How Obama lost friends and influence in the Brics

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Financial Times:

When Barack Obama took office, he pledged a new overture to the world’s emerging powers. Today each of the Brics – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – is at loggerheads with America, or worse. Last month four of the five abstained in a UN vote condemning the fifth’s annexation of Crimea. Next month India is likely to elect as its new leader Narendra Modi, who says he has “no interest in visiting America other than to attend the UN in New York”. As the world’s largest democracy, and America’s most natural ally among the emerging powers, India’s is a troubling weathervane. How on earth did Mr Obama lose the Brics?

Some of it was unavoidable. Early in his first term Mr Obama called for a “reset” of US relations with Russia. His overture was warmly received by Dmitry Medvedev, then Russia’s president, who was considerably less anti-western than his predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Unfortunately for Mr Obama, Ukraine, Pussy Riot and many others, Mr Putin repossessed the presidency. The US president can hardly be blamed for that. Things have gone downhill since then.

The trajectory of US relations with China has also been in the wrong direction. Within his first year in office, Mr Obama made his much-feted “G2” visit to China, in which he offered Beijing a global partnership to solve the world’s big problems, from climate change to financial imbalances. Alas, the Chinese did not feel ready to tackle problems on a global level that they were still struggling with at home. Mr Obama was rudely spurned by his hosts.

The following year he replaced his G2 charm offensive with a rhetorical “pivot to Asia”. Washington presented it as a long overdue rebalancing to a rising Asia Pacific region but it was seen by Beijing – with some justification – as a thinly veiled US attempt to shore up its military alliances with China’s neighbours.

This week Mr Obama will visit Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia – the first three of which are treaty allies of the US. It is his first visit to Asia in two years. China is not on the itinerary. Meanwhile, the anti-US rhetoric coming from Beijing is the toughest in years.

The fallout with Brazil is more specific. Mr Obama made a big play in 2009 to woo the main Latin American countries – even attending the summit of the Organisation of American States in Trinidad. But relations with Brazil took a nosedive after Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency last year. Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, cancelled a state visit to Washington last October in protest at US spying. It did not help that Mr Obama promised only Americans – but not foreigners – that the NSA was not tapping them. US-Brazil relations are now in a deep freeze.

The same is true of India – again, a far cry from Mr Obama’s warm opening act with Manmohan Singh, India’s outgoing prime minister. Mr Singh, whom Mr Obama once described as his “guru”, was given Mr Obama’s first state dinner at the White House in 2009. That goodwill has evaporated. Last month Nancy Powell, the US ambassador to India, resigned, having been treated virtually as a persona non grata in New Delhi since she took the job. It remains to be seen what the Modi effect will be. The fact that he is still denied a visa to visit the US – stemming from the gruesome 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom – would obviously need to be fixed.

Among the Brics only South Africa has what could be described as normal relations with the US. But even here, they are hardly close. If South Africa had spent half as much time wooing the US as it did lobbying to join the Bric club (and thereby adding the S to the acronym), things might be different. Nobody batted an eyelid when it joined the rest in refusing to censor Russia over Crimea.

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Losing friends Bric by Bric...

[Valin]

On A Related Note....

BRIC Bust?
The very structural characteristics that launched the economic successes of Brazil, Russia, India, and China are now holding them back.
Michael Mandelbaum
April 20, 2014

 

Once the darlings of the global economy and the brightest hope for economic growth robust enough to lift most if not all boats around the world, the four major emerging-market countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—have lately fallen from grace. They withstood the global financial meltdown of 2008 far better than the rich countries of Europe and North America, but growth rates in all four countries have declined in the past several years. Goldman Sachs, the company that first coined the term “BRICs” in 2001, issued an analysis at the end of last year whose title summed up its conclusion: “Emerging Markets: As the Tide Goes Out.”

 

Tides also come in, of course, so the important question about the BRICs is whether their poor performance of the past few years stems from cyclical, transient causes or is due to longer-term, more deeply rooted forces that presage stagnation or even decline. This matters for political as well as economic reasons. The rise of the BRICs, and of other emerging-market countries, has been thought in some quarters likely to lead to a shift in their favor in the global balance of power, with profound consequences for all countries, including the United States.

 

Whether or not the BRICs realize their potential for economic growth, that potential exceeds that of the world’s wealthiest countries because of what some economists call convergence. Rich countries already have in abundance what produces growth: the most advanced technology and techniques of production. For them, further growth requires inventing new techniques and technologies, a slow, unpredictable process. The BRICs, by contrast, can expand their economies simply by incorporating the technologies and techniques the rich have already invented. Incorporation is a much easier and faster way than invention to mobilize existing but underutilized economic resources—hence the buoyant optimism of recent years. All things being equal, the BRICs should lead the world in growth until they, too, reach the technological frontier.

 

All other things are not, however, equal. That is the reason for the outgoing tide and the uncertainty over the BRICs’ long-term economic prospects, and the political consequences of their growth rates. While certainty about their economic future is not possible, the range of uncertainty can be narrowed with a single observation: The extent to which the BRICs fulfill their considerable economic potential in the years ahead will depend, as do all economic matters, on politics.

 

 

(Snip)