “swing states” are beginning to loom larger in Delhi’s Strategic Priorities.
The concept of the BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India and China – was about Goldman Sachs pointing out to investors the economic potential of the four countries at the turn of the millennium. But the idea has acquired a political life of its own.
Like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization formed in 2001, the BRICS idea was a simple one – to limit American power in the unipolar moment of the 1990s. The Russians, who were looking for a way to regain their global position after the collapse of the Soviet Union, found the BRICS countries a useful platform to confront the West. Pushed by Moscow, the Russia, India, and China (RIC) Forum—the so-called Strategic Triangle—provided the scaffolding on which the new organization would be built.
If the BRICS ambition was global, the SCO’s focus was regional – to keep the United States and the “color revolutions” out of Russia and China’s common inner Asian periphery. Russia and China held the “Shanghai Five” in 1996 with three Central Asian countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – three former Soviet republics that share borders with China.
The BRICS Forum was formally established in 2006, and the first four members of the BRICS Forum welcomed South Africa into their ranks in 2010 to become BRICS. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS countries are now discussing expanding their membership as global interest in them grows. Despite ambitious plans to expand it, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS group are losing geopolitical momentum because the context that brought them together at the turn of the millennium no longer exists.
A large membership does not necessarily make any group more effective; In this sense, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) should be strong organizations. They are not today and are unlikely to be in the future. The story is repeated with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS.
The primary goal of the SCO was to counter “external threats” from the United States. Central Asian rulers welcomed the protection offered by Russia and China against the threat of Western-sponsored “regime change”. After Moscow’s conquest of Ukraine and the Russian nationalist claim that many former Soviet republics are “artificial states”, the source of the “external threat” looks different in Central Asia.
Nor does the region seek to exchange Russian hegemony for Chinese hegemony. Instead, Central Asian countries are looking to diversify their international relationships, including with the United States, Europe, Japan, Turkey, and India.
As in the case of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the contradictions within the BRICS countries have been kept hidden for much longer. For Russia, the BRICS have been about political mobilization against the United States. Beijing, which enjoyed a growing relationship with the West in the 2000s, had a different dream – to take advantage of the Forum to expand its economic and commercial influence. Now, locked in fierce competition with the West, China sees BRICS as a platform to legitimize its global ambitions. For India, RIC and BRIC were useful hedges against potential threats from the US to its core national interests in the 1990s.
The geopolitics of the BRICS countries looks very different today. China has become much stronger than its previous counterparts in the Forum. Beijing’s GDP is greater than all other BRICS countries combined. Russia has locked itself into a costly and unwinnable conflict with the collective West even as its relative economic heft continues to decline. Bleeding from the Ukraine war, Moscow is now more dependent on China than ever.
Meanwhile, India’s contradictions with China have intensified while those with the United States have been mitigated. Delhi may have wanted a “multipolar world” in the 1990s, but its number one preference today is a “multipolar Asia” — to prevent the region from becoming China’s backyard.
The idea of ”swing states” can survive because it is less ideological. It is rooted in the structural condition of the international system—the emergence of many states, large or small, with significant resources, capabilities, or positions to influence geopolitical outcomes.
The idea began to gain prominence in the early 2000s as analysts focused on the many “pivot states” that could make a difference in the global distribution of power. As the conflict between the great powers has intensified in the past few years, the idea of ”swing states” has gained momentum.
Goldman Sachs is making the concept relevant to global investors who are struggling to deal with the breakdown of great power harmony and the decline of economic globalization. In other words, the debate about “swing states” is no longer raging among the armchair strategists of think tanks. It’s about money bags education.
According to the report published by Goldman Sachs, “Geopolitical swing states are important to the global economy and balance of power, but they do not have the capacity alone to drive the global agenda, at least for now.” “As long as tensions between the United States and China continue to worsen,” the report says, swing states “will have enormous capabilities to confront, benefit from, and influence geopolitical competition.”
The report identifies four types of swing states. These are the countries that can dominate “critical components of global supply chains”; It states that it can “benefit from current trends toward approximation, longevity, and buddy support”; Countries that have “a disproportionate amount of capital and the willingness to deploy it around the world in pursuit of strategic goals,” and countries that can bring global leadership to critical issues. Addressing global investors, Goldman Sachs says: “The most effective business leaders will be those who work tirelessly to understand how changes in the geopolitical landscape create new risks and create new business opportunities.”
The writer is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for the Indian Express
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