BRICS Opinion

Now that the dust has settled and global media is no longer focusing on the handshakes of an American president, we look back at the G20 Summit (early July) and find it memorable for a number of reasons:
The riots in Hamburg, German Chancellor Merkel’s viral eye-roll at Russia’s President Putin, Ivanka Trump’s controversial sit-in for her father or perhaps French President Macron’s open, blatant racism.
Let’s look at the latter.

When Lobsang Sangay, the head of the self-styled Tibetan government in exile, hoisted the Tibetan national flag on the shores of Pangong lake in Ladakh (a mountainous, semi-autonomous region in northern India, borders the Chinese autonomous regions of Xinjiang and Tibet), he hammered the last nail into the coffin of the most important budding alliance of the post –cold war period. This was BRICS, the association of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. He did so by bringing the two largest members of BRICS, both in terms of population and GDP, to the brink of war.

On hearing the news that the French diplomatic maestro Talleyrand had died, the Austrian statesman Prince Metternich is reported to have said “What did he mean by that?” Such is the challenge of interpreting signals in international diplomacy. Parsing the G20 Leaders’ communique from this weekend’s Hamburg summit will keep modern day analysts busy, in particular in the contentious area of trade policy.

Mourning is difficult. And national mourning is harder still.
On Sunday, we woke up expecting the full swing of Egypt’s Palm Sunday celebrations, but any anticipation of such a day quickly dissolved as news of two church bombings seized the country.
At approximately 09:30 am, an explosion ruptured the St. George Coptic Church in Tanta, north of Cairo. Less than two hours later, a similar attack seared through the St. Mark’s Cathedral in Alexandria, bringing the total death toll to 46 with scores injured.

On March 30, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson commented during a trip to Turkey, that the long-term status of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would be “decided by the Syrian people”. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN reiterated his point on the same day: “Our priority is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out,” she said.

China has warned the US not to exacerbate tensions on the Korean Peninsula by deploying advanced anti-missile batteries in South Korea [Image: Archives]
When Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with US President Donald Trump on Thursday it couldn’t be more of a conference of polar opposites.
But opposites attract and in the next few months the two global superpowers are going to need each other more than ever If they are going to peacefully resolve the crisis in the Korean Peninsula.

The official opposition party in South Africa, the Democratic Alliance (with 22 per cent voter support) is testing foreign relations waters and upsetting the governing African National Congress (with 62 per cent voter support).
The US recently experienced diplomatic histrionics over then President-elect Donald Trump accepting a direct telephone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen congratulating him on his triumph in the elections.
Trump is the first US leader to have direct contact with a Taiwanese leader since 1971.

As it assumes the BRICS presidency in 2017, China’s strategic partnership with Brazil – its fellow member in the bloc – comes into focus. Although the nature of China’s ties with the member nations in the BRICS group has been a subject of much deliberation, the country’s strategic partnership with Brazil is a seldom discussed issue.

Every government wants to protect the health of its people because this is a considerable national asset. But no nation can on its own overcome the panoply of threats to public health.
As global and national health systems face growing and complex threats, increasing international cooperation to overcome them, therefore, becomes an imperative.

The world-wide debate about globalization has been upended by “the Trump Phenomenon” and its wild-fire spread to Europe and elsewhere. The two separate camps of “Deglobalization” versus “Reglobalization” are pitted against each other in a tug-of-war with no clear winner.