Belém, Brazil: – I inaugurate this new series of columns in a new year and a new beginning for Brazil with the inauguration of President Lula da Silva. His well-wishers poured out across the country in a revival of hope for Brazil after four years of disastrous rule under his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who had fled Brazil for Florida on the eve of Lula’s inauguration. Bolsonaro left behind a mob that rampaged through government office buildings before being arrested in large numbers by the police.
The mob tactics will not stop Lula, nor will they have a long-term effect in the US, where Donald Trump’s similar manoeuvres on 6 January 2021 were also shut down. In both cases, demagogic politicians used social media to rile up a mob; in both cases, the mob was put down within the day.
The real issue, in my mind, is not the mob, but the deeper changes in the world that are generating growing tensions in global politics and the economy. The deep changes can’t and won’t be stopped by mobs. Our real challenge is to understand the deeper changes at play so that we can manage them for the common good.
Such an understanding is the aim of my future columns.
Reality of a multipolar world
The biggest turmoil is geopolitical. We are no longer in a US-led world, nor even a world divided between the US and its rival China. We have already entered a multipolar world, in which each region has its own issues and role in global politics. No country and no single region can any longer determine the fate of others. This is a complex and noisy environment – with no country, region or alliance in charge of the rest.
One reason Lula’s return to the presidency is so consequential is that Brazil will be a key regional and global actor in the years ahead. Lula will work closely with like-minded progressive presidents in Chile, Colombia, Argentina and elsewhere in South America. Brazil will also hold the presidency of the G20 in 2024, part of a four-year run in which major emerging economies hold the presidency (Indonesia in 2022, India in 2023 and South Africa in 2025).
The management of a multipolar world is fraught with difficulties. We urgently need more dialogue with other countries, and to move beyond the simplistic propaganda of our own governments. Here in the West, we are bombarded daily with ridiculous official narratives, most originating from Washington: Russia is pure evil, China is the greatest threat to the world, and only Nato can save us.
These naïve stories, spun out endlessly by the US State Department, are a great hindrance to global problem-solving. They trap us in false mindsets, and even in wars that should never have occurred and which must be stopped by negotiation rather than escalation.
When we accept the reality of a multipolar world, we will finally be able to solve problems that have so far eluded us. First, we will understand that military alliances such as Nato offer no answers to the real challenges that we confront. Military alliances are in fact a dangerous anachronism, not a true source of national or regional security.
It was, after all, the US attempt to expand Nato to Georgia and Ukraine that triggered the wars in Georgia (in 2010) and in Ukraine (2014 until today). Nor did the Nato bombing of Belgrade in 1999, or the 15-year failed mission in Afghanistan, or bombing Libya in 2011, accomplish any real objectives.
Read in Daily Maverick: “Diplomacy remains the only prudent option to avoid catastrophe in Ukraine”
Neither is China the grave threat that is portrayed today in the West. The US tries to pretend that we still live in a US-led world, and that China is a dangerous pretender that must be stopped. But reality is different. China is an ancient civilisation of 1.4 billion people (almost one in five in the world) that also aims for high living standards and technological excellence. We will solve our global problems not by vainly trying to “contain” China, but by trading, cooperating, and yes, also competing economically with China.
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Other great global challenges lie elsewhere: the deep dangers of environmental catastrophe; the rising inequalities in our own societies; and the onrush of new technologies that can disrupt the world if they are not properly harnessed and controlled.
Brazil is the epicentre of the environmental challenge. Can the Amazon, constituting half of the world’s rainforests, be saved? Lula came to power promising to do just this. He won the vote of the Amazon states of Brazil.
Globally, Europe is in the environmental lead with the European Green Deal. Europe’s main geopolitical opportunity is to encourage other regions, including the African Union, China, India and the Americas, to adopt their own bold green deals. That’s a far better task for Europe than expanding Nato, fighting an endless war in Ukraine, or confronting China.
Brazil is also an epicentre of inequality, of which it has one of the highest degrees in the world. That inequality was originally created by European imperialism that suppressed indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of Africans. Their descendants continue to pay the price. Social justice is Lula’s calling, and our global calling, after centuries of racial and social injustice.
Brazil can also be an epicentre of the new technologies, for example a leader in the new bioeconomy in which the wonders of the Amazon’s and Brazil’s biodiversity are not destroyed for more cattle ranches but used instead to produce new life-saving medicines, nutritious food (such as the açai now booming worldwide), or advanced biofuels for green aviation.
Technological change is perhaps the deepest driver of global change. We need the new technologies to confront the crises of climate change, hunger, education and health. Yet we also suffer from the new digital technologies when they are misused, such as to mobilise mobs, or weapon-killer drones in Ukraine.
Advanced biotechnology may well have created the virus that causes Covid-19 (we still don’t know). Every day we confront the disruptions and inequalities caused by artificial intelligence, robotics and the rapid overturning of jobs.
The confluence of global change, disruption and danger is astounding. Solutions lie in understanding, cooperation and problem-solving. A better understanding of the New World Economy will be the aim of this column in the months ahead. DM
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I’m sorry but it is a total distortion to suggest that the main narrative from Washington is Russia is pure evil China the greatest threat in the world and only NATO can save us.
There is no suggestion in your article that a future world order, multi polar or not should be based on a fundamental understanding of human rights.
And that any country which is callously sending missiles into residential buildings and whose soldiers murder and rape civilians should be isolated, condemned and brought to trial. Because that is pure evil when weighed up against any principle of human rights.
And the only reason to keep NATO in place to so called save us is because the United Nations has proved to be incapable of upholding its most basic purpose. Which is that all nations have the freedom to choose its own leaders and political system and that their borders and territory are recognised by all nations. Even in a multi polar world, this is a non negotiable norm as confirmed in international law.
Until Russia confirms it upholds these accepted norms, it must remain isolated and considered to be pure evil.
Richard, I agree with much of what you say and what Sachs does in this article is challenge my prevailing beliefs about China and Russia. This is a good thing! Master class coop my DM to access these columns. Look forward to the next one.
It is true that the world is going through a process of de globalisation resulting in new alliances and the formation of a multi polar world where China, India, Brazil and Africa which contain a large proportion of the world’s population and its youth will play a much more significant role. Whether the West likes it or not.
However, what Sachs is doing is attempting to normalise and accept what Russia is doing is ok in this context. It is not!
There is nothing acceptable about what putin is doing from arresting opposition leaders, banning the media and using his citizens as pure fodder in his distorted desire to rebuild a notion of a Russian empire headed by an autocratic tzar. With his finger on a nuclear disaster, he does epitomise pure evil.
Sachs’s introductory account of the current world situation accords with what is actually happening.
Sachs: “… we are bombarded daily with ridiculous official narratives, most originating from Washington: Russia is pure evil, China is the greatest threat to the world, and only Nato can save us. … They trap us in false mindsets …”
Richard Bryant evidently believes these stories, particularly, rabidly, the ‘Russia is Putin is evil’ fantasy and its made up prejudicial exemplifications.
Bryant: NATO is upholding the UN basic purpose “Which is all nations have the freedom to choose its own leaders and political system and that their borders and territory are recognised by all nations.”
That’s what multipolarity is. Sovereign states recognising each other and co-operating between themselves and not interfering in each other’s sovereignty to bring about economic disadvantage or regime change. But NATO, on the contrary, is prosecuting the purpose that the US and its vassals must be the unipolar ruler of all peoples.
I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series. I anticipate that they will be consistent with the work of the political economist Michael Hudson. Bryant will regard him as a heretic against the correct beliefs of the Western mindset.
Does Sachs really and truly and honestly believe that Russia is justified in attempting to destroy a functioning democracy because Putin seems (on the surface, anyway) to believe that NATO, which is a defensive alliance, constitutes a threat.
And how about China, that bastion of human rights and democracy. By the way, most of what’s left of the ancient and venerable Chinese civilisation lives on in Taiwan, whose democracy the PRC under its glorious new czar is hell bent on destroying.
I posted a comment 4 days ago on 2 February and it still has not been moderated and posted? Please can you explain why?
I posted this comment 4 days ago but it still does not show. So hear goes again:
I started reading this article with interest, which quickly turned to derision. It is only because of the ‘anachronism’ called NATO that Russia has not invaded the Baltic states, and notable that Finland and Sweden are now desperate to join. They saw what has happened to non-members. And I assume the writer holds no interest in democracy for Taiwan – the Chinese Communist Party has made it abundantly clear it is prepared to go to war to annex it? I can also safely assume that Prof Sachs is in full agreement with the ANC being very cosy with the mass-murdering Putin, rather than the West.